1. In a world in chaos, everything is possible
How the New Spice Routes will reposition India and Brazil in the geopolitical chessboard with the USA 2020 elections.
This week Gold and Bitcoin, the US dollar hardest competitors, have broken their historical tops lighting up a yellow signal about how are going to be the next 4 months of this year of 2020. Bitcoin disrupted the landmark of 10.000 USD and Gold the landmark of 1.900 USD, reaching a level that they could have reached before, if wasn’t for the COVID-19 pandemic that made people rush to buy and stock food, toilet papers and the american currency.
This opens a window for a wider range of possibilities in the geopolitical chessboard that make the current situation of circumstances even more volatile. Such scenarios can make old power blocks to break and new power blocks to rearrange.
From the the fall of the Iron Curtain, the event that marked the beginning of the currently dominant block of unipolar power, NATO, performed by USA, Europe and Israel, rewrote frontiers on the Middle East taking regimes down by the use of direct or indirect forces. Until this block has ran out of fuel during the 2008’s subprime crisis, when the USA debt came closer to one entire GDP. And so to keep its adventure on the middle east this block has just ordered a new credit card, printing more money until it has hit a new wall.
Its action has precipitated the organization of a challenging block called BRICS, composed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, making it a block of emerging nations that included almost half of the world’s population and GDP.
In the beginning the BRICS block was strongly articulated by Brazil’s protagonism but currently is performed mainly by China and Russia, protagonists of the New Silk Roads project that is set to rewrite the global economy with a deep railway integration of the Eurasia, restoring a connection between China and Rome from century XIII, the largest empires of the west and east of those times. Along this years, this block became a new target of the dominant block, and got fragmented by the action of forces from inside, but also, in between their bricks.
Recent tensions in the borders between India and Pakistan and India and China, has sparked reactions like India’s banishing of chinese apps from India’s internet, as the successful app TikTok.
This suddenly created a inflow of money from US big techs into India, creating a new dynamics that can form a new vector of force in the hiper polarized chessboard between USA and China.
India’s capitalization, while triggered into defense mode, brings momentum for a player that not usually acts like a protagonist on the Asian context, also shared with China, Russia, Israel, Japan and Turkey.
For its size, India is quite smooth on its moves. But in a scenario where all other players have already stressed their field of action, India has now become one of the players with more freedom to act. With an advantage over the other players which is the element of surprise. Nobody knows or can predict how is the playing style of a player that doesn’t plays too much.
2. The New Spice Routes: Two Belts and Two Roads to the Orient
In the year of 1488 the world was changed by the adventure of Bartolomeu Dias, a portuguese navigator who had success on getting to Calicut, in India, by crossing the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa, and bypassing the intermediary empire of muslim world. In middle ages, Calicut was known as The City of Spices.
A few years later a Spanish navigator called Columbus has reached America enlightened by the theory that the Earth was rounded and trying to reach India going west. Because the spanish navigators had not the same knowledge of India as the portuguese had, he believed that he really had been on India and not a new continent. Because of it, later this new world was named America because that was the name of an explorer that went with another portuguese navigator expedition, coasting all South America until reaching the Patagonia. When he came back, one of his letters to italian authorities describing this silvester lands was leaked and this document went viral, being called Novus Mundus, describing the new continent that later was named by the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller as America. Another name given to this new world was Westen Indias, because of the spices of this land that today is called Brazil.
As an Marcopolo of his times, Amerigo’s Vespucci search for spices created a competitor for the italian Silk Roads, and this can also repeat today. With the difference that now it is the Orient that is coming to West, under the Chinese-Russian project of rebuilding the Silk Roads, and by India looking back to the portuguese navigations of the century XV and restoring the networks that once connected India, Africa and South America in Spice Routes that changed the game of international trade and set an end to the european middle age.
Connecting this 3 continents would mean bringing closer a block of mainly tropical, brown skinned and belonging to the Global South, that together account for 3 billion people that own some of the most resourceful lands and powerful military forces and almost unlimited human resources for facing foreign interests over their internal realities and owners of nuclear weaponry and space programs that place this block side by side with the other super powers in the game. Parallel to the polarization between capitalism (in blue) and socialism (in red) emerges a green block of tropical post-feudalism, defined by tribalism as a paradigm of organization, in many grades of technological development.
Grounded in strong cost-benefit advantages, this green block doesn’t really need political players to take action to form because it is already being formed by spontaneous private protagonism of businesses between this nations that are opening the routes for trading, from commodities to high end technologies. India-Brazil ties have been on an upswing in the last few years. The volume of bilateral trade was USD 8.2 billion in 2018-19. This included USD 3.8 billion worth of Indian exports to Brazil and USD 4.4 million as imports by India. Both the governments feel there is huge potential to enhance the bilateral trade further.
But, coincidentally, Brazil and India have recently settled bilateral trade agreements in one of the best – or perhaps the only – successful foreign policy action taken by the government of Jair Bolsonaro until now.
In January 2020, on a trip of the President Jair Bolsonaro to India, both nations have signed 15 agreements to boost cooperation in a wide-range of areas like oil and gas, mining and cyber security after talks between Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and separate pacts was planned to provide cooperation in areas of cyber security, health and medicine, oil and natural gas, geology and mining and scientific research, according to the Tribune India media outlet.
3. Outcomes
The 2020 USA elections will be key to define the geopolitical configuration for the XXI century.
Many analysts have been questioning what is going to be of the government of Jair Bolsonaro if Donald Trump loses its reelection for Joe Biden. Such possibility could leave Brazil isolated with Joe Biden possibly ignoring Brazil. That scenario could make this recent agreement with India a lot more relevant from the political point of view.
On the other hand, a reelection of Donal Trump could finish to consolidate the Chinese-Russian project of the Silk Roads, and even accelerate the french-german project of creating an european army and nuclear weapons, proposed by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel. This could seal the coffin of the North Atlantic Organization Treaty making the world’s largest and expensive army purposeless and economically unsustainable.
With the high price imposed by the Trump administration to Brazil’s exporting agribusinesses, and now a suden public rejection after many actions of support from the Brazilian government with zero counterparts from the USA accelerating the corrosion of Bolsonaro’s internal support, in both scenarios is possible that in the next months the USA loses influence towards its South American assets to a spicier protagonist India with a vision in mind and full momentum to a leap forward on the XXI century race.
This could mean a new configuration on the power blocks for the XXI century, where the USA could possibly join the global south after the dollar losing its status of global currency and where the NATO’s implosion would be similar to the Soviet Union implosion, with a massive defunding of the US Army while facing massive wave of internal unrest around racial tensions and a brutal decline in GDP, which in the second quarter of the year shrank 32%, the worst depression in history.
Two blocks can be formed on this new configuration to perform a race for the reconstruction of Africa. The continent that was the birthplace of mankind and object of dispute between all superpowers on all previous centuries.
SILK RAILS: The Global North, composed by China, Russia and European Union and satellites, defined as owner of the superior industrial park, a network of speed rails making the land integration of Eurasia, and 5G connectivity, which would enter the race for building the African infrastructures.
SPICE ROUTES: The Global South, defined as owner of a superior agricultural and IT capacity and integrated by naval routes between all oceans which would enter the race for the African agriculture with the knowledge of brazilian technologies on tropical agriculture. Composed and leaded in a first moment by India and Brazil, and later joined by USA and all other American and Caribean nations and satellites, where the USA will have to replace itself equally side by side with India and Brazil, for not becoming self-isolated from a 2 billion people consumer market.