There was plenty of fluff to amuse attentive audiences. French President Emmanuel Macron surrounded by a beefy security detail strolling on Copacabana beach near midnight; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen barefoot in the sand, stunned by the lapping waves; the White House lodger, US President Joe Biden – with his expiry date in less than two months – missing the G20 family pic because he was talking to a palm tree.
Right before the summit, Biden posed on a soundstage in the rainforest, complete with two giant teleprompters, pledging to save the Amazon just as his handlers in Washington let leak the “authorization” for Ukraine to attack targets inside the Russian Federation with ATACMS; a qualified preamble for a possible WWIII.
With Rio providing the ultimately gorgeous set, at the very least, tempers at the renovated Museum of Modern Art, the G20 venue with the Sugarloaf in the background, were bound to mellow out. This even allowed for a short, tense handshake between Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a true leader of the Global South, and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, a US asset who hates Lula’s guts.
China steals the show
The populist Brazilian head of state, whose political capital transcends all barriers, was, of course, an impeccable master of ceremonies, but the real star of the show was Chinese President Xi Jinping – fresh from his previous triumph, when he was for all practical purposes coronated King of Peru during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima – complete with the inauguration of the $1.3 billion port of Chancay, the new South American node of the Pacific Maritime Silk Road.
As China is all about global connectivity corridors, Chancay-Shanghai became an instant new motto ringing all across the Global South.
Beijing’s prime role as an engine and cooperation propeller across Asia–Pacific also applies to most of the G20 members. China is the largest trading partner of the 13 APEC economies, and is responsible for 64.2 percent of Asia-Pacific’s economic growth.
This prime role extrapolates to China’s BRICS colleagues among the G20, as well as brand-new BRICS partner-nations such as Indonesia and Turkiye. Compare that with the G7/NATOstan contingent of the G20, starting with the United States, whose main global offerings range from Forever Wars and color revolutions to weaponizing of news and culture, trade wars, a tsunami of sanctions, and confiscation/theft of assets.
So, predictably, there was some serious underlying tension permeating the G20, especially when it came to the face-off between the G7 and the Russia-China strategic partnership. Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t even bother to attend, sending his uber-competent Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead.
As for Beijing, after 7 years of combined Trump-Biden trade and tech war, the Chinese economy continues to grow by 5.2 percent a year. Exports now account for only 16 percent of China’s GDP, so the economic powerhouse is far less vulnerable to foreign trade machinations. And the US share of that 16 percent is now only 15 percent; that is, trade with the US represents only 2.4 percent of Chinese GDP.
Even under what can be described as NATOstan’s all-out tech sanctions, Chinese tech firms are growing at warp speed. As a result, all western tech companies are in deep trouble: massive retrenchment, factory downsizes, and shutdowns.
Meanwhile, China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world has expanded to a record one trillion US dollars. That’s what horrified Western economists qualify as China on a “collision course” with some of the world’s biggest – yet dwindling – economies.
Efforts to ‘Ukrainize’ the G20 agenda
The Brazilians had to dodge quite a few precision bullets to extract some success out of this G20 summit. US Think Tankland, on the eve of the summit, went on an all-out propaganda campaign, accusing BRICS nations of doing nothing but posture and complain. The G20, on the contrary, with “all major creditors on the table,” might be able to redress “financial grievances” and development deficits.
The Brazilians were clever enough to understand that an indebted NATO bloc exhibiting less than zero political leadership would do nothing under the G20 framework to redress “financial grievances,” not to mention contribute to “enfranchise” Global South nations.
The only thing that would interest the Hegemon’s financial elites out of a G20 meeting is to “deepen partnerships,” a euphemism for further co-option and vassalization with an eye on 2026, when the US will host the G20.
China, just like Brazil, had other ideas. Enter the campaign to fight hunger and poverty, officially launched in Rio. The Global Times has re-emphasized how China “has lifted all 800 million people out of poverty and achieved the poverty reduction goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ahead of schedule.”
In his G20 speech, Xi called all members to “make a fresh start from Rio,” by practicing “inclusive globalization” and “true multilateralism.” NATOstan, as every grain of sand in the Sahel desert knows, simply abhors multilateralism.
The official theme of the Rio G20 was “Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet.” The Hegemon’s ruling classes, irrespective of who sits in the White House, are not interested in a “just world,” only in maintaining unilateral privilege. As for “sustainable planet,” it is code for what the Davos Gang wants: the toxic imbrication of interests of the UN, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and NATO.
The G7/NATOstan did try by all means to hijack the agenda of the Rio G20, as confirmed by diplomatic sources. Yet the Brazilians stood firm in the defense of Global South-led multipolarity, negotiating a compromise agenda that, for all practical purposes, evaded getting deeper into the Hegemon’s latest Forever Wars, Ukraine and Gaza.
With NATOstan as a whole de facto supporting the Gaza genocide, the G20 85-point Final Declaration could, at best, offer a few consensual generalities, at least calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – which was promptly vetoed by the US at the UN Security Council immediately after the G20 summit’s conclusion.
Lavrov, at his G20 press conference, offered some extra nuggets. He said that while the west did “try to ‘Ukrainize’ the G20 agenda, other members insisted that other conflicts be included in the final declaration … Those countries reluctantly agreed to discuss the points of the G20 final declaration on the Middle East [West Asia].”
Indonesia, India, Brazil, South Africa
Lula’s personal imprint at the G20 represented a Global South move: to establish an alliance against hunger, poverty, and social inequality, and at the same time impose extra taxation on the super-wealthy. The devil will be in the details, even as over 80 nations have already subscribed, plus the EU and the African Union (AU), along with several financial institutions and a series of NGOs.
The alliance should, in principle, benefit 500 million people up to 2030, including the expansion of quality school meals for over 150 million children. It remains to be seen, for instance, how the AU will make it happen in practice.
In the end, to a certain auspicious extent, the Rio G20 worked as a sort of complement to the BRICS summit in Kazan, trying to pave the way towards an inclusive multi-nodal world framed by social justice.
Lula significantly stressed the key connection linking the latest G20s: the Global South – ranging from Indonesia, India, and now Brazil to South Africa, which will host the G20 next year, bringing “perspectives that interest the vast majority of the world’s population.” Incidentally, that, right there, includes three BRICS and one BRICS partner.
On a personal level, it was quite an experience to observe the G20 fresh from a series of rich dialogues in South Africa itself, centered on the construction of African unity in a multipolar world.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa reiterated it when he said in Rio that this passing of the baton from Brazil is the “concrete expression of the historical, economic, social and cultural links that unite Latin America and Africa.” And unite, hopefully, the whole Global Majority.
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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. He is the author of Globalistan (2007), Red Zone Blues (2007), Obama Does Globalistan (2009), Empire of Chaos (2014) and 2030 (2015), all by Nimble Books. Pepe was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy and is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.