Will the BRIC Grow or Plateau?
In an essay penned this year in the pages of Foreign Affairs, CFR President Richard Haass told the tale of a new global order in the 21st Century. Two centuries ago, the world was a multi-polar terrain, policed and charged by a handful of reigning and developing powers. Two world wars would realign this reality, as the Cold War gave us the bipolar era of America and the Soviet Union.But the future predicted by Haass for this young century is a different one, heavily influenced by growing regional powers in various spots around the globe:The increasingly nonpolar world will have mostly negative consequences for the United States -- and for much of the rest of the world as well. It will make it more difficult for Washington to lead on those occasions when it seeks to promote collective responses to regional and global challenges. One reason has to do with simple arithmetic. With so many more actors possessing meaningful power and trying to assert influence, it will be more difficult to build collective responses and make institutions work. Herding dozens is harder than herding a few. Haass' thesis aside, it's hard to deny that the first decade of the 21st Century has produced a handful of upstarts ready to exert both regional and global influence when and where they are able. The four countries that come to mind are the BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India and China. In 2008, the BRIC nations all played high profile roles in conflicts, crises and controversies all around the world. The storied and well-chronicled rise of China was highlighted this year by two major stories: The 2008 summer Olympics and the dairy crisis. The former, as Professor Joseph Nye put it, allowed Beijing to display its soft power capabilities for all the world to see. The crisis surrounding the nation's dairy sector did quite the opposite, exposing the regime's interdependence with the global market and inadequacies in regulation and trade control. Nonetheless, both incidents showed the world that China's actions have reaching impact globally, both negative and positive. The same might be said of Russia. While Moscow garnered world condemnation for its activities in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, but quickly demonstrated that the hollow criticism from the west could be easily silenced with the gas spigot. With much of the western world dependent on Russia's supplies of oil and natural gas, the summertime conflict with Georgia exposed the stunted reach of the international community. Other BRIC states have learned a similar lesson, and one booming giant in South America has used its energy flex to exert more regional and global influence. Brazil, now the eight largest economy in the world and the second largest in the Americas, this energy-exporting power spent much of 2008 pushing for a stronger presence on the UN Security Council, and somewhat brazenly reaching out to countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Gone are the days of the Monroe Doctrine, as the leadership in Brasília has increasingly shown stark distance and defiance regarding their superpower neighbor to the north. Other BRIC nations have encountered their own troubles for their close ties to the west. Mumbai, having already been the target of deadly train bombings in 2002, saw their cosmopolitan and commercial hub targeted in 2008 by Islamists bent on sending the pro-west Indian government a message. As the rising Asian powers integrate more and more into the global system, clashes such as these could become more likely. Global finance, traditional boundaries and the rise of global terrorism; these issues and more will all pose challenges to these four rising powers in 2009.
