THE BRICS, THE “PRIMAKOV TRIANGLE” AND THE REALIGNMENTS OF REGIONAL BALANCES ACCORDING TO BRZEZINSKI. ACTING THROUGH DIVERSION OR THROUGH THE INDIRECT APPROACH (Liddell Hart)

THE BRICS, THE “PRIMAKOV TRIANGLE” AND THE REALIGNMENTS OF REGIONAL BALANCES ACCORDING TO BRZEZINSKI.

ACTING THROUGH DIVERSION OR THROUGH THE INDIRECT APPROACH (Liddell Hart)
Irnerio Seminatore

Table of Contents:

The BRICS and Their Demands
Rebalancing
The Primakov Triangle and Brzezinski’s Realignments
Coercion or Appeasement?
Liddell Hart and Indirect Strategy
Inscribing the Conflict Against Iran in the Logic of the “Great Game”
The Objective of the United States

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The BRICS and Their Demands

The launch of the BRICS in Yekaterinburg, Russia (2009), followed by the organisation of a second summit of the founding countries in Brasília in 2010, established a new geopolitical framework aimed at a more balanced distribution of global power. In this perspective, the emergence of this new community of action reflects, conversely, the state of decomposition of the Bretton Woods system and the search for an order capable of meeting the major challenges of the future. Through their demand for a reform of global governance and respect for greater strategic independence, the BRICS do not seek to form an alliance or to constitute a bloc necessarily led by Russia and China, but rather an open partnership that can position itself as a “bridge” between the Global South and the West. They thus intend to constitute a platform for consultation and a “tribune of demands” to call for reform of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations Security Council, so as to adopt adjustments to regional balances that challenge the United States itself as the dominant global actor. The search for broader regional and global stability would therefore aim to avoid a phase of foreseeable, convulsive and destructive rivalries that historically accompany an imperial power in the phase of its decline. The selective and internal adoption of multilateralism in order to better position themselves within the dominant framework of multipolarism would thus mean escaping hegemonism and calling into question the unipolarism of the United States. Indeed, unipolarism accords a predominant place to the dollar and imposes political conditionality on the recovery plans of emerging countries.

Rebalancing

To achieve a rebalancing judged necessary, the BRICS countries have promoted a strategy of de-dollarisation based on the creation of a development bank (the New Development Bank) and on a decision-making method designed to finance the infrastructure of emerging countries without requiring regimes favourable to the West. The diversification of financial sovereignties thus provides control over a preponderant share of the world’s crude oil and natural gas reserves and enables the denunciation of sanctions and discriminatory barriers. Working toward the construction of a multipolar world more in line with their economic and demographic weight, the BRICS crystallise the aspirations of the Global South to free itself from an international order perceived as unjust and considered incapable of responding to their development needs and to the major challenges of the century. However, criticism of the fragility of the BRICS becomes evident in the difficulties of transforming their demographic and economic weight into political unity and into an alternative world order. Geographical distances, territorial disputes (India and China), internal strategic rivalries among their members, the heterogeneity of their regimes, and the distrust of certain members toward China’s hegemonic aims all act as brakes in this direction. It is nevertheless true that the BRICS, now comprising 11 full members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia), represent nearly 50 % of the world’s population and more than 40 % of global GDP (in purchasing-power parity), with the aim of rivaling the G7. Within the BRICS+ group, the currency used for international exchanges is the yuan, the Chinese currency, but the BRICS plan to create a common currency that could occasion a significant fall in the US dollar, hitherto the world’s principal exchange currency.

The Primakov Triangle and Brzezinski’s Realignments

Fundamentally, the emergence of the BRICS forms a continuation of the geopolitical doctrine developed at the end of the 1990s by Yevgeny Primakov, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Primakov theorised the formation of a Eurasian bloc uniting Russia, India and China (the “Primakov Triangle”) intended to promote a multipolar world order and to counterbalance Western hegemony, at least on the economic plane.

The contestation of the hegemonic order was well understood by Zbigniew Brzezinski in its systemic significance. In an article published in The National Interest in 2016, he suggested that the United States take the initiative of reorganising the global architecture of powers in the face of the open challenge launched by China against the United States and also in the face of the political awakening of the Middle East. That is why the strategy of the indirect approach, that of the “Primakov Triangle,” must now be read and interpreted in its global reach. This dimension is clarified, in Brzezinski’s own words, when “at least one of the two potentially threatening states (Russia or China) becomes a partner in the search for broader regional and then global stability.”

Since no hegemonic state has associated with its dominant power another state that is virtually threatening, preferring rather to combat it than not to act, the dilemma shifts from state actors to the international system, within which Kaplan’s rules can be applied. Defining six models of system, Kaplan establishes a conditioning link between actor and system.

Coercion or Appeasement?

In the present phase, in which a diplomacy of coercion appears to prevail over a diplomacy of appeasement in order to obtain a gain or the satisfaction of essential interests, in accordance with one of Kaplan’s principles on the balance-of-power model, the diplomacy of maritime or insular powers will have to manoeuvre along interior lines in order to secure the alliance of continental powers and the support of peninsular bridgeheads (the global Rimland). The effort of the land powers, on the contrary, will be to break the encirclement and to live in autarky in order to secure access to the oceans. In the latter case, the land powers prefer to fight rather than negotiate, but to negotiate rather than submit or capitulate.

Liddell Hart and Indirect Strategy

Although indirect strategy is inserted into a prospective geopolitics of the great powers and, in our case, of hegemonic alternatives, the conception and approach of indirect strategy are defined as the antithesis of a war of attrition. Indeed, even before coming to confrontation, the strategy of diversion disrupts its logic through alliances of circumstance and thereby extends its space of freedom of action, multiplying weak points and future theatres of engagement where resistance will be weaker and the rear of the front more vulnerable. Indirect action also proceeds through diplomatic manoeuvres and psychological campaigns that paralyse or discourage the opinions and orientations of adversarial civil societies and electorates.

Considering the emergence and the demands of the BRICS as a prolongation of the geopolitical doctrine developed by Primakov at the end of the 1990s, it becomes indispensable to define the general framework of the major trends that preside over the systemic metamorphoses of the present era. One can thus say that we are passing through an era of strong intercontinental interactions—transatlantic, trans-Eurasian and trans-Pacific—characterised by a tight balancing of “relative powers.”

This results in a general attempt at political and strategic realignment far superior to that recommended by Brzezinski, through capability-based rapprochements and diplomatic deals concerning the new assertions of power.

As for the metamorphoses under way, here are some significant variables and constants:

• The completion of the transition toward a multipolar world and the sharpening of rivalries that intensify the struggles for hegemony at the global level.
• The establishment of a series of network balances centred on the formerly unipolar actor that strives to exercise an adapted form of arbitration of the game or of “Global Leadership,” through a policy of “strategic Linkage” in the different regional systems, instead of the “Global Dominance” of the past system.
• The politico-strategic organisation of poles around a regional Leader (Brazil, China, Russia, etc.).
• A system of collective security that largely escapes the existing organs (UN, NATO, others…) and the current governance bodies (G7, G20), owing to variations in “mixed security” on a planet of finite resources.
• The ambiguities and limits of the new “multipolar coalitions” in a context of growing bipolarism (China–USA).
• The crossed combinations of “Balance of Power” practised by the traditional powers and of “Balance of Threats” by the rising powers (as a mixture of threats and vulnerabilities).
• The democratisation of the nuclear fact (WMD) and the multiform generalisation of nuisances and terrorism.
• The offensive dominance of cyber-warfare, drone warfare and space warfare, which induces a modification of the balance of force between attackers and defenders (with a premium for the attacker).
• The appearance of a “competition of systems of values” that is superimposed on “strategic rivalry” and on “economic competition” (founded on the couple confrontation / forced cooperation).
• The affirmation of an era of great uncertainties and geopolitical surprises.

Under these conditions, Hard Power and demographic power again become decisive, and the residual informal domination of the West appears mixed with relativist claims of other civilisational models, of Asian and Sinitic expression.

Inscribing the Conflict Against Iran in the Logic of the “Great Game”

At the level of the Great Game, does Iran figure as a perturbing state and a pariah state, or merely as a form of dissatisfied power? The attack by the United States was motivated by both, with a more accentuated rhetoric for the first. Among the major features of the United States’ war against Iran, however, one cannot fail to mention the inscription of this conflict in the logic of the “Great Game” that shook the foundations of nineteenth-century geopolitics and marked Mackinder’s 1904 lecture at the British Admiralty. It would be a matter today of adapting this image to the American strategy against China and of testing it at the same time against the BRICS and the obsolescence of their illusions about a façade of unity that weakens the concept.

In reality, with the war against Iran the United States is in a position to obtain several strategic gains:

• to disarticulate the Moscow–Beijing–Tehran axis
• to strengthen and privilege Russia against China
• to shatter the unity of the BRICS
• to normalise the Abraham Accords and extend them with the aim of anchoring the Greater Middle East region in the Western fold, while preparing for the post-oil era and the integration of Israel
• to conquer total control of the oil flows of the Gulf, which accumulate with those of Venezuela
• to weaken Europe lastingly on the energy, industrial and financial planes

Thus, the war against Iran is not an end in itself, but the principal fissure element of a strategy of decoupling the system, aimed at breaking China’s alliance games and paralysing the BRICS. The strategic literature on the conduct of war is unequivocal: the absence of an openly displayed strategic objective allows greater flexibility and the blurring of the readability of the war aim, which is particularly destabilising for the enemy.

The heart of the matter cannot escape an analysis of rationality. The present situation illustrates the failure of the Chinese “umbrella”: Beijing’s inability to protect its supplies and its official allies demonstrates the weakness of its claim to the status of global security superpower. In parallel, the rarefaction of Iranian crude restores to Moscow the power to set prices, inverting at least in the short term the balance of force between Russia and China. Following this manoeuvre one can observe a lightening of vassalage: the attrition of the axis allows Moscow to escape its strong dependence on the Chinese market by diversifying its exports toward India and Brazil.

The Objective of the United States

In this context, the fundamental objective of the United States is clear and has been an invariant for at least twenty years: to weaken China and deny it its role as leader of an alternative world, the Global South, the BRICS, etc. In this logic, Russia appears as an objective ally of the United States, and the extreme variety of reactions of the BRICS member countries—India, Brazil, South Africa remaining silent in the face of the asphyxiation of Iran—has made the BRICS appear as a syndicate of circumstance, or “a paper tiger.”

In the midst of a systemic transition, multipolar games remain uncertain and their decryption extremely risky. What can nevertheless be deduced are the limits of multipolarity in the face of the offensive mobilisation of the Hegemon ready to fight, the difficulties of elaborating a systemic alternative, and the absence and passivity of Europe in the face of the global Great Game, which also excludes it from any significant and decisive role at the regional level.