Opinion | The G7 Versus The BRICS: Who Wins?

The G7 is a sunset organisation. BRICS is a sunrise organisation.

These claims are undeniable. Yet, the globally dominant Western media refuse to accept these new realities. Instead, they continue to report on G7 meetings with great rapture, while pouring scorn on BRICS meetings, like the recent one which took place in Kazan, Russia from October 22 to October 24, 2024.

So, why is the G7 a sunset organisation? First, its share of global GDP is declining. In 1990, when the Cold War was ending (and when the West was drowning in great self-congratulatory triumphalism), the G7 share of the global GDP was 66%. BRICS hadn't been formed yet. Yet, its share of global GDP was abysmally small at around 6%. Today, the G7 share has declined to 45% while the BRICS share has climbed to 24%. Equally importantly, in PPP terms, the BRICS share of 34 percent is larger than that of G7's share of 29 percent. The trend lines are clear. The G7 is diminishing in size. BRICS is growing.

Second, the power structure within the G7 has shifted dramatically. When the G7 was founded in the late 1970s, the seven members (the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, and Canada) plus the European Union (EU) met as equals. In the 1980s, leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Schmidt considered themselves as peers to the American president. Today, G7 meetings look like meetings of Snow White and the seven dwarves (including the EU). The US share of the combined G7 GDP has gone up dramatically from 46% in 2000 to 59% this year. Functionally, the other G7 members have become satellite states of the US, having lost most of their strategic autonomy.

By contrast, even though China's share of the combined founding members' GDP is equally dominant at 68% in 2024, none of the other members of BRICS are in any way satellite states of China. Instead, they are fiercely independent. They are not........

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