By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Summit meetings are always circus rings. BRICS India 2026, just concluded in Delhi, is no different from BRICS Brasil 2025 nor from BRICS China 2027.
There’s another political constant. The BRICS summit leaders, especially President Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aim to be a combination of ringmaster and elephant, never the clown.
But here’s the political variable, the counter-factual, the What-if question:
If BRICS were an anti-imperialist collective, as Putin recently emphasized for Russia to “knock the teeth out of the imperialist sharks”, what should the new BRICS Declaration have said, and on the evidence of what the Declaration did say and didn’t, who has turned out to be the ringmaster, the elephant and the clown?
From the point of view of the audience – that’s you — is there a difference between them?
In the new Reason2Resist podcast, recorded on Monday morning, Moscow and Athens time, Dimitri Lascaris and I go beyond the clowning – smiles and hand-holding – and record what the ringmaster announced and what the elephant did with his feet.
We also record whose teeth are getting knocked out on the Ukraine war front, the Persian Gulf front, the Yemen front, and the Lebanon front, and we make a dental count of the teeth remaining inside the jaws of President Donald Trump and his allies, Mohammed Bin Salman, Marshal Asim Munir, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Click to view or listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufe_CJbpq2I
PUTIN’S SPEECH ON IMPERIALIST SHARKS, SEPTEMBER 1
Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/8066 at Min 7:42.
“Vladimir Putin: You know, it was quite spontaneous – it occurred during a meeting, I believe, at the Pedagogical University, and it was indeed an impromptu remark. As for orcas and bears… If your suggestion is that the orcas symbolise, so to speak, the collective West, I would say that the orca is, without doubt, a formidable predator, yet it is also a highly intelligent creature, a cunning one. The collective West, for its part, was assigned a specific definition in the Soviet era, which remains current to this day – the sharks of imperialism. Nonetheless, the essence, of course, is much as you have surmised. The thrust of my remarks was that if anyone attempts to drag us down the food chain and devour us, to consume us, they would be well advised to expect their teeth to be broken. And Russia stands ready to do precisely that, despite the insatiable appetites and ever-sharpening teeth of these sharks.”
THE NEW BRICS DECLARATION
Source: https://www.mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents?dtl/41776/BRICS_New_Delhi_Declaration_Building_for_Resilience_Innovation_Cooperation_and_Sustainability_September_12_2026 The Indian drafters displayed their gender sensitivity in Para 5: “We commend the significant progress achieved under India’s BRICS Chairship in 2026.” The term “chairship” is an obsolete English word dating back to the 17th century; it has been introduced to replace the word, “chairmanship.” The Russian language version of the same sentence says: “Мы высоко оцениваем значительный прогресс, достигнутый под председательством Индии в БРИКС в 2026 году”. The Russian председательство, a neuter noun, means presidency or chairmanship. The Johannesburg Declaration of the 2023 BRICS summit concluded with the line: “Brazil, India, China and South Africa extend their full support to Russia for its BRICS Chairship in 2024.” The same term appears in the English version of the 2024 Rio de Janeiro Declaration: “We commend Brazil’s BRICS Chairship in 2025.”
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