It’s increasingly looking like a clash of civilisations, isn’t it? In the last 24 hours there was yet another Global South summit where the collective leaders of the world’s biggest countries gathered to show unity in the face of US aggression.

That aggression was also on full display after US President Donald Trump sent gunboats to the Venezuelan coast, accusing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of collusion with Latin American cartels designated as terrorist groups. This follows on from a missile strike on a boat last week full of “drug traffickers”, except according to some subsequent reports it was actually full of travellers and fishermen. Even if that is not true, it is how it’s being sold in the Global South.

And in related news, after the coalition of the willing leaders met in Paris last week and got a tongue lashing from Trump for importing too much Russian oil, the EU is contemplating introducing secondary sanctions – the only sanctions that actually seem to work – for the first time.

Increasingly, we have the developed world on one side trying to bludgeon the developing world on the other side, which is rapidly and effectively circling its wagons to be able to push back.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was supposed to be wandering around lost in a geopolitical no-man’s land, friendless and with his economy in rubble at his feet. He is increasingly looking like a global statesman, surrounded with buddies that have got his back. Isolated, he is not.

What is confusing about this picture is that from a European perspective, the invasion of Ukraine was unacceptable and Putin clearly in the wrong. But from Maduro's perspective, Putin is simply a victim of the same sort of mindless aggression he is as a not-US-ally. That is a rapidly growing group.

These countries don’t care about human rights, values or the rule of law. They care about power. They understand being in the US crosshairs is the manifestation of Western power. The West’s approach to the Global South is you bomb the weak countries and sanction the strong ones. It’s as simple as that.

Reading the commentary since the SCO summit, and now the emergency BRICS summit yesterday, most commentators portray the BRICS leaders as a ragtag bunch of misfits held together by political necessity because “Trump is bonkers”. We have a similar comment today on the site, describing China and Russia as frenemies, and of course everyone points to the fact that China and India are practically at war and have been for decades. On the other hand, there is an axiomatic belief in the “unity” of the West bound by its shared belief in values and the rules-based system.

But that is falling to pieces now. It’s the West that is looking fragmented as Trump is off on his own, hitting the EU and Canada as hard with tariffs as he is the Global South and penguin-filled islands. The US-EU relationship is fundamentally broken. The collapse of the French government yesterday is a harbinger of the rise of the far right across Europe as the whole EU project starts to crumble – which ironically, French President Emmanuel Macron himself warned of.

As we reported, Europe can’t afford to take over the burden of supporting Ukraine, either financially or in terms of military supplies. The rise of the far right will rip Europe apart. Macron will be gone by 2027. Europe is deindustrialising. The Germans are starting to debate Dexit. And most EU countries are either in recession or approaching a crisis.

By contrast, the Russo-Chinese led Global South movement is looking increasingly unified and sensible. Everyone (except Putin) is calling for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a foreign policy speech yesterday saying get ready for a long war in Ukraine. The Global South is also calling for an end to the Gaza slaughter and a two-state solution, whereas the US is backing Bibi's plan to expel all the Palestinians and allow Trump to build a “riviera of the Middle East” on some prime beachfront property. More Western-supplied bombs in lieu of diplomacy.

How real is this BRICS+ unity? It’s assumed that they have nothing in common but I don’t think that is true, especially after Indonesia joined the BRICS+ this January.

A lot was made of Putin’s 5,000-word essay on Ukraine, saying Ukraine it’s not a real country. But almost nothing has been made of the 8,000-word essay he and Xi jointly wrote last year, laying out, in detail, their view of what the multipolar world order should look like.

The focus on Russia’s relations with China is on the fact that Russia is a vast store of raw materials – $75 trillion dollars-worth according to a recent estimate – while China has very little. Also, China has the people; Russia has the land. Only about 35mn Russians live east of the Ural mountains, the border of Europe, whereas China has 1.4bn people crushed into its coastline.

A shared value that unites China and Russia is developing Eurasia lies at the heart of their foreign policy goals. That was on display at the SCO summit: originally set up to improve security in Central Asia and arbitrate between Russia and China, which have overlapping interests in the region, it has come a long way since then. The heads of state from all five 'Stans were prominently on stage surrounding Putin and Xi in Tianjin.

This whole region is booming and I point you at the slew of railway projects under construction, or coming online, at the moment. The Middle Corridorhas gotten the most attention, but from the Baku–Tbilisi–Kars line to the new China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan route, the map of Eurasia is filling with the metal highways that bypass the seas where the US Navy still dominates. China has just announced a new and vastly expensive one that will run through Tibet that at first glance seems entirely pointless, as there are no people on the “roof of the world”, until you realise it’s another artery in the cardiovascular Eurasian body China and Russia are building.

The whole point of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is to connect Asia and Europe by land as that means you don’t have to ship anything by sea where the US remains dominant. And not for long, as the Chinese navy is already bigger than the US navy. Not that the Chinese want to clash with the US navy, but once all the railways are finished, they can just ignore the US and let it have the seas.

Of course, it’s still early days for this “Southern Consensus”, but it's growing, which is already clear from the shared patterns in UN votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the expanding trade ties amongst the BRICS bloc. Russia’s trade with China dipped this year, but it is still on course to top $200bn this year, up from $5.8bn in 1991 and $8bn in 2000 when it started to take off.

The roughly 135 Global South countries are getting fed up with the “international community” of about 65 countries, mostly in Europe and the US, telling them what to do. If the 20th century was the ‘American Century’, the 21st may be remembered as the age of the Bandung Order — after the 1955 Bandung Conference, the symbolic start of non-aligned Global South solidarity – a world where the Global South, speaks for the majority of humanity and sets the rules rather than living under them. This is already an ideology that can unite the Global South.

Their rivalries are real, but as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to Tianjin showed, the relations are being remade in the fires of a Trumpian dystopia. The pragmatic goals of banding together in the face of the US-made GBU-57 series Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs used on Iran’s nuclear facilities has become more important than taking potshots at each other in the mountains of the Himalayas. The longer this goes on, the smoother this consensus will become.

 

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