Photograph Source: Prime Minister’s Office (GODL-India)

The U.S. now assumes leadership of the G20 until the Miami summit ends on December 15, 2026 – but not without having lost some crucial soft power. In the wake of Donald Trump’s farcical attacks on the host of last week’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, might the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (plus Egypt-Ethiopia-Indonesia-Iran-United Arab Emirates) BRICS bloc – maybe alongside some annoyed Europeans – finally stand up straight, and boycott the Florida meeting?

After all, a process of shifting power relations – symbolic and real – is supposedly underway. At the University of South Africa in Pretoria on November 20, two days before G20 leaders met, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs gave a viral speech in which he castigated Trump – as the equivalent of a four-year old throwing tantrums – and proclaimed that U.S. power

is fading. It’s fading in part because of the BRICS. Because the BRICS are saying we don’t need to be under the thumb of a US empire. That’s what President Lula said when he was hosting the BRICS this summer. And Trump put on a tariff on Brazil because he didn’t like a court proceeding against the preceding president who had tried to make a coup. And so he put on a penalty tariff and President Lula said, ‘We don’t need an emperor, and we’re not going to succumb to this kind of pressure.’ So the BRICS, of which you are an esteemed member … have 46% of the world population. Thank you. And 41% of the world GDP. And they can look at the G7 and say, ‘Who are you?’ And that’s what they’re doing. So this is the new phase of geopolitics.

Sachs’ rhetoric is certainly pleasing, but in a manner reminiscent of a too-brief sugar high. Looking more closely over the past six months, the (aspiring) multi-polar world has provided many examples of the opposite process, suggesting the BRICS’ threat to U.S. imperialism is in fact, fading. Read on if you are worried that Sachs vastly hypes the BRICS, by not digging deeply enough, dialectically, into the devils in the details. Read on if you are worried that the BRICS’ ruling elites can and do behave in neoliberal subimperialist – not anti-imperialist – ways.

“We collapsed the ambitious agenda we had about revitalizing the Global South”

In the most obvious two examples of Trump appeasement syndrome evident in late November, first, there was no punishment whatsoever – e.g. climate taxes (such as a ‘carbon border adjustment mechanism’ on U.S. exports) – announced against his withdrawal from United Nations climate talks, which were hosted from November 10-22 by Brazilian President Lula da Silva in Belém.

The idea of smart sanctions against the U.S. for climate crimes was first mooted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz two decades ago. In 2016-17, campaigning by (now-jailed conservative) former French President Nicolas Sarkozy – defending his own capitalists – and by leading climate justice movement strategist Naomi Klein promoted a carbon tax against the U.S.. In contrast, technocrats overpopulating the Brazilian COP30 climate summit could muster no such gumption.

Second, regular U.S. temper tantrums were appeased by South Africa during this year’s G20 chairing process, rather than decrying and punishing Trump’s wanton-destructive approach to climate, public health, humanitarian aid, international rule-of-law, long-accepted rules-of-military-engagement, and trade multilateralism. Indeed no one in power – aside from the Yemenese Houthis controlling Red Sea access – has stood up against Trump, his ‘Department of War’ and paramilitary immigration agents as they facilitate ongoing genocide in Gaza; attack speedboats offshore Venezuela (killing scores); recklessly bomb Iranian nuclear facilities; nonchalantly threaten to invade Nigeria, Greenland and Panama; and brutalize immigrants including desperate refugees.

To illustrate, the G20 hosts behaved in an obsequious manner in relation to Trump starting a year ago when after his first outburst threatening the BRICS with tariffs if de-dollarization was pursued, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa begged Trump for a state visit and game of golf. This was openly explained by Pretoria’s former U.S. Ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, on November 28, in an interview worth citing at length:

We’ve tried the appeasement. Our president went to the White House [on May 22] with two white Afrikaner golfers and a white Afrikaner billionaire, Johan Rupert: ‘please tell him we’re not that bad.’ We tried the appeasement route. It didn’t work… Before I left [on March 14], Trump punished us and I explained that after I left, he doubled down on the tariffs even though we went with an appeasement agenda to the White House, as our president did, and I as I explained. So, we’ve tried the appeasement route. It’s not done anything. We’ve even, as we led the discussions to the G20, we kind of collapsed the ambitious agenda we had about revitalizing the Global South in this G20, completing four years of Global South leadership of the G20, starting with India, Indonesia, Brazil and now South Africa. We’ve built up to this crescendo. And then South Africa had to say, ‘listen we’re not going to achieve this, what we want to achieve on........

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