Tsipras could find a new world order built on Moscow-Beijing axis
MARK MACKINNON
LONDON — The Globe and Mail
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If and when Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras takes a break from rattling the current world order this week, he’s expected to fly to a place called Ufa to see if he can find favour with those building a rival one.
Ufa, a virtually anonymous city in central Russia, is playing host to two gatherings this week. Wednesday saw the opening of the seventh annual summit of the BRICS developing nations that is using its increasing economic clout to challenge the G7.
When that ends, the leaders of Russia and China will remain in Ufa to preside over Thursday’s meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a military bloc seen as a potential counterweight to NATO. It’s the first time BRICS and the SCO have met at the same time and the same place, and a testament to how much the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have converged in recent years.
While financial aid for Greece is not on the agenda for either summit, Mr. Tsipras likely wants to show – amidst talk Greece could be pushed out of the euro zone – that Greece can and will find other partners if Europe continues to play hardball over his country’s debt crisis.
“The prime minister of Greece? We are looking forward to see him,” Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to Mr. Putin, said in an interview with Russia’s RBK television. He said the Greek government, which has refused European creditors’ demands that it introduce added austerity measures as a condition for further loans, was considering joining a new BRICS development bank that’s expected to come into being later this year.
The Greek government hasn’t announced a trip by Mr. Tsipras to Ufa. But in coded remarks on Wednesday that seemed directed at Mr. Tsipras’s courting of Russia in particular and BRICS in general, European Council President Donald Tusk warned Greece to “seek help among your friends, not your enemies – especially when they are unable to help you.”
Mr. Tsipras’s pugnacity will fit well with the BRICS/SCO new world order, where the most commonly shared trait among members is a willingness to challenge the Western institutions that have dominated for the past 25 years.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi are the two main players in Ufa. The Russian leader is at daggers drawn with the West over the war in eastern Ukraine, and the Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. While Mr. Xi has better relations with Washington and Brussels, his first two years as China’s paramount leader have seen the Communist Party government straining against what it sees as the constraints of Western hegemony.
“We are well aware of difficulties that we have to face both in economy and international politics, but combining efforts, no doubt we will overcome all the problems before us and solve all the problems and tasks before us,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi at the start of a one-on-one meeting before the opening of the BRICS summit. It was the 10th bilateral meeting between the two men since Mr. Xi rose to power in March, 2013.
BRICS also includes Brazil, India and South Africa. The SCO includes Russia, China and the ex-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
More intriguing is the list of those attending the SCO meeting as observer states, indicating interest in future membership: India, Pakistan, Iran, Mongolia and Afghanistan. In another sign of the group’s growing clout, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is expected to travel to Ufa, even as crunch-time negotiations are taking place in Vienna over the future of his country’s Russian-backed nuclear program, and Western economic sanctions against Tehran.
“Changes are taking place in Eurasia’s geopolitical architecture which was led by Western powers in the past. … International power has been shifting to emerging countries which have an increasing say in rule-making,” Yang Jin, a Russia scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in the Beijing-based Global Times newspaper.
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