Is the Geopolitics Heading to Bipolar World?

BRICS summit is taking place in Russia from October 22 to 24 with leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, among many others scheduled to meet in the Russian city of Kazan. Indian President Narendra Modi too is expected to join the summit.

The new BRIC members are Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Turkey, a NATO member with complex ties to both Moscow and the West, too has announced in early September that it also wanted to join BRICS.

Russian President Vladimar Putin has reportedly invited Palestine President Mohmoud Abbas for the meet.

According to media reports coming in, the main issues on the agenda include Putin's idea for a BRICS-led payment system to rival SWIFT, an international financial network that Russian banks were cut off from in 2022, as well as the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Though some nations like India, try to keep an equidistance from the U.S. and Russia, there are many nations in BRICS who are victims of the U.S. camp and would like to see a strong BRICS rivalling NATO. Russia wouldn’t mind leading it. Putin, according to analysists in news organisations, wants to set up a challenge through BRICS to the Western ‘hegemony’ led by the United States.

The Ukraine war that Russia is fighting has alienated Russia and Putin is all willing to form a group that will stand by Russia against the unipolar hegemony of the U.S. in geopolitics. Nations like China, Iran, North Korea, and many Middle-East nations would like to see a bipolar world after they are tired with sole hegemony of the U.S., who they think is the one actually behind all the crisis in the Middle-East today, seconded by the European countries.

The Islamic nations have been tired of the unipolar world and wouldn’t mind a bipolar world to emerge, though Russia is their competitor in the oil market.

As for Russia, Putin feels he has been nearly ‘provoked’ by U.S.-led NATO for sending troops into Ukraine and it is not Ukraine but the U.S. fighting the war with Russia, supported by the European West.

The twin war: Russia-Ukraine; and Israel vs Palestine-Iran, in both of which the U.S. and the European nations double as commons; have created a suitable situation for a unipolar world if Russia manages to seize the time and give the necessary leadership. After the wars end, if at all they do ‘peacefully’, the world may be a world with a different order.