Terror dollar baby, by Lorenzo Maria Pacini

The West is losing its place of primacy, and it’s not going gently into that good night. From Lorenzo Maria Pacini at strategic-culture.su:

There is a fear running through the streets of the collective West—a terrifying idea, a monster of unspeakable horror haunting the dreams of its leaders: the BRICS.

There is a fear running through the streets of the collective West—a terrifying idea, a monster of unspeakable horror haunting the dreams of its leaders: the BRICS. And even worse, what they are doing: dismantling the hegemony of the American dollar.

In July 2025, President Donald Trump told his cabinet, “BRICS was set up to hurt us, they were designed to weaken our dollar and take it off as the global standard.” His blunt statement reflects a growing concern in the United States: the notion that BRICS—once a loose coordination of emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—has transformed into a bloc determined to challenge Western-led institutions and undermine American financial supremacy. The core issue concerns the true capacity of the BRICS to act as an effective instrument, given that their formation was neither accidental nor unexpected.

Their consolidation reflects a long accumulation of sentiments dating back to the Cold War and postcolonial struggles. The Non-Aligned Movement, founded in Belgrade in 1961, offered an institutional dimension to the desire of newly independent states to avoid the obligation of siding with Washington or Moscow. Yet neutrality soon took on different meanings, as it came to signify real autonomy—as with Jawaharlal Nehru’s India or Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia. These countries pursued sovereignty and freedom of maneuver. A form of “neutrality against,” instead, was less about independence and more about indirect opposition to the United States. By the 1970s, many governments claimed non-alignment while benefiting from Soviet support. These currents survived the debt crises of the 1980s, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the unipolar phase of the mid-1990s.

In the early 2000s, China revived this tradition, presenting itself as the spokesperson of the developing world, expanding its ties in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and advocating multipolarity as an alternative to Western financial hegemony. The persistence of the dollar’s centrality and the unequal distribution of power in global institutions fueled this narrative, allowing the BRICS to become the institutional expression of these grievances.

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