(For an obscure article about BRICS subimperialism, two Brazilian comrades and I were just trying to quickly sum up the probable shift; does this capture it?)

Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president brings respite from a world threatened by Donald Trump’s climate-denialist, dictator-coddling, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, rules-breaking regime, at first blush. On second thought, 2021 will also initiate an unwelcome restoration of legitimacy to Western imperialism akin to Barack Obama’s rule. Biden’s (2020) recent Foreign Affairs article began by stressing how since 2017, “the international system that the United States so carefully constructed is coming apart at the seams.” In reconstructing imperialism, Biden may draw upon a legislative and public-advocacy record dating to the 1980s based upon consistent service to several internationally-ambitious circuits of U.S. capital:

·       financial, e.g. through supporting bankruptcy ‘reform’, austerity in social programs, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act deregulating Wall Street, and unprecedented financial sector bailouts;

·       merchant and agri-corporate, when promoting trade and ‘investor rights’ deals;

·       technology, through unleashing Big Data surveillance;

·       medical and insurance, when favoring Intellectual Property and opposing public healthcare financing;

·       fossil fuel, given that his climate policy will resurrect Obama’s, based on insufficient emissions reductions, ongoing oil and gas drilling and pipeline transport, a refusal to pay the U.S. climate debt, and renewed reliance upon carbon markets; and

·       the Military Industrial Complex – for Biden supported every war since the 1980s, leading the authoritative insider journal Defense One to celebrate: “Biden may not radically change the nation’s military, deviate from the era’s so-called great power competition, or even slash the bottom line of the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget” (Benjamin and Davies 2020).

What will stand in opposition to a Biden-administration imperialism, whose toxic ideology only replaces Trump’s ‘paleoconservative’ nationalism with the Obama-style fusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism? Much hope had been invested in the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ but it faded after Hugo Chavez’s 2013 death. Since, then, notwithstanding serious crises, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) network has been of central interest in 21st century international political economy. 

ETC ETC