Your correct that the US has bullied or thrown their weight around in unwise ways.
Your hope in the BRICKS is still up in the air.
As Ive said before, Brazil & India don’t have the warmest feelings towards China. Russia is a different matter. The belt and road has stalled in many ways but principally with India.
Chinas policies in Africa have not been met with universal appreciation.
Their there own sort of bully.
In short does the US and the west need to do better absolutely.
Will Bricks achieve their goals? That remains to be seen.
Russia’s economy is mainly dependent on petrol and no bigger than some American states.
Putting trust in chinas financial stability is as difficult or worse than the Dollar.
Predictably of laws l, open trade policies and respecting other nations ocean economic zones all come into play when considering who to put your trust in.
Im sure you will have a response and that’s fine but call me cynical. I’ll lean towards the west. The thought of a totalitarian nation running the worlds financial system doesn’t appeal to me.
“Im just not thinking correct yet”
It's BRICS, not BRICKS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. There are also forty other countries involved:
en.wikipedia.org
There are multiple configurations involved: EAGLE, MINT, CIVETS, Next Eleven, etc.
en.wikipedia.org
The point that all that is still up in the air is around two decades too late. Goldman Sachs and several multinational banks reported back in 2005 that they had been growing at significant rates, and by 2030 would dominate the global economy. As of 2018, the five countries alone held almost a quarter of global GDP.
The reasons for this has less to do with culture or race or other nonsense: just like the U.S. in the early part of the previous century, or Japan and the Asian tigers of the latter half of the same century, these countries have large populations, and some very young ones, which means they are eager to work and earn hard and to spend more, which is why they will soon become the main source of production and consumption globally:
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty but can the middle class continue to grow?
www.bbc.com
Again, what's being described isn't something that will happen in the near future but something that's been going in the past three decades. I've no idea why you're not aware of this.
Even as early as the late 1980s, economists like Robert Reich were already referring to phenomena that has been taking place throughout: U.S. cars only in name, with the engine designed in Germany and manufactured in China, components made in Japan, parts made in Philippines and Indonesia, advertising managed in France and Singapore, customer support in India, minerals from various South American countries, oil from the Middle East, and so on. Even the owners of the same U.S. companies involve investors from China, Japan, Singapore, EU members, the Middle East, and South America.
All that involves combinations of global trade and soft power. Why do you think China has been catching up quickly with the U.S. without heavy military spending, especially in Africa and South America, not to mention Australia and even countries like Canada?
As for preferring the West, here's the irony: what China has been doing, and before that Japan and others who gained from the East Asian Miracle after WW2, follow Western ideas, ranging from nineteenth-century Prussian statecraft to IMF-WB soft power moves of the 1980s!
In the end, more will realize that this has nothing to do with clashes of civilizations or cultures or ideologies but the effects of capitalist-driven industrialization. Put simply, what China is is what the U.S. once was:
And what happened to the U.S. will happen to China, too, as more of its workers, who moved from farms to factories (just like what happened in the U.S.) will soon move from factories to services as they outsource manufacturing to countries like Bangladesh and others. In fact, that's already taking place, because I recall
The Economist reporting years ago that up to 60 pct of manufacturing in China involves assembly of parts manufactured in other countries, like Thailand and the Philippines, and that more factory workers want to move to service industries where they're paid more! And what do they want do with the money they earn? Buy the same things that Americans are buying, which happen to come from the same factories.
And that's the same West which, with counterparts like Japan, South Korea, and others, face population aging and rely heavily on increased demand for consumer goods across BRICS and emerging markets to earn, if not warm bodies to act as nurses and caregivers.
Thus, conflict will obviously be disastrous for everyone, including those who win it. The global economy has reached a stage that countries are essentially tied to each other and need each other to maintain industrialization, if not to allow it to grow.
In which case, the correct phrase when it comes to imagining the effects of future conflict isn't "good luck to them." It's "good luck to all of us."