MOSCOW - The big outsider nations of the world meet at the BRICS summit as the US and EU face their own struggles, with a chance to reset the global agenda to improve their own economies and standing on the international stage.
The Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) summit in Brasilia, starting today, shines the spotlight onto a disparate group of hugely populated nations at a time when Western powers are at their most unstable for years.
This is a meeting for the outsiders of this world. The awkward squad. They are the lanky kids, the geeks, the pimply swots and the just plain weird of the global playground. They are big, influential players in their own regions but not welcome at the top table of global financial institutions where Europe and the US hold sway and jealously guard their seats.
Sure, they have economic issues to talk about, ostensibly the whole point of the Brasilia summit, but it is geopolitics that they are really there for. A big gossipy catch-up and a chance to compare notes on the increasingly fractured European Union and the ever more isolationist US of Donald Trump, and how those two tectonic shifts impact their own worlds and spheres of influence. (RT)