Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya Calls BRICS Nations ‘Polar Opposites’, Has Trouble Seeing Members Cooperating

Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya says that he has a hard time seeing BRICS nations working together to achieve anything significant.

In a new episode of the All-In Podcast, the business magnate says that even though BRICS is made up of economically aligned nations, there are stark differences among them that make any meaningful collaboration seem unlikely.

Given the differences, he doubts BRICS could come up with a currency framework to compete against the US dollar.

“And the problem now is that their regional rivalries are only growing. So China and India, which are the two anchor partners of BRICS, are literally in a land war. There’s a border that they fight over with guns. You have a growing anti-Chinese resentment inside of both India and Brazil. In India, they’ve blocked a lot of apps. They’re about to block a bunch of imports. But India sees China as an existential threat. There’s just a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment. So it’s very hard to see folks that are such polar enemies actually working together even if they’re part of an organization.”

He also says that BRICS lacks a key foundation of shared democratic ideals that an international group like NATO has.

“The other thing that I’ll say about the BRICS, which is kind of odd, is that unlike the G7 and unlike NATO, where you have democratic ideals that underpin the organizational framework, here it doesn’t because you have China, Russia, Iran, which are total polar opposites to Brazil and India in terms of democratic governance. And I don’t know enough about Ethiopia or Egypt to say anything. They’re not democratic the way like NATO and the G7 are all democratically elected countries.”

BRICS nations include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. However, more nations may soon join the group. Member countries have recently made moves toward abandoning the US dollar.

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