Los líderes del BRICS verán juntos la final del mundial de futbol. Dos días después celebrarán su VI cumbre, en Fortaleza, Brasil. Ahí relanzarán su lucha por una globalización multipolar, opuesta al unilateralismo del G8. Durante los rituales de año nuevo estadistas del BRICS expresaron sus deseos geopolíticos y sus principales retos para el 2014, por ejemplo, participar en la negociación de conflictos regionales, intensificar las contradicciones del desarrollo (como la proletarización masiva de campesinos en China) y afrontar desafíos como la crisis en Ucrania y las elecciones en India y Brasil.

Will Washington allow China to overtake America economically – and should it? And what can America do in a restrained way, short of the usual doomsday scenarios, which can be dismissed because of their incalculable consequences for everybody?. Recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculations set a date for a first step in the overtaking: 2013, when China’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) should become larger than America’s in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) terms. China’s overtake of Japan last year in terms of GDP makes it likely it will exceed the US in2013, and this reinforces the possibility of a real overtake at current exchange rates sometime in the next decade or so. The consequences of this shift could be huge. China would de facto take center stage in the world, and although militarily China would still play second fiddle to America, China would then have the theoretical ability to engage America in an arms race. Incidentally, this logic was quite clear to Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s when he refused to deplete China’s weak coffers engaging in an arms race and instead focused all resources on an economic build-up.