BRIC(S) A BRAC

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa were the original BRICS. Now they are joined by Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. Turkey is applying for membership.

In the past, Western steered alliances ruled the world...SIC TRANSIT ! The former Western world order is no longer. NATO is a beggar's opera. Bush killed the American inroads in the Middle East. Obama's Asian grand design is dead on arrival. The EU became what it is, an ambition drowned in a pool. 

The new axis of evil engineered by Putin should alarm the West. What it might lack in engineering or focus, it compensates with  some form of nihilistic acrimony. They come together less about goals than because of shared resentment. Putin has showed how he can master hurt feelings and imagined humiliation. This is all the more ironic since this former KGB apparatchik is the heir to the Gulag and the various coups in Prague, Warshaw and Budapest (Remember Mr. Orban?). True, China's Tien An Men follows the pattern.

What is at stake here is the Russian strategy to break the world into pieces. The growing falling apart of coherence, or a guiding agreed philosophical Meridien, benefits the freelancers. Russia watches while the American Secretary of State runs to  exhaustion.  Netanjahu's thank you note might well be joining the BRICS, club of enemies.

Meanwhile the American presidential campaigns are giving free elections a bad name. Thanks.