The BRICS shopping campaign, the former emerging countries that are now a large group of countries with ever-increasing economic and geopolitical weight, continues at a rapid pace. The latest “blow” is the official accession of Vietnam, recently announced by the member holding the rotating presidency this year, namely Brazil, which will host the annual summit in a few weeks in Rio de Janeiro. The entry of the Southeast Asian country into the club of the “others”, that is to say the increasingly large anti-Western axis that is now worth at least 40% of global GDP, more than the G7, is no small news: Vietnam has a population of almost 100 million and is a stable member of the G20, that is, it is among the twenty most industrialized countries on the planet, with an economy that is growing at a rapid and sustained pace (+7% in 2024, exceeding the expectations of the government itself).
Eradicating Poverty and Sustainable Development
Hanoi has also made significant progress in reducing poverty in recent decades, bringing the percentage of the population living in poverty from 58,1% in 1992 to 4,8% in 2020, and has now established itself as one of the world's leading producers of rice and other agricultural products, such as coffee, rubber and tea, as well as one of the most committed to proposing sustainable development, through investments in technology and in particular in hydrogen as an alternative and clean energy source. But above all, Vietnam's membership in the BRICS consolidates the alliance with China in an anti-US function: to circumvent the very heavy duties announced by Washington, in addition to trying to slow them down through laborious and uncertain agreements with the White House, Beijing immediately turned to its Asian partner, putting into practice the so-called "commercial transshipment", that is, the passage of goods destined for the West through Vietnam, to avoid the tariffs.
The axis with Beijing
The move has irritated the United States quite a bit, so much so that Peter Navarro, one of Donald Trump's main advisers, called Vietnam "a colony of China". Between the two litigants, however, the third benefits and the trade war is greatly benefiting Hanoi, which now boasts a trade surplus with the US of 123,5 billion dollars, while seven years ago it did not reach 40 billion. "There are no winners in trade wars", Chinese President Xi Jinping said in April, when Washington announced 145% duties on products from Beijing. But if you can't win, you don't lose and so Xi flew to Vietnam to secure about forty strategic agreements, in particular - coincidentally - in the supply chain. Hanoi is perhaps the main industrial and logistics hub in Southeast Asia and represents the hub between China and the US: it imports almost exclusively from Beijing and exports almost exclusively to North America.
Entering the anti-Western “club”
So much so that the data almost coincide: in the first three months of this year, Vietnam bought 30 billion dollars of goods from China and sold 31,4 billion to the United States. Hanoi is now part of the BRICS, but only as a partner. Today, the BRICS have gone from the five countries that represented the acronym of the acronym (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to eleven full members, with the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The partners are another ten "friendly" countries: before the new entry of Vietnam, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan had already been involved in the club. If some of these countries seem little more than exotic, one cannot help but notice with the naked eye the economic weight of countries like Indonesia (which within 20 years will have the fourth largest GDP in the world), Egypt and Nigeria. Not to mention the military weight, with the recent entry of another nuclear power like Iran.
