Russia Hosts BRICS Summit, EU Leaders Talk Migration, UN Biodiversity Summit Kicks Off, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Russia hosts this year's BRICS Summit. EU leaders meet to discuss possible changes to migration policy. And, the UN Biodiversity Summit begins in Colombia. It's October 17th, 2024, and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, we usually start off by saying things are still happening as we tape this podcast. And just as we sat down this morning, reports came in that Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was the architect behind the October 7th attacks on Israel, has been killed in Gaza. He was killed by the Israeli military, according to reports that came out after identifying DNA testing in Israel, according to an Israeli official, although Hamas officials would not immediately confirm his death.

ROBBINS:
A pretty extraordinary development.

MCMAHON:
There have been some comparisons obviously already made about Nasrallah, and Nasrallah was seen as this generational figure really hard to replace. But Hezbollah is a different type of group, a different organized group and is going to muddle through in a way that Hamas might find more difficult with someone like Sinwar leaving the scene. But the targeted killing approach is useful to a point for some countries, but it's not clear how this changes the calculus or not.

ROBBINS:
Watch this space.

MCMAHON:
Yeah.

ROBBINS:
Bob, let's start in Russia, which is hosting this year's BRICS, that's Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, Summit. And the location of this summit is a really grim reminder of how Putin has managed to break out of his isolation. And how many countries are sitting on the sidelines in the Ukraine War or actively supporting Moscow as it violates the most basic global norms. You don't change borders with force and Putin is doing that.

This is going to be the first summit since the BRICS expansion with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates now at the table. And last week, the Kremlin was also claiming the Saudis as a member, but they've since walked that back. What's on the agenda for this meeting and are the Saudis playing hard to get?

MCMAHON:
First, I'll touch on what you mentioned, the stepping out of Russia as host of this in Kazan, and that is an important symbolic effect. And I think we keep on saying with the BRICS that there's symbolism, there's symbolism, but it actually does matter because they've endured for fifteen plus years, which I think a number of people didn't think was possible as a formal grouping. Even though there's not any sort of an organized institution in and around the BRICS. It's a rotating hosting of this, but they do discuss increasingly concrete proposals.

One big one to look for is the BRICS cross-border payments initiative. That would include a new messaging system and a network of national, commercial banks linked to each other through what are known as BRICS central banks. And the big goal there is to remove the need to exchange local currencies through the U.S. dollar. These countries, Russia in particular, China close behind it, and now Iran as a new member, very much would love to circumvent the U.S. dollar and its prime role. Russia and Iran among the most sanctioned countries in the world, and the U.S. dollar dominance has been an important part of that.

So that's going to be an important thing to watch. There's still a lot of complications. A lot of economists would say this is still going to be something that is going to be very difficult to roll out for these countries. But they are showing a desire to do it, including the democracies that are in the BRICS: India, Brazil, South Africa. And now you have this expanding group, including Gulf countries. Whether or not Saudi Arabia does come ahead and formally join it, has indicated it would like to. By the way, we should note Argentina was offered membership and declined.

ROBBINS:
So would it be bric-a-brac then?

MCMAHON:
Very good, yes. I knew you were waiting for that opportunity, but yes. But again, back to what I was going to say at the start, which is an opportunity for Russia to come out with these world leaders, and there'll be many leaders attending this. At a time when he continues to be a pariah, certainly in many of the Western chambers that he was accustomed to appearing in.

ROBBINS:
And has a warrant from the ICC.

MCMAHON:
He has a warrant from the ICC. Russia has been suspended from the UN Human Rights Council. It is not currently active in the OECD, the OSCE. It's not in the Group of Eight anymore, which is known as the Group of Seven. That ended after the initial invasion of Ukraine and on and on. There's so many other groups that Russia had been part of and a participant in and just doesn't have a voice in anymore.

And this movement into groups like the BRICS is setting in motion what we talked about before, which is this sense not only of Russia and China. But other countries that they're not happy with the norms in the Western-led and the U.S.-led system of institutions that have dominated in terms of the IMF and the World Bank. The U.S. itself is now undermining the WTO, which it had been a champion of.

So whether it's a Global South movement or it's just some sort of an ongoing challenge to the system that had the post-war system set up, the BRICS is manifesting this unhappiness. So they will go ahead and they will try to create this new economic cohesion. They will come out with statements or perhaps non-statements on things like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They will try to make common cause and things like cultural exchanges. When was the last time you saw a cultural exchange with Russia, for example, or humanitarian ties, things like that. There are all sorts of soft power ways in which the BRICS can continue to build on that.

And again, Russia being able to host this next week in Kazan, is able to say, "We are in the right and we are embraced by our peers, and we are going to move ahead and create a new system." So that, I think, continues to be the big takeaway, while they do talk about some tangible changes in terms some way of circumventing the dollar's dominance.

ROBBINS:
As you said, there are democracies going to this. And there are democracies that have been sitting on the fence in the Ukraine War, notably Brazil, India, South Africa. India, in particular, it's playing all sides in a really disturbing way. They're members of the Quad, and do you get the sense that the United States sits down with them and says, "Guys, we're not going to tell you to get out of the BRICS"? They have a huge resilience of huge investment in the BRICS, but "don't go to Russia." This is really a bridge too far here. Do you get any sense that they made any effort like that? This is such an extraordinary family photo op for Putin. This is just really, "I'm back. Nobody's taking my sins seriously anymore." Do you get any sense that they tried to stop it?

MCMAHON:
India poses a special challenge and it really does seem to have set in this sense of realpolitik with India that it's important to be a partner when it can be with the U.S. That the U.S. has no illusions that it's going to be any sort of an ally. And just if you look at India's purchases of discounted Russian oil, for example, enormous amounts of money that have been a main way of circumventing the sanctions against Russia, that's huge. Modi has not been shy though of appearing at Putin when he can, and of continuing contacts with Russia and saying warm things about the relationship, which goes back. The New Delhi-Moscow goes back into the Cold War era, and India leading the nonaligned movement vigorously.

But it does have, as you say, it's part of the Quad. It's got these important ties with the U.S., that it is also proud of and growing economic ties. And there's a huge Indian diaspora in the United States, a huge Indian immigrant community in the United States. And that creates a sense that certainly we can make common cause on areas so important. And yet, here we are, we're in this world where there are these competing poles of influence, and Modi is deftly navigating this world right now.

ROBBINS:
I do think, and I know we need to move on, but I do think that the United States and our allies have to have a serious conversation with ourselves about why so many countries feel that they can sit on the fence in this. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a fundamental violation of international law, violation of the UN Charter. Violation of the self-interest of so many countries that could be invaded themselves, and there is this "what about-ism" there. And we really do need to think about what is happening in the world that people can be so blasé about this.

MCMAHON:
And let's not forget the other multilateral events coming up, an increasingly intriguing one is the G20 Summit in Brazil. First of all, are a member of the he BRICS, and who is attending that from Russia will be interesting to watch.

Carla, let's pivot to Brussels where European leaders are meeting to talk about migration. This comes at calls for speedier deportations and changed asylum processes grow increasingly louder among leaders. Certainly, as politics shifts to the right, to the populist right, in many countries in the EU. So Carla, what is the status of the current migration pact and how could this meeting shake things up?

ROBBINS:
So the Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, hoped this meeting was a chance to restore some discipline to what is becoming an increasingly chaotic race to the bottom among EU member states on migration law. You're seeing all across Europe, this rise of anti-immigrant sentiment—looks very familiar to us here in the United States—and a rise of the power of far-right parties that are demagoguing this. Germany, which has national elections next September, has introduced border controls with all its neighbors. We've talked about this, and it suspended the passport-free Schengen zone. France, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Italy and Slovenia have also introduced border checks.

But the most recent and surprising move was this week's announcement from Poland of a new migration policy that would temporarily suspend the right to claim asylum for people crossing the border from Belarus. And the really surprising thing about this is who is championing it, this is not the far-right party in Poland. This is its centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who everybody cheered when he came back. He's a former European Council president. He's an enormously big power player in Brussels and he's no nativist. He came back to power last year after the Poles voted out the far-right, anti-immigrant Law and Justice Party.

Poland has taken in thousands of Belarusians since the uprising against Lukashenko's rigged 2020 election. But as we've recently heard from Finland, he and others say that Lukashenko and Putin have been pushing other migrants across the border as a form of hybrid warfare. That is probably true, but Tusk is really going far out on this thing right now. He's sounding more and more MAGA by the minute, he really is. Commission officials earlier this week were saying that Tusk's plan violated EU laws, but by today at this meeting that started, it's a two-day meeting, people are celebrating it. People are saying, "This is the way we want to go. We got to worry about hybrid warfare. This is all a security issue." People are talking about crime from migrants. It sounds so much like what's going on here in the U.S. election.

But what's really important to know as well, that this is a political crisis more than a migration crisis. The numbers are really falling in Europe. According to the EU border agency, which is Frontex, the number of irregular migrants arriving in Europe last year were less than a third of the number who came at the peak of the 2015 migration crisis. And in the first nine months of this year, the number had declined by 42 percent compared to the same period last year to about one hundred and sixty thousand people. This is like when we look at what we talk about here. But centrist leaders are panicking about the rising power of the far-right parties, and facts don't matter in the face of political demagoguery.

So von der Leyen had hoped that she could get the countries back in line by committing to speeding up the implementation of a pact on migration that she had engineered that took her several years to get through, that they finally passed in May, just in time for the parliamentary elections that they thought would hold off the far-right and didn't hold off the far-right. But it wasn't going to be implemented until 2026, so I think she was going to go there and say, "Let's speed it up." And what it would've done was empowered these so-called frontline states, like Greece and Italy, to process migrants a lot faster. And those that don't meet asylum terms to get them out. And to give the rest of the EU, they're supposed to share the burden and let in migrants that do meet asylum terms by saying, "Well, at least we'll accept them or maybe we'll pick up the burden another way. We'll put money in or we'll send personnel, or do something like that." They don't want that. They want to do something a lot more aggressive than that.

And we can talk about what they want to do, but it looks a lot like it's going to violate fundamental EU law. They want to deport migrants a lot faster. People are talking about a lot of things that were taboo even a few weeks ago. Other schemes being discussed, they want to send rejected migrants to allegedly a safer third country. It sounds a lot like Rishi Sunak's "let's send them to Rwanda" idea. Netherlands and Hungary are already talking about sending people to Uganda.

Italy this week opened two processing centers in Albania, and delivered sixteen men that they intercepted in international waters. Giorgia Meloni used to be a pariah coming from the Brothers of Italy nativist group. Now she's everybody's favorite..."Tell me how to do it." Keir Starmer went and talked to her in Italy, "Tell me how you're reducing the number of migrants." So there's a lot of ideas on the table that they're looking at very seriously, that honestly and truly a few weeks ago, I couldn't even imagine them considering.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's certainly driven by politics. We should note that, as you say, the numbers themselves have dropped off on the trendlines. There are still existing numbers of migrants in many of these countries, whose presence alone in the thousands depending on what country, is continuing to become a source of concern, as well as misinformation from the nativist groups.

Many times these are people from—pick the world's toughest spots right now—Afghanistan, Syria, places in the Middle East and North Africa. The people being driven out of Sudan right now, or people who are increasingly climate refugees. All of these are in the mix, and they're either trying to make the very difficult set of crossings on the Mediterranean or they find themselves enticed up to places like Belarus, which has then weaponized them into a country like Poland.

So you have Tusk doing what a lot of politicians, centrist politicians and others are doing, which is trying to seize a little of the initiative to steal a little of the thunder of right-wing movements to both stay in power and one imagines to, potentially in the long game, take control of policy again from a position that's more traditional of the rules-based order in the way in which asylum cases are processed and so forth. But I think as you noted, I think you're going to see more and more of these instances, in which there are countries brokering deals with source countries or countries that are near the front lines.

Albania decided to take up this agreement with Italy as a gesture to be a good neighbor, to score some points for its future accession perhaps into European bodies, all of those things. North African countries like Tunisia are part of this-

ROBBINS:
They're getting millions of dollars from the EU, and von der Leyen negotiated that deal to stop migrants there and allegedly, they're going to spend money to make better life there, but when they cut a deal like that with Libya before that, we know what happened.

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
Boats were getting sunk, people were getting shot. Human rights groups and migration groups say that this is outsourcing border control and nobody's paying attention to what's actually happening.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And again, it's a measure of the degree of real concern that has been driven by public attitudes in these countries, and these politicians are scrambling now. So it's a real test, as you say, for the European Union to figure out what is the way they can continue to observe proper humane treatment, established under long-standing laws, post-war laws?

And at the same time, dial down the pressure that these countries are facing. Austria and Germany most recently, had political results that saw real gains by far-right parties. So it is a big test for the EU at a time when it's being tested seemingly on many other fronts, too.

ROBBINS:
I just keep going back to those numbers. Why there is this rise of far-right sentiment when the migration numbers are really radically going down? And you just kept coming back to how much of this is Russian disinformation? How much of this is just sheer demagoguery? There is no crisis except for a political crisis.

Let's move our conversation to Colombia, which is hosting the UN Biodiversity Summit, and the theme this year is Peace with Nature. We've seen so many climate disasters lately hit regions around the world, and most recently these two hurricanes in the United States. Bob, what are the goals of this year's meeting? And, can we, if you forgive me, and I'm going to blame our producer, Molly, can we give biodiversity a chance?

MCMAHON:
Well, the theme of the meeting is Peace with Nature, Carla, which sounds great. And the meeting is taking place in the city of Cali, and so you had some WAGs calling it Cali fauna dreaming. So the host country is one of the most biodiverse countries, in one of the most biodiverse regions of the world. So it's very significant that this meeting is taking place, even though it's in very much of a review meeting. Because the last meeting, and this is called, we've heard the term COP used for the climate meetings, and there's going to be one next month in Azerbaijan. This is also a series of meetings now called COP, the BioCOP meeting. So the last BioCOP was two years ago.

ROBBINS:
COP being Conference of Parties.

MCMAHON:
Conference of Parties, right. The last one of these was in Montreal and it produced the Global Biodiversity Framework. Some people have said it is the Paris Agreement of the biodiversity movement.

A number of targets were set, a number of ambitious targets that seem to be pretty remote. But let me start out with a quick definition of biodiversity for those—

ROBBINS:
Thank you.

MCMAHON:
—wondering where that's coming from. I'll just use the quotation described by the organizers, "Biodiversity refers to the variety of life on earth, extending from the simplest and smallest genes to the most complex ecosystems. It encompasses evolutionary, ecological and cultural processes that sustain life." And that would include human life as well, which is again, why this is important at the end of the day. And this meeting that's taking place in Cali, is going to be attended by something like ten thousand to twelve thousand people, including a number of people from business interests.

At the end of the day, nature of course, is a very important asset for businesses. They want to be at the table if certain controls are going to be set in place, but also have a number of companies and business sectors have set into their goals actually sustaining a biodiverse pathway to life. So at the very least, there's some lip service being paid to the importance of biodiversity. Framework targets that have been set include conserving 30 percent of land, water, and sea. And some countries have actually stepped up to this but it needs a lot more. The Guardian, for instance, recently reported that countries that were supposed to just at the very least submit plans by this COP, of the countries that were supposed to submit plans, 80 percent have not. And these are national biodiversity strategies and action plans.

Coming just ahead of this summit was a report, a very sobering report released by the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report 2024, that says there has been a 73 percent decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations since 1970. And this is based on an index provided by the Zoological Society of London, which tracks thirty-five thousand-plus vertebrate populations since 1970 or from 1970 to 2020. The biggest decline in these species, 85 percent are in freshwater populations followed by land-based, and then marine. So we've all heard the stories, we've heard about the recent alarm over colony collapse syndrome involving bees and honeybees. And their ability to pollinate many of the trees that create the fruits and nuts and things that we like to eat, but it goes far beyond that.

The most recent Economist has also a sobering piece about a real surge in trafficking of animals out of Latin America, because it is incredibly valuable to the trafficking networks, to organized crime networks, and this has surged. So things like jaguar teeth and precious birds being stuffed inside different types of storage bins and things like that, are starting to come up as customs people come across these, and even though there are laws on the books preventing such things, there's very little enforcement either capacity or will in some cases. And the ability to bribe customs officials in these places also makes it a pretty easy game. So this meeting, this COP is a review meeting, but also it's about the very future of the living beings and the cycles of living beings in this planet. So it's really important that some markers be laid out that they can hit.

ROBBINS:
So the Paris Accord laid out markers, at least the success of it such as it was. And people are supposed to start fessing up about how much progress or not that they've made toward their nationally determined contributions to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Have they not even yet set markers for the biodiversity?

MCMAHON:
Other than this 30 percent rule I mentioned, these are like the Paris Agreement, these are all voluntary, by the way. There's no binding agreements, but there is this sense of obligation if you do sign up to, which is why it has been difficult for some countries even to get to that point. There's a sense of obligation that you say you are going to commit to leaving a certain portion of your land free of development or of ruinous development, then you should step up to it.

And countries, including European countries, have had a hard time doing it. It was reported the UK is not going to be able to have its plan in place, partly because of the new government there, and a lot of the things they're trying to accomplish. So it's about stepping up and saying, "Hey, who's actually provided commitments here? Who is willing to take part in data sharing?" One of the things that is supposed to be most important about this COP is the ability to really track data. And for countries to be working from the same tracking information to be able to keep pace of animal populations, plant populations, and so forth.

There's also a really important discussion going on. It's not expected to reach solid agreement, but about the genetic material and how you can follow, how can you track genetic material. How countries can share information so that they can properly keep track of genetic material that can be used to create food and vaccines, and other products. Again, biodiversity is not only great for healthy cycles and healthy ecosystems, but biodiversity usually translates into medicinal uses. It translates into all sorts of benefits for society and for human society.
And Carla, we have talked ourselves into the audience figure of the week portion of the podcast, which is the figure the listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Carla, our audience selected "Canada Expels Indian Diplomats." So what has led to this expulsion?

ROBBINS:
This is a bizarre and brazen story. We know that Russians go around murdering their opponents overseas, and certainly we know the famous case of Jamal Khashoggi from the Saudis. We really don't expect this from a sort of democracy like India. Canada announced the expulsion this week of six Indian diplomats, including the high commissioner to Canada. And these diplomats were accused of being part of a broad criminal network to they say harass Canadian Sikhs. Canada has the largest Sikh population outside of India, and they say they're tied to this murder in June of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar. And in response to this, India immediately kicked out six Canadian diplomats.

Nijjar was a Canadian citizen living in British Columbia who came to Canada some thirty years ago. And in 2020, the Indian government declared him a terrorist for his political work in Canada calling for the creation of an independent state in northern India called Khalistan. The Indian government accused him of leading a terrorist group, but people in Punjab, people went out and reported this, said they never even heard of him.

So the Sikhs are only a tiny fraction of India's population, but they are a large population in Canada comparatively, and the Indian government's really obsessed with this. So the case really seized the attention of the Trudeau government. And in September of last year, three months after Nijjar's murder, the Canadian prime minister—this is really unusual—Trudeau got up and said he had credible information that the Indian government had a hand in this killing. And this high-profile announcement was not taken well, as you can imagine in India. And in May, the Canadians arrested and charged three men for the murder. And at a press conference this week, the Mounties said that the six diplomats were involved. So this has become a very, really high-profile face-off between the Indian and Canadian governments.

The Indian government fiercely rejecting all the allegation, and it says that Trudeau is pandering to the Canada Sikhs, who tend to support his liberal party. Trudeau seems absolutely furious about this meddling's charge, the Indians are meddling in Indian politics as well. And it is really an extraordinary thing to see a prime minister so directly involved in a criminal case like this and talking about this. And finally, there are some U.S. links to this story. In November last year, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against an Indian government employee for an alleged, foiled murder-for-hire plot. And the target was the general counsel for a group called Sikhs for Justice in New York.

We know the U.S. really shares intelligence really closely with the Canadians and certainly knows a lot about the allegations that Trudeau surfaced. But at the same time as Trudeau was speaking out really forcefully against the Modi government, Biden has been quite cozy with India's leader, and geopolitics has a way of doing that.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. We were just talking about the Indian role in the world and the U.S. relationship with the Modi government. And as you say, while the U.S. and India might have a partnership and certain cordial aspect to it, the U.S. and Canada, it's hard to find any relationship tighter than that one.

And they share lots of information and have lots of common threads. It's going to pose a bit of a challenge for the U.S. to continue to navigate this, especially as the Modi government seems to be intent on pursuing what it sees as enemies abroad.

ROBBINS:
Just one final point, as this was going on, of course, MBS, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, before he went to his BRICS meeting, he was making nice and they were making nice with the EU as well. So there is a tendency that even when governments go out and murder people, if they're powerful enough, people have a way of forgetting.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's our cynical look at The World Next Week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on: Moldova's citizens vote in presidential election and in an EU referendum; Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Istanbul; and the IMF is due to release its World Economic Outlook.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast platform, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation, are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week—I'm really not that cynical, am I?—are solely those are the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Molly McAnany and Markus Zakaria with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. And special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson and Kenadee Mangus for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by—he's everywhere—Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long and don't forget to vote.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.