By Devine Mafa
The United States could have become the Western version of BRICS: a magnetic, multicultural superpower that welcomed talent, capital, and ambition from every corner of the planet. Instead, it doubled down on racism, aggression, and isolation. The result is not just moral failure; it is strategic suicide.
BRICS today represents 55.6 % of the world’s population and 44 % of global GDP in purchasing-power terms. China alone accounts for roughly a third of all manufacturing on Earth and has a nuclear arsenal that, while smaller than America’s, is more than enough to deter any rational adversary. The bloc trades increasingly in its own currencies, builds its own payment systems, and courts the very nations America has spent decades lecturing or bombing.
America, by contrast, is 4.2 % of humanity, dependent on imported energy, rare earths, semiconductors, and even basic pharmaceuticals. Its greatest natural resource has always been its people: waves of immigrants and their children who built Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the Manhattan Project. Yet in 2024, a critical mass of voters decided the country’s biggest threat was the very diversity that made it exceptional.
Putting Donald Trump back in office was the single most self-destructive act in modern American history. His administration’s opening moves: mass deportation threats, boycotting the 2025 G20 in Johannesburg, slapping 60 % tariffs on allies and adversaries alike, and peddling the lie that force still works in a world that has quietly moved on. Every time America screams “America First,” the rest of the planet hears “America Alone.”
China, for all its authoritarian flaws, has not launched a single overseas invasion in the modern era that compares to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or the dozens of regime-change operations Washington has backed since 1945. Beijing grows richer while the dollar is strong and grows richer still when the dollar falters, because its growth is rooted in production and domestic consumption, not endless foreign wars and debt-fueled consumption.
America’s tragedy is not that it lacks the raw power to dominate; it is that it lacks the wisdom to lead. Leadership today requires inclusion, long-term alliances, and the humility to sit at tables it does not control. Trump’s refusal to even show up at the G20 table handed China and the Global South a gift they never could have stolen.
The path back, if one still exists, is brutally simple: abandon the politics of racial resentment, reopen the borders to talent, rejoin the institutions it helped create, and treat the rest of the world as partners rather than vassals. Unity, not uniformity. Strength through addition, not subtraction.
History will not remember the loudest voices on social media or the most retweeted memes. It will remember that, at the precise moment the world was begging for an inclusive American century, America chose exclusion and wondered why the century moved on without it.
Devine Mafa – THE MATTER STANDARD – coming soon on Amazon Books
01 December 2025