According to Goldman Sachs projections, China will have a GDP greater than the United States in 2034 and India in 2070. For other analysts, the United States would maintain predominance, but with China and India competing inch by inch for primacy.
The context requires maintaining a independent and multilateral foreign policy, far from overacting and automatic alignments with any foreign power. The only path to development is to strengthen regional integration as a way to enhance the internal market and be able to achieve dynamic competitive advantages, stimulating local science and technology and articulating regional projects.
During Bolsonaro’s administration, Brazil did not abandon the Brics and maintained a state policy and international insertion consistent with its national interests. Resigning from joining the Brics, extended to Western allies such as Saudi Arabia, which coexists in the Brics with its rival Iran, constitutes not only a crude ideologization but Argentina’s most serious strategic error.
A bloc to which more than 40 medium and low developed countries aspire to join and which went from representing 23% of world product and 16% of world trade in its original version, to in its expanded version representing 35.8%. of world GDP compared to 27% of the G7 countries and have 25% of total world trade.
In the analysis of benefits and costs, it is clear that a strategy subordinated to a hegemonic power is a bad deal for Argentina and refers to the historical error of the Roca Runciman Pact of 1933, when our country gave its meat market to Great Britain, when the United States United asserted itself as a new emerging hegemony.
To evaluate a possible course of hegemonic war, a very interesting report to analyze how the context of “geopolitical war” evolves is the Critical Technology Monitoring Report “The Global Race for Future Power” carried out by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (ASPI).
The supply of critical inputs and access to finished products with high technological content is crucial, and the vision that it can be acquired in a free market world has ended, due to supply problems in the pandemic and the geopolitical war itself that has changed the conception of productive value chains.
This report makes an evaluation of seven areas that total 44 items that include industrial manufacturing of critical materials, computing, technology and artificial intelligence, clean energy, technology in quantum physics, biotechnology, genetic engineering and vaccines, naval technology, robotics, defense and systems satellites.
The report concludes that China has an advantage in 37 of 44 items over the United States. In fact, China has 7 of the top 10 research in hypersonic aircraft engines and has four times as many high-impact publications as the United States.
At a time when the university budget is being cut in Argentina, an issue that reflects the ability to develop its own technology is where researchers are trained and work.
68.6% of the professionals who work in China in space technology research institutes were trained at universities in that country. China is also attracting to its country professionals who completed postgraduate degrees in the subject in Western countries. 21.6% of authors of high-impact publications work in China, both Chinese who return to their country and foreigners who go to that country to gain professional experience.
One challenge is that no Latin American country is among the top 5 in any item. The only way to aspire to independent technological development, key to changing the productive matrix and creating quality employment, is through regional integration and, as the ASPI report proposes, a “public and private synergy.”
The above reiterates the imperative need for a national policy that expands national sovereignty that, to be effective, involves adequate development policies articulated with international insertion supported by regional integration, in a world that is structured in regional blocks.
It is key to maintain multilateralism that ensures sovereignty and minimizes conflict hypotheses, avoiding repeating historical errors of an automatic alignment that did nothing to improve the situation of Argentina and its people.
