You can call them respectable democracies, but India, Brazil, and South Africa will be judged by how they act abroad. And on the Syria question, it’s been shameful.

[By James Traub* | Foreign Policy | March 9, 2012] As global power has shifted away from the West, the emerging order has come to be identified with the BRICS — an unofficial geopolitical bloc consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. But the BRICS are equally divided between autocratic and democratic states. The growing reach of powerful autocracies is nothing to celebrate, but the rise of stable and increasingly prosperous democracies in the developing world — India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Indonesia, among others — has been the single most encouraging phenomenon in the world over the last generation. Those first three countries, in fact, have established an informal bloc known as IBSA. This, too, should be a profoundly welcome development. But it hasn’t been, at least in Western capitals. In global affairs, it turns out, emerging democracies often behave a lot like Third World autocracies. And IBSA is turning out to be not so very different from the BRICS. Continue lendo →