The argument emanating from Bern was that Switzerland’s neutral status and its experience as a mediator in conflicts suggested the European state offered the best position to offer its “good offices.” This was the claim endlessly repeated by Ignazio Cassis, the Swiss minister of foreign affairs. He lobbied hard to bring as many countries as possible to the summit, traveling to New Delhi and Beijing among other places. The Chinese refused, however, and they were followed by most of the BRICS members. India sent a career diplomat; Brazil and South Africa sent low-level observers. Thus, the conference was set to be a debacle from the outset.

In the opinion of the leading Italian geopolitical journal, Limes, the exclusion of Russia “cloaked the event in evanescence even before it began.” The outcome of the conference was accordingly “very disappointing”:

Those countries belonging to the “Global South” that did come to Bürgenstock refused to sign the “Joint Communiqué on a Peace Framework.” This is unsurprising; it is a surreal document.

Finding troops for the “meat grinder” in Ukraine hasn’t been easy for the Russian government. Russia does conscript soldiers every year, but conscripts generally can’t be deployed outside Russia. In the fall of 2022, the Kremlin declared a “partial mobilization” meant to raise 300,000 troops for the military. But more than twice that number are believed to have fled the country to avoid the draft.

Since then, however, Russia has managed to stabilize its manpower situation. It has done this in part by offering large signing bonuses that exceed average annual salaries in many remote and impoverished regions of Russia, and by granting pardons to prison inmates. (Pardoned prisoners made up the bulk of the fatalities in Bakhmut.) These tactics have largely kept the public backlash to the hundreds of thousands of casualties manageable.

The worries about personnel are far more acute in Ukraine, which has a democratic political system and about 100 million fewer citizens than Russia. The long lines that formed outside recruiting centers immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 are a thing of the past. Today, there are desperate shortages of Ukrainian troops on the front lines.

The average age of these soldiers is over 40 — shockingly old by global standards. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently signed a controversial law to lower the age for draft eligible men from 27 to 25. (The average age of an American GI in Vietnam was 19.) The government has resorted to a number of carrots (giving volunteers the right to choose their own battalions) and sticks (highly unpopular street patrols to find young men avoiding the draft) to replenish the ranks. And like Russia, Ukraine is also now recruiting prison inmates to serve.

Another similarity to Russia: Ukraine was in a state of precipitous population collapse even before the war, thanks to a combination of plummeting birth rates and out-migration. Its population declined from 51.5 million when it became independent in 1991 to just 37 million in 2019. Add to that the more than 6 million people who fled the country after the outbreak of war, those currently in the military, those killed or seriously wounded in the war, and those who’ve turned to black market employment in order to avoid conscription, and it’s no surprise that Ukraine’s civilian economy is facing serious labor shortages.

The war has presented Ukrainian leaders with an agonizing choice that goes even beyond the brutal prospect of sending thousands of young people to their deaths: Fighting for their national survival today might require decimating the nation’s already grim demographic future.

In China, demographic decline is further compounded by the legacy of the country’s one-child policy. A high-casualty war — which China has not fought since its conflict with Vietnam in the 1970s — would devastate many families in a society where lone adult children are often expected to provide for their aging parents. Perhaps in recognition of this concern, the People’s Liberation Army amended its policies to allow parents as well as spouses to claim death benefits for a soldier killed in the line of duty.

There might appear to be a bright side to all this. Not so long ago, some theorists were predicting a “geriatric peace”: societies with fewer available soldiers as well as older — therefore, presumably, less aggressive — populations might simply be less likely to start wars.

But the recent actions of Russia — where population decline is only slightly slower than in Ukraine — provide a powerful counterexample to that theory, not to mention the rising tensions and territorial conflicts in fast graying East Asia. The calculations of aggressive leaders like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping might just as easily be explained by what international relations theorists call “power transition theory”: the idea that governments will try to lock in military gains before their power starts to decline.

In other words, looking at decades of population decline to come, China’s Xi might decide that now is the moment to act in Taiwan, while he still has the troops to take it.

As of March 2024, over half (52.9%) of Chinese payments were settled in RMB while 42.8% were settled in U.S. dollars. Furthermore, according to data released by the People's Bank of China, China's gold reserves rose to 2264.87 tons in the first quarter of 2024, up from 2235.39 tons in the fourth quarter of 2023.This is double the share from the previous five years.

According to Goldman Sachs, foreigners’ increased willingness to trade assets denominated in RMB continues to contribute to de-dollarization in favor of China’s currency. Early last year, Brazil and Argentina announced that they would begin allowing trade settlements in RMB. With the onset of the global de-dollarization trend, numerous countries have sped up diversifying their reserves by augmenting their gold holdings and adopting local currencies for international transactions.

At the ASEAN finance ministers and central banks meeting in Indonesia in March, policymakers discussed cutting their reliance on the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen, and the euro and moving to settlements in local currencies instead. And, in early April, Indian media widely reported that the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had announced that India and Malaysia were starting to settle their trade in the Indian rupee. India already conducts most of its energy trade with Russia in rupees or rubles.

As de-dollarization accelerates, the BRICS nations continue efforts to establish a new reserve currency backed by a basket of their respective currencies. BRICS members have not developed their own currency; however, a BRICS blockchain-based payment system is in the works, according to Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov in March 2024. The payment system, referred to as the BRICS Bridge, would connect member countries' financial systems using payment gateways for settlements in central bank digital currencies.

Ideally, a BRICS currency would allow these countries to assert their economic independence while competing with the existing international financial system. The current system is dominated by the U.S. dollar, which accounts for about 90 percent of all currency trading. Until recently, nearly 100 percent of oil trading was conducted in dollars; however, in 2023, one-fifth of oil trades were reportedly conducted with non-dollar currencies.

The potential impact of a new BRICS currency on the U.S. dollar remains uncertain, with experts debating its potential to challenge the dollar's dominance. According to an article on Nasdaq.com, “Any such currency, if stabilized against the dollar, would weaken the power of U.S. sanctions, by reducing the influence of the dollar globally…weakening the status of the dollar as a global currency and mitigating risks associated with global volatility due to the lessening of dependence on the dollar…As more countries would seek alternatives to the dollar this would only accelerate the trend toward de-dollarization.”