Was there more to World Chess Federation president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s recent trips to Libya than meets the eye? Trinity College professor and author Vijay Prashad thinks so. The professor sees Ilyumzhinov’s visits as evidence of a larger struggle—a new cold war between the established G7 countries and the up and coming BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa):

Libya is the first battleground of a new “cold war,” this one not between the U.S. and Russia, but between the G7 (and its military arm, NATO) and the BRICS (who have not much of a military arm). The G7 commands the skies and, increasingly shakily, the rhetoric of freedom, but it does not have a sustainable economic base and no sense of a political process that does not come with aerial bombardment.