BRICS—originally an acronym referring to the rising economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa—held its first formal summit in 2009 in Yekaterinburg. After adding South Africa in 2010, the group has evolved into a multilateral organization claiming to represent the interests of the Global South. In its own telling, BRICS is a counterweight to the G7: an alternative platform for emerging powers to coordinate on matters of global governance, development finance, and institutional reform. With its 2024 expansion to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, the group’s appeal as an alternative to the Western-led international order has gained more attention from Western governments and media alike. Yet beneath the surface of anti-Western posturing lies a deeply incoherent coalition, whose internal contradictions, regional rivalries, and lack of strategic alignment render it ill-suited to function as either a bloc or a meaningful alternative to the existing international order.
BRICS is the latest in a long list of multilateral organizations serving the “Global South.” The Bandung Conference and later the Non-Aligned Movement, the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) have all served as similar projects, aiming to create coalitional power to shape global institutions in favor of states underrepresented within dominant multilateral organizations. The Non-Aligned Movement offered a forum for states seeking to exit the bipolar competition of the Cold War, while the NIEO and OPEC offered supranational economic projects for post-colonial African states and petrostates to exercise more power on the global stage, respectively.
But there is a crucial difference between these organizations and BRICS. You have to have alignment to have non-alignment, and bipolarity is a necessary condition of a “third way.” BRICS discourse has fallen victim to the lazy analogies that have proliferated through much of today’s foreign policy commentary, where every challenge is reflexively cast as either a replay of appeasement at Munich or a redux of the Cold War. While the Non-Aligned Movement, NIEO, and OPEC indeed offer examples of Global South multilateralism, they did so in the very specific context of US-Soviet rivalry and the exclusive international regimes of the communist East and capitalist West.
Despite Western commentators pining for the proxy wars, interventionism, and aimless deficit expansion of the Reagan years, we are not currently in a Cold War with China, our third-largest trading partner (after Mexico and Canada). While many within the foreign policy establishment are nostalgic for the clarity of US-Soviet security competition, there is no cohesive “axis of autocracies” reminiscent of the Warsaw Pact. Furthermore, BRICS can hardly be compared to the Non-Aligned Movement, when China was a founding member of the organization in 2009. BRICS exists in an international system shaped not by ideological bifurcation, but by a pluralistic patchwork of regional competition and endemic geopolitical hedging among minor powers.
Without systemic pressures pushing the BRICS countries together, one must turn to the interests of the states themselves to find any hints of a common purpose. BRICS does not act as a commodities cartel (like OPEC) nor as a solidaristic bloc of post-colonial states seeking refuge from a neoimperial global economic order (like the NIEO). Their economic systems are split between petroleum exporters (Russia, Iran, and the UAE) and states working to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels (Brazil, India, and China). Notably, the motto of the recent 2025 BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro was “Inclusive and Sustainable Global South,” a slogan that loses its bite when backed by Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and the UAE. Without a shared energy model, commodity focus, or common position in the international division of labor, there is little space for these countries to coordinate economic policies in a way that would impact global markets.
“The coalition is an awkward mixture of neo-imperial and post-colonial powers.”
Beyond economic interests, it is also unclear that BRICS membership offers any real geopolitical advantage. The coalition is an awkward mixture of neo-imperial and post-colonial powers, along with a divergence between “anti-Western” actors like Iran and US partner states such as Brazil. Russia and China each occupy an ambiguous space in the international hierarchy, clashing with the identity and rhetoric of post-colonial states such as South Africa and India.
These divisions are exacerbated by regional rivalries. Saudi Arabia received an invitation to join BRICS but has not formally accepted, maintaining an ambiguous position on potential membership for well over a year. While the Saudis’ hedging can be attributed to a number of factors, such as a hesitancy to antagonize Washington, more immediate geopolitics are also relevant. Joining a global multilateral organization like BRICS would position Saudi Arabia alongside second-tier international powers such as Iran and the UAE, while the Saudis would prefer to assert themselves as a dominant regional leader in the Middle East.
Regional antipathies have also contributed to Brazil’s veto of Venezuelan membership in the BRICS club, exacerbating the existing divisions between petroleum producers and consumers. Likewise, perennial geopolitical tensions between China and India cast ever more doubt on the group’s ability to transcend regional rivalries and act as a consolidated bloc at the global level. In a multipolar world, these local enmities will take precedence over abstract cross-regional pacts, further undermining any claim to speak for the Global South as a whole.
Despite these differences, the BRICS countries do share one common goal: reducing dependence on the US dollar. While true “de-dollarization” remains a distant fantasy, President Biden’s aggressive sanctions regime against Russia, combined with the freezing and attempted seizure of Russian foreign exchange reserves, has created considerable skepticism around the world regarding the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. Desire to reduce dollar dependency has only accelerated with President Trump’s seemingly arbitrary application of tariffs. The United States is choosing to sacrifice its long-run institutional power in favor of short-run leverage—a decision that will only hasten the movement away from the US-led international order.
That said, a shared distaste for the dollar is not enough to overcome the structural pressures undermining an ascendant BRICS. While a bipolar international system is generally characterized by clear alignment across two blocs, as in the Cold War, multipolarity rewards a more flexible approach to interstate relations, in which multilateral organizations are eschewed in favor of nimble bilateral deal-making. Alliances will become less fixed and more opportunistic without the clarity of a bipolar system, creating incentives for states to hedge and cultivate ties with multiple centers of power: India, for example, is a member of both BRICS and the US-aligned “Quad” alliance in the Indo-Pacific.
In the absence of a unifying vision or common strategic threat, BRICS is unlikely to emerge as a transformative force in international politics. For all its ambitions, it is less the vanguard of a new world order than a symptom of the old one’s decay. Until BRICS can offer more than symbolic resistance to Western hegemony, it will remain what it is today: a coalition in search of a cause.