When BRICS — originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — was coined as an acronym by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001, it was a marketing device for an investment thesis, not a geopolitical framework. The idea was that these large emerging market economies would grow rapidly over the coming decades and represent attractive investment opportunities for Western capital.
Nobody at Goldman Sachs in 2001 was projecting that BRICS would one day become a rival institutional architecture to the Western-led international order.
That may be what it is becoming.
In August 2023, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg announced the group’s first expansion since South Africa joined in 2010. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina were invited to join — with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia accepting and formally joining in January 2024. (Argentina withdrew its acceptance after the election of Javier Milei changed the country’s foreign policy orientation.) Since then, additional countries including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Turkey have expressed interest in membership or observer status.
The enlarged BRICS — sometimes called BRICS+ — now encompasses countries representing approximately 45% of the global population, 35% of global GDP (on purchasing power parity terms), and, most significantly, a dominant share of the world’s hydrocarbon exports. Saudi Arabia and the UAE together account for roughly a quarter of OPEC production. Russia is the world’s second-largest natural gas exporter. The BRICS+ bloc controls approximately 42% of world oil production.
This is not a discussion club. It is a coalition with structural leverage over the global economy.
What BRICS Is and Isn’t
It is important to be precise about what BRICS+ represents, because it is often discussed in ways that overstate and understate its significance simultaneously.
BRICS is not a military alliance. There is no mutual defense commitment among its members. India and China, both members, have fought several border skirmishes in recent years and have deep strategic tensions that have not been resolved by their shared BRICS membership. India participates in the Quad, a strategic grouping explicitly oriented around countering Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. Brazil’s relationship with China is primarily economic, not ideological.
BRICS is not an ideological bloc. It does not have a unifying political philosophy comparable to liberal democracy or Marxism-Leninism. Its members range from India (a democracy with an independent judiciary and free press) to China (an authoritarian single-party state) to Saudi Arabia (an absolute monarchy) to South Africa (a constitutional democracy). The attempt to frame BRICS as an “authoritarian bloc” misrepresents its composition.
What BRICS+ does represent is a platform for coordination among major economies that do not primarily identify their interests with Western-led institutions — the IMF, World Bank, G7, and US-led alliance structures. The shared interest is not ideological convergence but institutional pluralism: a desire to have alternatives to dollar-denominated finance, Western-dominated international institutions, and US-centric security arrangements.
The De-dollarization Agenda
The most consequential agenda item in BRICS+ is the effort to reduce dependence on the US dollar in international trade and finance.
Dollar dominance is a structural feature of the current international order with enormous practical consequences. Because most international trade — including oil — is denominated in dollars, countries around the world must hold large dollar reserves. This gives the United States extraordinary leverage: sanctions that cut a country off from dollar-clearing systems effectively cut it off from the global financial system. This leverage was dramatically demonstrated when the US and EU froze $300 billion of Russia’s sovereign reserves following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — an action that shocked many governments into reconsidering their own dollar exposure.
Within BRICS+, there is active exploration of alternatives. Trade settlement in local currencies — India and Russia trading in rupees and rubles, China and Brazil trading in yuan and reals — has expanded. The BRICS New Development Bank, established in 2015 and now capitalized at $100 billion, has been increasing its share of local-currency lending. Russia has essentially exited the dollar system through force, and is expanding yuan-denominated trade. Saudi Arabia, in a move that would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago, has concluded trial oil sales in yuan.
The end of dollar dominance is not imminent. The dollar’s reserve currency status rests on the depth, liquidity, and rule-of-law credibility of US financial markets — attributes that no alternative has come close to replicating. The yuan is not freely convertible, and China’s capital account controls make it structurally unsuitable as a major reserve currency. A BRICS+ common currency, discussed at various summits, faces enormous technical and political obstacles.
But the trend is clear: the universe of dollar alternatives is expanding, the political will to use them is growing, and the 2022 sanctions episode has permanently altered how non-Western governments think about the risks of dollar dependency.
The Global South Signal
The significance of BRICS+ is not primarily economic or military. It is political: it signals that a large number of countries outside the Western alliance system have concluded that their interests are better served by institutional pluralism than by alignment.
The Global South — a loose term for the non-Western, non-aligned majority of the world’s nations — watched the Ukraine crisis response with mixed feelings. Virtually no country in Africa, Asia, or Latin America joined the Western sanctions regime against Russia. They did not do this because they support Russian aggression or are indifferent to Ukrainian suffering. They did it because they saw a situation in which the West was asking them to bear economic costs — through energy prices, grain supply disruptions, and trade disruptions — for a conflict whose origins and dynamics they did not feel they had any voice in shaping.
The BRICS+ expansion, and the much longer queue of countries expressing interest in participation, reflects this dynamic. Countries that feel excluded from the rooms where decisions affecting them are made are creating alternative rooms. Whether those rooms actually deliver — whether the BRICS New Development Bank offers better terms than the World Bank, whether BRICS trade infrastructure delivers actual efficiency gains, whether local currency settlement networks become as reliable as dollar systems — remains to be demonstrated.
The Western Response
Western analysis of BRICS+ tends to oscillate between dismissal and alarm.
The dismissive view emphasizes the bloc’s internal contradictions — the India-China tensions, the ideological heterogeneity, the absence of a binding institutional framework — and concludes that BRICS+ cannot function as a coherent actor in international politics. This view is not without basis: BRICS summits produce communiqués full of general principles and short on binding commitments. The NDB has faced governance challenges and a slower-than-projected lending pace.
The alarmed view treats BRICS+ as the nucleus of an authoritarian coalition explicitly aimed at dismantling the US-led order. This view overstates the ideological coherence and understates the diversity of member interests.
The more accurate assessment is neither dismissive nor alarmed: BRICS+ is a significant and growing expression of institutional pluralism in international affairs, backed by real economic weight, responding to real grievances about the representativeness of existing institutions, and likely to persist and expand regardless of what Western governments prefer.
The appropriate Western response is not to try to defeat BRICS+ or to pretend it does not exist. It is to reform the international institutions whose inadequacy has made BRICS+ attractive — to give major emerging economies the voting weight, voice, and stake in the rules-based order that their economic size warrants. The current IMF quota system, in which the United States has de facto veto power and Europe is overrepresented relative to its economic weight, was designed for a 1944 world that no longer exists.
Whether Western political systems have the domestic flexibility to make those reforms — which would require conceding some power and representation to countries that do not always share Western values — is the underlying question. The record so far is not encouraging.
What Comes Next
BRICS+ will hold its next summit with a full agenda on NDB expansion, local currency trade frameworks, and coordinated positions on the reform of international institutions. The membership queue continues to grow.
The world that is taking shape is not the end of Western influence or the triumph of authoritarianism. It is a more genuinely multipolar international system in which the Western-led institutional framework is one pole rather than the organizing principle.
For countries that spent the post-Cold War era operating on the assumption that liberal international order was permanent and universal, that adjustment is disorienting. But for the majority of the world’s population — which never fully inhabited that order and experienced its governance failures as well as its benefits — the shift looks more like long-overdue normalization than revolutionary crisis.
Also explore:
The Return of Great Power Competition
China vs America: The New Cold War
India as the New Global Superpower (published June 16)
De-dollarization: The End of America’s Financial Superpower? (coming July 31)
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About the Author
António Monteiro
Engineer by profession, geopolitical analyst by conviction. I believe responsibility for the planet's future doesn't belong only to governments and institutions - it belongs to all of us. Knowledge about geopolitics, international conflicts, and the forces shaping the world is the most powerful tool for becoming more conscious, informed citizens. You don't need to be a diplomat to understand what's at stake - you just need to want to go beyond the headlines. At Outside The Case, I analyze conflicts, power dynamics, and global trends with rigor and accessible language, so you can understand what's really happening in the world.
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