The grand illusion of BRICS – that Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa could stand together as equals, forging a new world order beyond the grasp of Western hegemony – was always more wishful thinking than sober reality. From the beginning, the alliance was a patchwork of competing interests, bound not by shared ideals but by a mutual, if temporary, resentment of the old powers. And like all coalitions built on little more than opposition, its cracks have only widened with time.
Consider China, the colossus whose shadow looms over the entire enterprise. It does not seek partnership but primacy, its Belt and Road Initiative less a gesture of solidarity than a web of debt-trap diplomacy, ensnaring nations from Sri Lanka to Zambia. Within BRICS, Beijing’s trade surpluses with fellow members – India’s $100 billion deficit, Brazil’s reliance on soy and iron ore exports – reveal not cooperation but domination. India, no fool, recognises the trap. It now cosies up to the Americans, joins the Quad, hedges its bets. Why tie oneself to a bloc where one’s so-called ally stations troops along one’s own Himalayan borders, as China did in Doklam and Galwan?
Russia, meanwhile, clings to BRICS like a drowning man to driftwood. Sanctions have turned its economy into a black-market bazaar, its once-mighty energy exports now bartered for Chinese yuan or Indian rupees in desperate, humiliating deals. The ruble is a currency in name only, and no amount of BRICS summit rhetoric about ‘dedollarisation’ can disguise the fact that Moscow’s war machine still runs on smuggled Western chips and Turkish drones. What use is a ‘multipolar world’ when your own partners quietly comply with the very sanctions they publicly decry?
As for the others – Brazil, South Africa – they are bit players in a drama they scarcely influence. Brazil’s economy lurches from crisis to crisis, its political class too mired in corruption to steer a coherent course. South Africa, once the continent’s beacon, now staggers under rolling blackouts and a ruling party more interested in looting than governing. Their inclusion in BRICS was always more about symbolism than substance, a nod to geography rather than genuine power.
“BRICS was put there for a bad purpose… I told them if they want to play games with the dollar, then they are going to be hit by a 100% tariff. The day they mention that they want to do it, they will come back and say – we beg you, we beg you. BRICS is dead since I mentioned that… “
And what of BRICS’ grand projects now?
Dilma Rousseff’s New Development Bank, that much-touted rival to the IMF, has disbursed a paltry $40 billion in loans over a decade – peanuts compared to the West’s financial machinery. The dream of a BRICS currency, floated periodically like some monetary utopia, dissolves upon contact with reality: China will never surrender control of the yuan, India trusts the rupee no further than it can throw it, and Russia’s rubble – well, enough said. Even the bloc’s expansion, adding the likes of Iran, Indonesia and Ethiopia, feels less like strengthening than dilution, a desperate bid for relevance by adding voices that only add to the discord.
Meanwhile, the West, though far from flawless, adapts. The G7 funnels billions into infrastructure to counter Belt and Road; the Quad tightens its grip on the Indo-Pacific; even the UAE and Saudi Arabia, once courted by BRICS, quietly pivot back to American security guarantees. The harsh truth is that resentment does not build lasting alliances – only mutual interest does. And BRICS, for all its bluster, has too little of the latter and far too much of the former.
It will not end with a bang. There will be no dramatic rupture, no grand farewell. BRICS will simply recede, its summits growing ever more performative, its declarations ever hollower, until one day the world realises that the great ‘alternative’ was never really there at all. And the historians of the future, if they bother to note it at all, will record it not as the dawn of a new order, but as a fleeting mirage in the desert of geopolitics – a vision of unity that never was.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Britain’s Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).
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Aren’t all blocs that aren’t united under a single government and currency just delusional attempts to gain leverage and influence? Are the EU and the Commonwealth any better?
The Russian Rouble was supposed to reduced to rubble by Xmas of 22 according to Biden. America can survive the very real direction of a multi polar world but it ain’t going to shove everyone about as it used to do.
“a vision of unity that never was” a succinct description of the EU sinking boat that the UK is swimming towards frantically.
Unity by the wholehearted consent of the majority – no; Unity through manipulation by ‘our betters’ – yes. That’s the EU succinctly summed up (and hence its appeal to socialists of all types).
The New Conservative’s Dom Wightman, desperate to reassure the (so called) ‘free world’ that it has nothing to fear from a group of countries that wish to distance themselves from the failing West… 20 years time the eu will be at war; not with Russia, but as Yugoslavia broke up! The writing is on the wall, so much difference, so much central corruption, so much bullying by the big lads