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The Battle for the BRICS
Why the Future of the Bloc Will Shape Global Order
By Alexander Gabuev and Oliver Stuenkel
September 24, 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking at a BRICS forum in Saint Petersburg, July 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking at a BRICS forum in Saint Petersburg, July 2024
Valeriy Sharifulin / Reuters
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In late October, the group of countries known as the BRICS will convene in the Russian city of Kazan for its annual summit. The meeting is set to be a moment of triumph for its host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will preside over this gathering of an increasingly hefty bloc even as he prosecutes his brutal war in Ukraine. The group’s acronym comes from its first five members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—but it has now grown to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia also participates in the group’s activities, but it has not formally joined. Together, these ten countries represent 35.6 percent of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms (more than the G-7’s 30.3 percent) and 45 percent of the world’s population (the G-7 represents less than ten percent). In the coming years, BRICS is likely to expand further, with more than 40 countries expressing interest in joining, including emerging powers such as Indonesia.
Putin will be able to claim that despite the West’s best efforts to isolate Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his country not only is far from being an international pariah but also is now a pivotal member of a dynamic group that will shape the future of the international order. That message is not mere rhetorical posturing, nor is it simply a testament to the Kremlin’s skillful diplomacy with non-Western countries or to those countries’ self-interested, pragmatic engagement with Russia.
As the United States and its allies are less able to unilaterally shape the global order, many countries are seeking to boost their own autonomy by courting alternative centers of power. Unable or unwilling to join the exclusive clubs of the United States and its junior partners, such as the G-7 or U.S.-led military blocs, and increasingly frustrated by the global financial institutions underpinned by the United States, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, these countries are keen to expand their options and establish ties with non-American initiatives and organizations. BRICS stands out among such initiatives as the most significant, relevant, and potentially influential.
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Since the group’s founding, 15 years ago, numerous Western analysts have predicted its demise. Its members were very different from one another, often at odds on various matters, and scattered around the globe—hardly the recipe for meaningful partnership. But BRICS has endured. Even following the global geopolitical earthquake unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the deepening of tensions between China and the United States in recent years, interest in joining BRICS has only grown, with many developing countries seeing the grouping as a useful vehicle to navigate the years ahead.
But despite its allure, the club must grapple with an internal fissure. Some of its members, chief among them China and Russia, want to position the grouping against the West and the global order crafted by the United States. The addition of Iran, an inveterate adversary of the United States, only deepens the sense that the group is now lining up on one side of a larger geopolitical battle. Other members, notably Brazil and India, do not share this ambition. Instead, they want to use BRICS to democratize and encourage the reform of the existing order, helping guide the world from the fading unipolarity of the post–Cold War era to a more genuine multipolarity in which countries can steer between U.S.-led and Chinese-led blocs. This battle between anti-Western states and nonaligned ones will shape the future of BRICS—with important consequences for the global order itself.
THE KREMLIN’S BRICOLAGE
The BRICS summit in Kazan follows years of diplomatic efforts by the Kremlin to turn this alphabet soup of a group first cooked up by Goldman Sachs analysts into a proactive global organization. In 2006, Russia assembled the first meeting of BRIC foreign ministers in New York during the UN General Assembly. In June 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev hosted the leaders of Brazil, China, and India for an inaugural summit in Yekaterinburg. And in 2010, the group added South Africa, completing the acronym as it is known today.
Fifteen years ago, the global financial crisis that originated in the United States stoked interest in the BRIC grouping. The failure of American regulators to prevent the crisis and the exposed inefficiency of the Bretton Woods institutions—not to mention China’s sustained spectacular growth as Western economies struggled—spurred calls to redistribute global economic power and responsibility from the West to the developing world. BRICS was the most representative club to express this sentiment. Back then, however, Moscow and its partners largely worked to improve the existing order, not torpedo it. BRICS announced the New Development Bank (NDB) in 2014 to complement existing international institutions and to set up a financial safety net that offered liquidity should any of its members face short-term difficulties. It was meant to supplement, not rival, the World Bank and the IMF.
Russia saw greater purpose and value in BRICS following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the war in eastern Ukraine, and the coordinated Western sanctions against Russia that followed. Russia portrayed the BRICS summit it hosted in 2015 as a sign that it was not isolated, and that the group could serve as an alternative to the G-7—formerly the G-8, from which Russia had just been evicted. The Kremlin’s sense that BRICS can be a refuge from the domineering hegemony of the United States has only grown more pronounced since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Interest in joining BRICS has grown significantly in recent years.
Russia’s ties to its fellow BRICS members China and India have allowed the regime to weather the Western sanctions campaign. But U.S. sanctions on Russia still affect those countries that don’t intend to punish the Kremlin for the war in Ukraine. U.S. pressure forced many Chinese banks, for example, to end transactions with Russian counterparts this year, thereby disrupting payment schemes and increasing transaction costs for Russian importers. Moscow was troubled to discover that Washington’s toolkit affects not only payments in U.S. dollars but even those in Chinese yuan. Those punitive restrictions also apply to the NDB, which Russia had hoped would serve as a source of funding as Western sanctions shut off other avenues, but the BRICS bank has frozen all projects in Russia.
These complications notwithstanding, BRICS still plays a major role in Russia’s evolving grand strategy. Before February 2022, Moscow hoped for a multipolar order in which Russia could balance relations with the two most powerful countries, China and the United States. The war in Ukraine has smashed the remnants of pragmatism in the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Since Putin perceives the war as part of a broader confrontation with the West, he now seeks to undermine the United States’ positions wherever he can—including by undermining various aspects of current global institutions and by helping to strengthen China’s challenge to U.S. hegemony. This approach can be seen in multiple areas, including Russia’s sharing of advanced military technology with China, Iran, and North Korea; its work to destroy the UN sanctions regime against Pyongyang; and its tireless promotion of payment schemes that can bypass instruments under Western control. Putin summarized the agenda of Russia’s BRICS presidency in remarks in July as part of a “painful process” to overthrow the “classic colonialism” of the U.S.-led order, calling for an end to Washington’s “monopoly” on setting the rules of the road.
In this fight against the Western “monopoly,” Putin identified the most important campaign as the quest to weaken the dominion of the dollar over international financial transactions. This focus is a direct result of Russia’s experience with Western sanctions. Russia hopes that it can build a truly sanctions-proof payments system and financial infrastructure through BRICS, involving all member countries. The United States may be able to pressure Russia’s partners one by one, but that will be much harder or even impossible if these countries have joined an alternative system that features important U.S. partners, such as Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia. The NDB’s decision to suspend projects in Russia served as a potent reminder that BRICS needs to evolve further to reduce its members’ vulnerabilities to Western sanctions.
CHINA AT THE HELM
Russia may be the angry vocal spearhead of the bid to use BRICS to create an alternative to the U.S.-led global order, but China is the real driving force behind the grouping’s expansion. During the global financial crisis of 2008–10, Beijing shared Moscow’s desire to make BRICS more relevant. China wanted to position itself as part of a dynamic group of developing countries that sought to gradually rebalance global institutions to more fairly reflect shifts in economic and technological power. Under Chinese President Hu Jintao, however, Beijing was unwilling to claim leadership of the grouping, still guided by Deng Xiaoping’s formula of “keeping a low profile.”
Things started to change soon after Xi Jinping became China’s paramount leader, in 2012. In 2013, Beijing concocted an ambitious project that became the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast global infrastructure investment program. Around the same time, China helped launch regional financial institutions in which it would have strong influence: first came the NDB, in 2014, then the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, set up in 2016. The People's Bank of China also pushed the internationalization of the yuan by expanding the use of the Chinese currency in settling trade, extending national currency swaps with other central banks to boost the global liquidity of the yuan, and lobbying for the inclusion of the yuan in the IMF’s special drawing rights basket, making it the only nonconvertible global reserve currency. Through the NDB, through initiatives to use local currencies in bilateral trade, and through efforts to create a pool of national reserve currencies, BRICS plays a significant role in building the multilateral institutions that increase Chinese clout inside the current global order.
China is the real driving force behind the expansion of BRICS.
As U.S.-Chinese relations have plummeted in the last decade, Beijing’s foreign policy has grown more radical. Chinese leaders are convinced that the United States won’t willingly allow China to become the dominant power in Asia, much less deign to share global leadership with Beijing. China believes that the United States is instrumentalizing the alliances and institutions that underpin the current global order to constrain China’s rise. In response, Beijing has embarked on projects such as Xi’s overlapping Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative, all of which challenge the West’s right to unilaterally define universal rules and seek to undermine the notion of universal values in areas such as human rights. These initiatives point to China’s desire to build a different order rather than simply reform the current one.
China and Russia now have similar ambitions for the BRICS, making Putin and Xi a powerful tandem. Both want to dethrone the United States as the global hegemon, and to that end, Beijing and Moscow seek to make alternative financial and tech platforms immune to U.S. pressure. Deepening multilateralization through BRICS seems like the best path forward. Like Putin, Xi casts this effort in moral terms. As he said at a BRICS summit in 2023, “We do not barter away principles, succumb to external pressure, or act as vassals of others. International rules must be written and upheld jointly by all countries based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, rather than dictated by those with the strongest muscles or the loudest voice.”
Beyond rhetoric, China has led the effort—with Russian backing—to add members to the BRICS. Beijing advocated a maximalist approach, trying to rope in as many countries as possible. It wants to be the leader of a strong and sizable bloc. Lengthy negotiations behind closed doors narrowed the list of new members down to six, which became five after Argentina reneged its commitment to join in the wake of the triumph of the libertarian Javier Milei in presidential elections last fall.
The summit in Kazan will be the first meeting of the expanded BRICS. But Beijing’s aggressive push to enlarge the grouping and expand its role on the international stage comes with a cost. The grouping has become less cohesive and more fragile; not all countries within it share Xi’s and Putin’s anti-Western agenda.
THE SEARCH FOR MIDDLE GROUND
The fissure is apparent among the bloc’s founding members. China and Russia may be on the same page, but Brazil and India remain largely committed to pursuing the reform of global governance without trying to assail the international system as it is currently constructed. Decision-makers in Brasília and New Delhi are keen to take a nonaligned stance and find a middle ground between the West, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other. Both Brazil and India have largely sat on the fence when it comes to the war in Ukraine, reluctant to support the West's attempts to isolate Russia but equally unwilling to explicitly side with Moscow, recognizing that the invasion amounts to a flagrant violation of international law. Both countries have benefited in economic terms from the trade diversion caused by Western sanctions against Russia. Brazil purchases discounted Russian fertilizer and last year was one of the biggest buyers of Russian diesel. India, too, buys discounted Russian energy commodities. But neither country desires to cut ties with the West or consign itself to an anti-Western bloc.
Brazil and India are therefore wary of the BRICS’ hardening orientation. Both were initially opposed to China’s push to expand the group, which Beijing first proposed in 2017 under the rubric of “BRICS Plus.” Brazil and India were keen to retain the club's exclusivity, worried that adding more members to the bloc would dilute their own influence within it. In 2023, China stepped up its diplomatic campaign and pressured Brazil and India to support expansion, mostly by casting their resistance as tantamount to preventing the rise of other developing countries. Keen to preserve its own standing in the global South, India dropped its opposition, leaving Brazil no choice but to go along with expansion. Brazil did lobby against adding any overtly anti-Western countries—an endeavor that failed spectacularly when Iran was announced as one of the new members that year.
The way China imposed its preferences at the 2023 summit took Brazilian diplomats by surprise, confirming fears that their country’s role would be diminished in an expanded group helmed by a much more assertive China. These developments have raised concerns in Brazil that being part of BRICS may complicate its strategy of nonalignment. For now, a broad consensus that membership generates significant benefits still holds. Brazil appreciates the chance to deepen ties with other BRICS member states and the added leverage it brings to negotiations with Washington and Brussels. BRICS membership has also helped countries such as Brazil and South Africa, whose bureaucracy had limited knowledge about the non-Western world, adjust to a multipolar order. And it comes with significant face time with Xi and other Chinese decision-makers—a perk that is far from trivial, considering how important Chinese investment and trade have become for countries across the global South.
Brazil and India are keen to take a nonaligned stance between the West and China.
Despite the growing divergence between the explicitly anti-Western camp in the BRICS and the nonaligned camp, all members still agree on a number of fundamental issues that explain why the grouping has become vital to its members. In the view of most countries in the grouping, the world is moving from U.S.-led unipolarity to multipolarity, with geopolitics now defined by the competition among several centers of power. The BRICS grouping, despite its internal tensions, remains a key platform for actively shaping this process. Indeed, seen from capitals across the global South, multipolarity is the safest way to constrain hegemonic power, which, unrestrained, represents a threat to international rules and norms and to global stability. Western policymakers often overlook this baseline agreement among BRICS countries and the part it has played in keeping all members committed to the grouping since its inception.
This shared perspective also explains why much of the developing world looks forward to greater multipolarity in the global order and does not pine for Washington’s or the West’s undisputed preeminence. For many countries, joining BRICS is a seriously attractive proposition. For their part, China and Russia welcome the large number of countries that have expressed interest in joining, including Algeria, Colombia, and Malaysia.
Yet any country that joins BRICS will have to grapple with a key question: Which side are they on? Will they band together with Brazil, India, and other nonaligners, or with the anti-Western faction led by China and Russia? Iran, itself a pariah on the international stage, will strengthen the anti-Western camp. But most other countries will likely view accession to BRICS as a way to strengthen their ties to China and other countries in the global South without downgrading their ties to the West.
Saudi Arabia is a prime example. While Riyadh remains a key ally of Washington, it has sought to deepen ties to Beijing, and has initiated an unprecedented diplomatic outreach in regions where Saudi Arabia traditionally played no role, such as in Latin America and the Caribbean, accompanied by investments in countries such as Chile and Guyana. Latin American governments embrace these initiatives with the same rationale: in an increasingly unstable world heading fitfully toward multipolarity, they would do well to diversify their economic and diplomatic strategies.
CRACKS IN THE WALL
In the West, some critics of BRICS dismiss the outfit as a motley crew that deserves no serious attention. Others believe it is a direct threat to the global order. Both views lack nuance: the emergence of BRICS as a political grouping reflects genuine grievances over the inequities of the U.S.-led order and cannot simply be waved away. But owing to changes in Chinese and Russian grand strategy, the divergences within the group are also growing, and the recent expansion is likely to weaken its cohesiveness.
For now, China and Russia have the upper hand in the internal debate about shaping the future of BRICS. But that may not always be the case. It is true that power in the club is not distributed equally—China's economy is larger than those of all the other founding members combined—but that does not mean that other members cannot resist the transformation of the grouping into a Beijing-led bloc copiloted by Moscow. Brazil and India have for years worked behind the scenes to tone down Russia’s more assertive language in summit declarations, and China, too, will find that it cannot ignore their moderating influence. For example, Brazil’s president explicitly rejects the framing of the BRICS as a counterpoint to the G-7 and often states that the group is “against no one.” Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser to the government of India, recently urged New Delhi to leave the grouping, as its expansion was tantamount, in his view, to a takeover by Beijing and its agenda. But Brazil or India still have significant leverage within the BRICS: their departure would severely weaken the entire outfit in a way that is not in China’s or Russia’s interest.
The grouping will have to manage these tensions and contradictions in the years ahead. The fissures within BRICS are likely to grow but are unlikely to lead to its breakup. To be sure, the group could face very real strains. The technology competition between China and the United States may lead to the erection of a digital iron curtain and the emergence of two separate and incompatible technological spheres, which would make fence-sitting more challenging. Finding a common denominator in the grouping will become more difficult, particularly on sensitive geopolitical issues such as the war in Ukraine. Those differences might make the bloc less influential on the international stage, even as its efforts to advance alternative currencies to the U.S. dollar gather strength.
For the United States and other Western powers, the dynamics inside BRICS underline the necessity of taking the grouping—and the underlying dissatisfaction with the current order—seriously. It is entirely reasonable for rising powers such as Brazil to search for hedging options and to feel dissatisfied with how the United States has steered the existing system. Western powers should focus on not making things worse by, for example, trying to scare middle powers away from joining BRICS, which smacks of paternalism and quasi-colonial interference. In the same way, Western attempts to warn middle powers in the global South about being too dependent on China have proved ineffective.
Western countries can do more to not alienate those middle powers seeking greater space for maneuver and to ensure that BRICS does not become an anti-Western bloc. They should spell out more clearly how certain sanctions relate to violations of international law, and try to be consistent in applying those sanctions against all violators—not just against geopolitical adversaries. Countries in the global South want to escape the hegemony of the dollar when they see Western countries, for instance, freezing Russian central bank reserves in 2022 as a response to the invasion of Ukraine but receiving no punishment for similarly unlawful military interventions in the Middle East and Africa. Wealthy countries can also be better problem solvers for poorer countries, including by sharing technology and assisting with the green transition. And the West should make more genuine efforts to democratize the global order, such as by doing away with the anachronistic tradition that only Europeans head the IMF and only U.S. citizens lead the World Bank.
Such actions would build trust and undermine Chinese and Russian attempts to enlist the global South to an anti-Western cause. Rather than bemoaning the emergence of the BRICS, the West should court those member states that have a stake in making sure that the grouping does not become an overtly anti-Western outfit intent on undermining the global order.
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ALEXANDER GABUEV is Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
OLIVER STUENKEL is Associate Professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo and a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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Russia Diplomacy Geopolitics Globalization Economics International Institutions U.S. Foreign Policy Vladimir Putin World Order War in Ukraine
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