BRICS expansion — a coalition of mutual irritation
BRICS+ now includes the UAE, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and others. Headlines frame it as anti-Western bloc-building. The reality is messier: a club whose members agree mostly on what they dislike, not what they want.
Key fact
BRICS+ share of global GDP (PPP): 36% — but bilateral trade is dwarfed by their G7 trade
BRICS started in 2009 as a Goldman Sachs research category that got ambitious. By 2024 it had become an organizing label for a loose group of large non-Western economies pushing back against US-led institutions.
The 2023 Johannesburg summit expanded the group to include Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia (with Argentina backing out post-election). Western analysts read this as the formation of a counter-bloc. That overstates BRICS coherence by a wide margin.
India and China are strategic rivals with an unresolved border conflict. Saudi Arabia and Iran were in proxy war until a Chinese-mediated thaw in 2023. The UAE prices everything in dollars and runs a US-aligned security posture. Brazil's politics swing 90 degrees every electoral cycle.
What unites them is irritation with G7 institutional dominance — IMF voting weights, World Bank conditionalities, dollar leverage. That shared irritation is real, and produces real outcomes: the New Development Bank, local-currency settlement pilots, parallel statistical infrastructure.
But it does not produce a bloc. A bloc requires that members trust each other more than they trust the alternative. BRICS members trust each other less than they trust their G7 trading partners. That ceiling is structural.
The 2024 Kazan summit communiqué is the most useful primary document for what BRICS+ now means in practice. The membership expansion that took effect on 1 January 2024 brought in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Ethiopia; Saudi Arabia was invited but has not yet acceded; Argentina withdrew after the Milei government's December 2023 inauguration. The combined GDP of the post-expansion bloc, measured at purchasing power parity, exceeds the G7 — a fact the bloc's communications office foregrounds. The combined GDP measured at market exchange rates, the more relevant denominator for trade and capital flows, remains substantially below the G7's.
The structural problem with the bloc-as-counterweight framing is internal divergence. India and China have an active border dispute and have not normalised troop deployments along the Line of Actual Control since the 2020 Galwan clash. Saudi Arabia and Iran remain regional rivals despite the March 2023 Beijing-mediated diplomatic restoration, and on every major Gulf security question they sit on opposite sides. The UAE prices roughly 95% of its merchandise trade in dollars and runs a US-aligned defense posture, including the Jebel Ali port hosting US Navy logistics. Brazil's foreign-policy doctrine shifts with each presidential transition.
What the bloc has produced, measurably, is institutional infrastructure rather than coordinated policy. The New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai and capitalised at $50 billion in subscribed capital, has approved roughly $35 billion of project lending since 2016 — modest at the global development-finance scale but real. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a $100 billion currency-swap facility, has not been drawn on, but it exists. The bloc has hosted a series of working groups on local-currency settlement, with bilateral pilots running between Russia and India (rupees for crude), Russia and China (yuan for industrial inputs), and Brazil and China (yuan for soybean and iron-ore exports).
Oliver Stuenkel at FGV in São Paulo has been the most consistent non-Western analyst of the BRICS project's trajectory, and his reading is that the bloc functions best as a coordination forum on specific institutional grievances — IMF quota reform, dollar extraterritorial reach, the development-finance shortfall — rather than as a strategic coalition. On those specific grievances the post-expansion bloc has more leverage than the pre-2024 grouping. On the broader strategic posture — a unified line on Ukraine, on the South China Sea, on the Israel-Gaza war — there is no bloc position because there is no internal majority for one.
The de-dollarization rhetoric attached to BRICS summit cycles is the part most often miscoded in Western coverage. The bloc has not proposed a common currency; the relevant Kazan communiqué language refers to local-currency settlement and to a hypothetical BRICS-managed digital payment platform, neither of which is a currency substitution. India in particular has consistently blocked language that would move toward a yuan-anchored settlement system, for reasons that are obvious from a New Delhi vantage and that remain stable across Indian electoral cycles. The bloc's de facto ceiling on de-dollarization is therefore the floor of what India will accept, and that floor is currently bilateral rupee deals with specific partners rather than any architectural break with the dollar system.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.