Ravi Arvind Palat

[T]he day when the cosy club of the rich—the United States, the strongest economies of Western Europe, and Japan—sets the pace for the rest of the world, passing out instructions and assigning grades, is fast drawing to a close (French 2005).

In 2023, two Bloomberg correspondents wondered how the “BRICS group of emergent market nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—has gone from a slogan dreamt up at an investment bank two decades ago to a real-world club that controls a multilateral lender” when the group was about to add four new members (Hancock & Cohen 2023). This was astonishing because when Jim O’Neill (2001) of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym BRIC—South Africa was not in the original formulation—his purpose was to advocate the inclusion of these large economies, particularly China and India, in the management of global economic policies. He envisioned their inclusion in G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S), perhaps at the expense of the smaller economies (Canada and Italy) for the better coordination of economic policies, especially since major disruptions to the world-economy like the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98 and the Russian crisis of 1998 had emerged from outside the bloc of high-income states.

Crucially, O’Neill’s projection of the economic growth rates of large economies did not assess the impact that the economic and demographic weight of states like China and India, would have on other economies: on their working and middle classes, on their firms, and on their domestic politics. It also did not consider how economic linkages between states in the Global South would be transformed by the BRICs—their needs for strategic raw materials and markets. Nor did it take into account how the rise of BRIC economies would challenge the technological prowess of North Atlantic states. O’Neill also did not factor in his analysis the consequences of economies that do not share the institutions, practices, and legacies of a Western culture and are from a very different cultural and ethnic formation.

In hindsight, the financial crisis of 2007-08 was a watershed as the crisis was largely limited to the North Atlantic and provided the backdrop for leaders of Brazil, China, India, and Russia to create BRIC at their summit in Yekaterinburg in June 2009. They called for the greater representation for the Global South in the management of economic affairs, the creation of a development bank more attuned to the needs of the South, the growth of South-South trade and even the replacement of the dollar as reserve currency.  Consistent with their advocacy of the role of countries in the Global South, they included South Africa at their gathering in Sanya, China in 2011 to constitute the BRICS by adding a member from Africa even if Pretoria did not fully meet the criteria laid out by O’Neill (Tsheola 2014).

As the world-economy recovered from the financial crisis, BRICS did not at first attract much attention especially since the collapse of commodity prices in the mid 2010s plunged Brazil and Russia into recession. China’s double-digit growth rate also fell back to 7 percent and after Goldman Sachs’ BRIC fund suffered significant losses, it was folded it into a general emerging markets fund in 2015 (Hopewell 2017: 1377). Immanuel Wallerstein (2016) even called the group  “a fable for our time” for these reasons. Commentators coined several other acronyms to suggest a variety of alternate acronyms for rising economies: O’Neill came up with MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey), while others suggested CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa), or VISTA (Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, and Argentina) (Cooper 2016: 4; Boesler 2013 ; Wallerstein 2016). Even O’Neill (2021), twenty years after he first coined the BRIC acronym was himself disappointed by the glacially slow pace of change in the institutions of global economic governance and with the lackluster growth of some of these economies.

And yet, of the various acronyms proposed for emerging market economies, BRICS was the only one to transform itself from a descriptive acronym to an institutional basis. Apart from the annual summits of its heads of government, the group created financial and other institutions which led to its expansion beyond the quinumvirate to now number 10 members and the BRICS states are the only ones to withstand President Donald Trump’s threats to raise tariffs unless they succumbed to his demands. If much of this was due to the rise of China and to the loss of moral and intellectual leadership by the West, as we shall see, there are still deep divisions within the briCs+, especially between China and India, that may hamper cooperation between them.

I

When O’Neill formulated the term, the BRIC states were so heterogenous that there was no suggestion that they could institute themselves as a bloc. Each of the four countries was aligned to the United States in some way, though none of them were Washington’s protectorates like the other G7 states: all four were too large to be clients. Russia had been included in the annual G7 heads of government meetings in 1998 partly to soften the blow for the expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe in 1999 and 2004, an expansion that violated Washington’s earlier commitment not to expand the alliance “by one inch” at the demise of the Soviet Union (Sarotte 2021).[1] In a bid to keep prices of its manufactured exports low, China had become by 2006, the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries. Given the long-standing territorial dispute between China and India, the United States had been consistently trying to wean New Delhi from its non-aligned posture, and in 2007, succeeded in coopting India as a member of the Quad security arrangement along with Australia, Japan, and the U.S: essentially to a watered-down Asian NATO against China because it doesn’t obligate allies to respond if one member is attacked. Similarly, Washington had recruited Brazil for peacekeeping missions in the early 2000s in Haiti and designated South Africa as the lead state in dealings with Zimbabwe (Palat 2008: 722-23, 730-31; Palat 2012 ; de Carvalho, Anand, & Naidu 2025: 13, 23, 26; Tellis 2025). These ties to Washington led some like Patrick Bond (2013) to call BRICS “sub-imperialist” powers.

Yet, the following year, on the heels of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s consequent expulsion from the G8, BRICS at their Fortaleza summit in 2014, created a multinational bank, the New Development Bank (NDB) and a financial reserve arrangement, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), broadly similar to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) respectively. NDB is headquartered in Shanghai with an initial capitalization of $50 million, shared equally by the five member states (Cooper 2016: 65). It expanded with the inclusion of Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates in 2021, Egypt in 2023, and Algeria in 2025.[2] The CRA had an initial capitalization of $100 billion—$41 billion from China, $18 billion each from Brazil, India, and Russia, and $5 billion from South Africa (Cooper 2016: 65-66; de Carvalho, Anand, & Naidu 2025:20). And unlike the acronyms describing other emerging market economies, BRICS as a group was able to add several other members in 2024: Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. The organization now called itself briCs+ and accounted for 29% of global GDP, 46% of world population, 25% of all exports, and 43% of oil production (Pertry & Nölke 2024: 3). In 2025, Indonesia also joined the group. Ten other states—Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam—were accorded partner status in 2024 giving the bloc a broader Global South patina. Saudi Arabia participates in BRICS forums but has yet to formally join the group. Argentina is the only country, under its right-wing president, Javier Milei, that refused an offer of membership (Rodrigues Vieira 2025: 125-26)!

The success of briCs+ is underpinned by China—it was not only the second largest economy in the world in nominal terms, but its economy is also larger than those of the other nine briCs+ economies combined (Hopewell 2017: 1380). The recovery of the global economy from the financial crisis of 2007-08 owed much to China’s gargantuan investments in infrastructure: to take just one instance, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, in just three years between 2011 and 2013, China used 40% more cement than the United States did in the entire twentieth century (Palat 2024: 146-47). Additionally, actions of Western states, especially by the United States, has alienated much of the Global South, and briCs+ provides an umbrella for China to expand its global presence.

 

Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-global-share-of-manufacturing-value-by-country/

The World Bank estimated that China accounted for 26 percent of the world’s manufactured products, more than the combined total of the next three largest economies—the United States, Germany, and India. China’s scale of exports, and its import of raw materials for these has made it a larger trading partner than the United States for 70 percent, or 145 of 205 of the world’s economies by 2023 according to Australia’s Lowy Institute (Rajah & Albayrak 2025). Since the Lowy Institute report was published in January 2025, China overtook the United States as Germany’s top trading partner in the first eight months of 2025 partly because of the tariffs imposed on German exports by the second Trump administration (Wagner & Martinez 2025).

Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-china-overtook-u-s-in-global-trade-dominance-2000-2024/

The expanding scale and sophistication of China’s manufacturing also led it to finance infrastructural projects in many states of the Global South to extract raw materials. Both the NDB and the China-led Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) made loans without the “conditionalities” attached to World Bank and IMF loans (Pertry & Nölke 2024: 60). These financial institutions were deliberately set up to counter U.S., European, and Japanese domination of the international financial institutions—especially the World Bank and the IMF—set up by the Bretton Woods agreement, and despite Washington’s opposition, all G-7 economies except the U.S. and Japan, as well as other close American allies joined the AIIB which was inaugurated in January 2016 (Wu 2017).[1]

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States suffered a striking loss of moral and intellectual leadership as it used monetary incentives to divert to its shores personal protective equipment paid for by France, buy exclusive rights to a vaccine developed by a company funded by the German government, and to even hijack medical supplies from its own domestic state governments (Willsher, Holmes, McKernan, & Tondo 2020 ; Jankowicz 2020 ; Palat 2022: 35; Economist 2025c). In contrast, though the vaccines produced by China, India, and Russia were less effective than the mRNA vaccines produced by U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies, they supplied them to many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America unlike firms and governments of the global North (Mezzadra & Neilson 2024: 76-77). Chinese biotechs that did not really exist a decade ago have now been propelled to become the second largest developer of new drugs (Economist 2025a ; Temple-West 2025 ; Olcott, Ko, & Sandlund 2025)

In this context, though the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may have united the West temporarily, the perception that the West privileged profits over the health of the peoples of the Global South led to a fracture between the West and the Rest according to a poll conducted by Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard (2023) for the European Council of Foreign Relations. The rupture was compounded by the West not only shielding Israel from criticism but also by actively assisting its gruesome genocide in Gaza since October 2023: a gross violation of the supposed rule-based international order. Grotesquely, Nicolas Guillou, a French judge on the International Criminal Court that approved the arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military wing chief, Mohammed Deif found that he could not shop online or book hotel rooms in France because he was sanctioned by the United States and hence could not use his bank cards (Jones 2025).[2]

The weaponization of the dollar as illustrated by the sanctions imposed on Iran, Russia, and Venezuela among others—and secondary sanctions, or sanctions imposed on third countries by the United States if they continue to deal with sanctioned countries, firms, or individuals—further accelerated a move towards de-dollarization through mutual currency arrangements between countries and towards the internationalization of the Chinese renminbi (RMB). Since foreigners would accept and use RMB as payment only if they had access to it, China had to create a large reservoir of currency outside the Peoples’ Republic. Several countries have even swapped out their debts in dollars to RMB (Cotterill, Murray, & Daniels 2025 ; Sandlund & Ko 2025). “Paradoxically then, de-dollarization opens China’s financial system to greater foreign investment, including from the US. What counts as decoupling in one arena drives integration in another” (Mezzadra & Neilson 2024: 189).

China, consequently, has emerged as a major lender. AidData’s exhaustive analysis of Chinese lending patterns shows that between 2000 and 2023, Chinese banks loaned $2.2 trillion, half of which were directed towards high-income states and that the United States was the single largest recipient with $200 billion. Beijing directed its resources to its advantage in strategic sectors to control supply chains. These included loans for massive infrastructural projects—railway projects in Central Asia, highway networks in Africa, ports in Latin America—as part of President Xi Jingping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Stevenson 2025 ; Hindu Data Team 2025).[3] BRI also provides Beijing with an avenue to sell its goods and even set up agencies to evade tariffs imposed on imports from China. In recent years, much of this lending has been in RMB as China seeks to reduce its dependence on the dollar: the Bank of International Settlements estimated that in the four years ending on 31 March 2025, Beijing’s lending in RMB to low- and middle-income countries rose by $373 billion (Sandlund & Ko 2025). Better terms of trade, investment, and aid—and loan forgiveness—from China also forces intensifies pressure on financial institutions in the Global North to offer low-income nations better terms (Arrighi & Zhang 2011: 49). Strikingly, when President Trump was imposing tariffs across the board, China announced that it was dropping all tariffs on imports from 53 African states (Zane 2025).

Source: (Hindu Data Team 2025).

Unsurprisingly, given the exclusion of many of its banks from the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), Russia has taken the lead in de-dollarization and the greenback component of Sino-Russian trade dropped fell from 90% in 2015 to 20% in 2023. Russia also issued its first RMB bond in December 2025, joining Slovenia and Kazakhstan (Cotterill 2025 ; Sandlund & Ko 2025). BRICS are also working on a BRICS PAY system that will be an alternate to SWIFT which is after all increasingly outdated by blockchain technologies and the emergence of central bank digital currencies—and this of course would be especially welcome to countries and firms subject to U.S. sanctions and secondary sanctions like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. In 2023, a larger percentage of China’s international trade was settled in RMB than in dollars for the first time (Pertry & Nölke 2024: 17; Xie 2025: 78).

President Trump has also torpedoed more than two decades of U.S, efforts to court India as an ally against China for what appears to be petty and egoistical reasons—Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s refusal to give him credit for ending a military clash between New Delhi and Islamabad and Modi’s refusal to endorse Trump’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize—by imposing a tariff of 50% on imports from India, besides deporting thousands of Indian nationals. The ostensible reason for imposing this impossibly high tariff was to eliminate India’s purchase of Russian oil in an attempt to force Russia to the negotiating table over the conflict in Ukraine. China is a larger purchaser of Russian oil than India but since it controlled about 90 percent of the processing of rare earths vital for most consumer and military goods, Trump had to backtrack on tariffs on China.[1] Interestingly,

A distinct feature of the Russian war effort derived from the predominantly extractive form of capitalism that has evolved in that country: the need to keep selling energy to its enemies in order to fund its military campaign” (Mezzadra & Neilson 2024: 17).

Nevertheless, Modi could not accede to this demand nor to Trump’s other demand to open up India’s agricultural markets as it would shatter his domestic support and analysts expect India to continue importing Russian oil through less transparent channels (Balakrishnan 2025b).

Contending that former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s conviction for attempting a coup was politically motivated, Trump sanctioned a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, cancelled the visas of several Brazilian officials and imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports. But as the U.S. has a trade surplus with Brazil and accounts for only 12 percent of the latter’s exports, Brazil is well positioned to deal with this (Ionova 2025). In fact, as China cut back its imports of agricultural products—especially beef and soy beans—from the U.S., it turned to Brazil. South Africa, the weakest of the BRICS, may be the least prepared for Washington’s sanctions but when Trump ambushed its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in May 2025, with “false and inflammatory claims about a ‘white genocide’ Afrikaner farmers” (Stuenkel & Gabuev 2025), it had no choice but to oppose Washington.

II

To recapitulate, O’Neill’s original formulation of BRICs was based on economic projections, advocating integrating these large market economies in global economic governance at the expense of smaller G-7 states. He did not, and perhaps could not, analyze the geo-political and economic consequences of the rise of the BRIC economies. In the first instance, the high rates of economic growth that have pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese, Indians, and others out of poverty and boosted the fortunes of their upper- and middle-classes have had an adverse impact on the middle-classes of the North Atlantic as Branko Milanovic’s (2016 ; 2022 ; see also Corak 2016) “elephant curve” suggests and triggered the rise of protectionist and anti-immigrant movements in the United States and Western Europe. The growth of manufacturing in China, and the consequent need to procure strategic raw materials, has seen a dramatic expansion in its trade relations with African, Asian, and Latin American states. Indeed, the growth of South-South trade has blunted the impact of many of Trump’s tariffs. To facilitate this trade, BRI has led to massive infrastructural development in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America. China’s growing dominance in clean energy, electronic vehicles, fast trains, rare earths and their processing, and biotechnologies further signify the erosion of the dominance North Atlantic economies have exercised for more than 250 years.

The institutionalization of BRICS has also led to the creation of financial institutions not controlled by high-income states and along with Chinese-led banks like the AIIB, they are a source of finance for low- and middle-income states that do not come attached with “conditionalities.” In the context of the weaponization of the dollar, these channels and the gradual internationalization of the RMB and the introduction of BRICS Pay, and currency-swap arrangements indicate slow moves towards de-dollarization of interstate currency arrangements.

 Though each of the BRICS quinumvirate have refused to submit to Trump’s tariffs, they are not yet a coherent actor on the international stage. Most importantly, China and India remain at loggerheads over their territorial disputes and as O’Neill recently noted that unless China and India come together, talk of BRICS ever challenging the dollar is “for the fairies” (see Johnston 2025: 246), because India can’t counter China without Washington’s help. Even as New Delhi has a ‘special and privileged partnership’ with Russia, Moscow’s dependence on Beijing—their “no limits” partnership—for its conflict in Ukraine means it will not be able to provide a counterweight for India. Politically, the Hindu nationalist government of India reversed New Delhi’s long-standing advocacy of the Palestinian cause and now supports Israel while Brazil joined South Africa in its case against Israel in the International Criminal Court. Expansion of the briCs+ also brings other challenges. At their Rio de Janeiro meeting in April 2025, foreign ministers could not agree on a joint communique for the first time—the stumbling block being the issue of the reform of the UN Security Council because Egypt and Ethiopia refused to endorse South Africa’s aspirations for a permanent seat (Stuenkel & Gabuev 2025). However, these challenges may resolve themselves, the relentless growth of China, India, and other economies and their interrelationship indicates that we are at the cusp of a new era of world history, one that is no longer dominated by states of the North Atlantic.

*[1] I use the ‘briCs+’ with an upper-case ‘C’ in the title to underscore the greater economic weight of China and the ‘+’ notation to indicate an expansion of the group membership though the acronym remains unchanged. I am thankful to William G Martin for comments on an earlier draft.

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Ravi Arvind Palat serves as Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology, Binghamton University, The State University of New York. He has undertaken research in historical sociology, political economy, nationalism and ethnic conflict, social theory.