The BRICS countries (henceforth BRICS+) have received growing attention and visibility in international discourses over recent years – in part due to intensifying geopolitical fissures between select members of the grouping and the proverbial “West,” and in part because of a series of expansions that resulted in the bloc doubling in size.
After the 17th BRICS Summit in Brazil in July 2025, BRICS+ expanded to ten full members: the original Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the newly incorporated Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria. With 10 further countries as partners, the grouping appears to have been transformed from a loose acronym into something closer to a political brand, though the substance and value of what it apparently offers remains to be seen.
With major energy exporters such as UAE and Iran now inside the tent, alongside emerging economies like Egypt and Indonesia, BRICS+ has achieved a scale that commands attention. The recent signs of a tentative thaw between India and China only add to the bloc’s diplomatic weight, which now represents 56 percent of the world’s population and 44 percent of global GDP.
When Western leaders and policymakers dismiss BRICS+ as little more than a geopolitical vanity project of China and Russia, they risk repeating the error many analysts tend to make: writing off the rhetoric as mere bluster and overlooking the substance beneath it. The correct approach is to take BRICS+ seriously, albeit not literally.
The temptation is to laugh off BRICS+ communiques about de-dollarization or the birth of a “multipolar world order.” The gap between rhetoric and reality is indeed vast, but that does not make the grouping irrelevant. If anything, the danger is the opposite: that Western governments, lulled by a mixture of skepticism and comfortable hubris, miscalculate and are caught off guard when experiments begun in the name of symbolism yield practical innovations.
Three Emerging Clusters
As it stands, the bloc has demonstrated growing interest and influence in three areas.
First, its members collectively command enormous shares of renewable energy supply chains and critical minerals, from rare earths to core ingredients for EV batteries, such as cobalt and nickel. Brazil has the world’s second-largest rare earth reserves, while Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of nickel – a vital component of batteries and stainless steel. The idea of coordinating policies around these resources is no longer theoretical, but was laid out in the Rio de Janeiro Declaration.
As the world transitions toward renewable energy, pay attention to who can extract substantial dividends from a commanding lead in the most ubiquitous technologies. While the United States’ transformative innovation with fracking proved to be a game-changer for its geopolitical ambit in the second decade of the 21st century, the overt weaponization of rare earths by China has proved effective in bringing U.S. negotiators to the table, whether over trade terms and investment securitization. These resources will prove to be increasingly relevant as critical stockpiling becomes a core tool and focus of national security for countries across the world.
Yet even with the incumbent White House pressing full speed ahead with bolstering U.S. mineral production, vast swathes of the European Union and Anglophone countries that are not Australia or the United States remain fundamentally exposed and dependent upon external parties for their mineral supply chain. For these countries, stockpiling and amassing rare earths will demand that they do not put all their eggs in one basket. Engaging countries within BRICS+, especially those that have shown relative openness to economically lucrative partnerships with a wide range of geopolitical interest groups, such as Indonesia and Brazil, could well be key. Diversification, as opposed to disproportionate dependence upon any particular country, is vital.
Second, BRICS+ countries are experimenting with alternatives to the dollar-centric financial order, from cross-border payment systems to local currency settlements.
As it stands, of course, less than 5 percent of transactions through SWIFT are settled in local currencies – small in scale but meaningful as proof of concept. There is sound ground to think that no conventional currency, issued by any central bank within BRICS+, will step up to providing a meaningful substitute for the U.S. dollar. Yet this would be a misplaced expectation concerning the prospective pathway for de-dollarization.
The ideal end-state among BRICS+ technocrats, especially those in Iran and Russia, is not so much one where any BRICS+ currency – or a common currency, for that matter, which remains distantly in the pipeline and apparently infeasible – becomes the “new USD.” Instead, it is a financially multipolar world with increasing volumes of the Japanese yen, the euro, the British pound sterling, as well as offshore Chinese yuan, cryptocurrencies, and even (digitalized) gold as units of transaction. The manifestation of a plurality of choices would significantly reduce the collective dependence of the bloc on the USD, as well as justifying the appeal and case for the BRICS Pay system – a platform that could considerably augment the mBridge model in providing a viable alternative to SWIFT.
Third, the grouping has shown growing capacity for collective maneuvering in multilateral bodies, where coordinated voting patterns amplify grievances of the Global South. With only 13.24 percent of the voting rights in the World Bank, BRICS+ countries have a long way to go within existing multilateral institutions. The disproportionality between their economic and geopolitical heft, and their level of (under-)representation at the “table” creates friction points that the West cannot ignore.
As countries that have been more conventionally overlooked within BRICS+ as geopolitical players, the two African members of BRICS+, Egypt and Ethiopia, will have an important role to play tackling global challenges such as food and water shortages, regional and developmental inequalities, and even climate change. As evidenced by negotiations over the future of Gaza in recent months, Egypt is keen to play a mediating role, as is the UAE, in navigating the geopolitical faultlines between the West and the Arab World.
Calling In, as Opposed to Calling Out
It would also be a mistake to view BRICS+ through a purely adversarial lens. For many of its members, the point is not to choose sides but to maximize options.
To cite one example, India is interested in deepening security and technology ties with the United States, even as its leadership invests political capital in BRICS+. The recent Sino-Indian thaw, apparently depicted by the meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in late August came with clear caveats: Modi did not attend the virtual BRICS+ meeting that immediately followed his trip to China, instead sending External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in his place. Nor did Modi stay in Beijing to attend the military parade that followed just days after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. India wants to calibrate and moderate the message being sent to Western audiences.
Additionally, Gulf members remain closely embedded in Western financial and defense networks, while seeing value in joining BRICS+, a club that increases their exposure to multilateral governance discourse.
Indeed, beyond values and rhetorical statements that few would find questionable, there is no robust, coherent vision for BRICS+, much less core answers regarding disputes within the bloc, from the Saudi-Iranian schism to long-standing territorial disputes between China and India. This noticeable gap points to the fact that the BRICS+ is much looser and more amorphously defined than the European Union or even ASEAN.
For many in the Global South, BRICS+ is therefore not a rival to the West, but a means of generating more leverage and bargaining capital. It would be a mistake for the West to at once hype up the “threat” that emerges from BRICS+ while neglecting the clear messages emitted by a vast majority of developing countries: they are not interested in taking sides, though are interested in talk that does not manifest as lectures, and deals that result in real fruition.
For the West to navigate the era of an increasingly potent BRICS+, three shifts would be crucial.
The first is to separate signal from noise. BRICS+ statements are often deliberately loud, crafted as much for domestic consumption as for international audiences. Yet behind the theatrics lie real innovations that deserve monitoring: the establishment of the BRICS Pay initiative that bypasses SWIFT, the growing role of the New Development Bank (formerly known as the BRICS Development Bank) in developmental financing, and nascent discussions of coordinating energy security and resource policies. Dismissing the rhetoric without tracking these developments is an invitation to be surprised later.
Building up BRICS+ expertise – namely, individuals who understand and track financial, energy, and technological movements across these countries – is an imperative. When in doubt, remember that those who nonchalantly disparaged and cast doubt over China’s ability to manufacture high-quality EVs at the dawn of the century have since been proven wrong in the starkest of ways, by the unfolding events on the ground.
The second is to take stock of both the risks and benefits of BRICS+ emerging as a convening platform. The risks are obvious: financial fragmentation, resource nationalism, or new forms of bloc politics that result in further escalation in geopolitical fissures. Yet there are also potential upsides, from expanded financing options for climate infrastructure to avenues for collaboration on South-South technology transfer.
Western governments must avoid the reflex of seeing BRICS+ purely as a spoiler or challenge. They must also consider where the grouping might complement global public goods – such as around food security and the energy transition, and where engagement could steer constructive experiments, especially at a time when climate change is not universally acknowledged to be a salient global governance priority by all national leaders.
The third, and arguably most important, is to develop a roadmap for engagement that calls BRICS+ members “in” rather than calls them “out.” Many of the countries involved are indeed Western partners with no interest in being conscripted into a binary competition. The West should avoid condescension that alienates them, and instead emphasize areas of shared interest – from green investment to pandemic preparedness – that allow dual participation in Western and BRICS+ initiatives. Value-centric preaching only goes so far before it becomes sterile, and falls on deaf ears. Such pragmatism respects agency while reinforcing global institutions.
Taken together, these shifts amount to a key test of Western adaptability and, frankly, statecraft.
Rather than forcing BRICS+ members to quit or withdraw from a bloc that has thus far delivered limited results, albeit one with significant promise, a more constructive option would be to heed their desire for options, and engage and work with those among BRICS+ who have not signed onto overtly antagonistic projects aimed at undermining Western territorial integrity or national interests. It would be erroneous to conflate the stance of one or two BRICS+ members with the stance of the bloc as a whole; it would be tragic if such conflation ended up producing a self-fulfilling prophecy – though geopolitical strategists and leaders are by no means above a natural predisposition to err, under the lethal mixture of fear, arrogance, and naivete.