The BRICS Boom Could End Up Being a Bust

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For much of its early existence, BRICS was an acronym in search of a meaning. The original Goldman Sachs report that coined the term in 2001 simply pointed to four emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India and China—that would be increasingly influential in terms of globalized trade and manufacturing. But the report's author never suggested they might harmonize a broader multilateral agenda, let alone form an alliance.
Before long, however, the leaders of what subsequently became five countries when South Africa joined in 2010 began to gather on an annual basis. And in between those annual summits, their foreign ministers and other government officials began to organize routine lower-level meetings. Over time a common agenda began to take shape. While it never achieved a crystal-clear purpose, the BRICS grouping attempted to become a five-country counterweight to the G7, offering an alternative vision for global development as well as a critique of the existing international system that the West, led by the United States and Europe, still dominated.
More recently, across 2023 and 2024, the primary BRICS narrative was one of expansion. The organization's original five members agreed to bring in new members, even as they disagreed about who they should be. Ultimately, five new full members—Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates—joined the original five nations last year. Another 10 states—Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam—were accorded the status of 'BRICS partners,' meaning they will be invited to participate in nearly all of the bloc's meetings moving forward.
Other countries have applied to be part of the organization's multilateral New Development Bank or attend BRICS meetings as likely future partners. Unofficial reports suggest as many as 40 more countries have applied to join the organization as full members or partners. A map included in a recent WPR briefing by Mihaela Papa and Walter Streeter shows over half the globe having joined the organization or thinking about doing so. That makes for a lot of new countries involved in BRICS.
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However, such rapid expansion appears to have hurt the group's mission. Just one year after welcoming in its new members and partners, and at a time when it seemed that everyone wanted to be part of the group, the story of this year's summit on July 6-7 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was one of no-shows. The leaders of new member states Egypt and the UAE skipped the BRICS meeting. But the leaders of China and Russia also failed to attend. When it had only five permanent members, the BRICS summits regularly achieved 100-percent attendance. Now, with 10 full members and 10 partner nations, it's struggling to get half the member states' leaders to turn out. In one year, BRICS has gone from the organization that everyone wanted to join to just another multilateral meeting that might not be worth the time and money for the countries' leaders to attend.
Some of the absences were understandable, though that didn't make them any less noticeable. Russian President Vladimir Putin's ability to travel is restricted due to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court over Russian actions in Ukraine. And Chinese President Xi Jinping just visited Rio last November for the G20 Summit also hosted by Brazil. Still, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made hosting these multilateral gatherings a major part of his diplomatic agenda, and with a presidential election coming up next year, these gatherings are also intended to burnish his credentials for his domestic audience.
Still, there are at least two other factors that contributed to what remains a dramatic shift. First, BRICS has always struggled to balance the democracies and autocracies within its midst, as well as to overcome some internal geopolitical tensions, particularly between China and India. When there were only five members, these differences could be brushed off by focusing on areas of clearly converging interests as well as the valuable bilateral sideline meetings that summits made possible.
But with increased membership, the various internal 'factions' are now competing to shape the organization's agenda, and the one that feels less represented by a particular host country's priorities may choose to reduce their role or just not show up. For this year's summit, that was the authoritarian leaders. But that is the opposite of last year's summit, when Russia was the host and China's influence—along with the presence of the grouping's new members—tilted the balance toward non-democracies.
Second, BRICS must now contend with the reshaped geopolitical landscape since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Trump clearly does not like BRICS. He views the organization's plans for expanding alternatives to the U.S. dollar for cross-border trade settlements as a strategic threat to the United States' place in the international system. While Trump has minimized the threat that BRICS poses, he also recently compared the potential loss of dollar dominance to losing a war.
And although mounting an alternative to the dollar remains a distant prospect, Trump threatened to slap a 100 percent tariff on the BRICS countries for any efforts to do so back in February, and ahead of this month's summit he raised the possibility of a 10 percent tariff against any state that aligned itself with those efforts. Maintaining dollar dominance was also one of the justifications for the 50 percent tariff Trump imposed on Brazilian goods last week, although the move was also driven by Trump's affinity with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently facing a trial on charges of plotting a coup after his election defeat to Lula in 2022.
Political ideology and global geopolitics had already played a role in limiting BRICS' expansion last year. Argentina and Saudi Arabia were both invited to join as full members, but the former declined due to President Javier Milei's antipathy to China and Russia, while the latter has hesitated to formally accept due to U.S. objections. Under Trump, those geopolitical considerations will be heightened for all other potential members seeking to maintain warm relations with Washington.
The BRICS grouping's inability to navigate its internal cleavages and the changed global landscape under the Trump administration are part of a broader challenge the organization now faces. The reality is that BRICS overreached in its expansion and undermined one of its key assets, as the depth of the relationships that could be maintained across five members is no longer possible among 10 or 20. BRICS has moved away from being an organization in which the potential for reaching agreements in bilateral meetings was reason enough to meet each year.
That can be seen in how last week's meetings played out. While the BRICS Summit was underwhelming and under-attended, the meetings between Lula and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was honored with a state dinner—were incredibly productive, including a pledge to triple trade between the two countries. This kind of deepening of bilateral political and trade relations was the strength of BRICS when the group's presidents all met in the past.
India will host the BRICS Summit in 2026, and these same issues will in all likelihood play out yet again. India will want to drive the agenda, likely with Brazil's support, and China will want to downplay India's role as a global leader. At the same time, Modi will need to balance a desire for BRICS leadership with the need to maintain a strong relationship with Trump and the U.S., meaning he cannot focus too much on the organization's role as a potential alternative to the U.S.-led global system, one of the key talking points of BRICS proponents.
One way BRICS could remedy its newfound drift would be to return to its origins by creating a 'permanent council' of the original five members that prioritizes their roles and gives them a separate space to continue meeting without the expanded membership. Those five countries are important enough to be global leaders without the presence of the other members and partners. The irony, of course, would be that any effort to create a privileged group within BRICS would look a lot like the permanent veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council, a system that Brazil and India have been particularly critical of in the past due to being excluded from it.
Whether it goes in that direction or not, if BRICS does not find more focus, the organization will be a victim of its own success. What began as a small grouping of rising powers will have diluted its effectiveness in pursuit of greater numbers and broader representation.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, as well as a global fellow at the Wilson Center's Latin America Program. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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