Foreword

The BRICS Summit was recently held in New Delhi, from 12 to 13 September, under India's 2026 chairship. But what does BRICS essentially mean for global governance if the world has been dominated by the US due to the extreme concentration of military power which meant that much of the world outsourced its security to US-led alliance systems?

Moreover, the US dominance of economic power allowed the US to write the trade rules, to lead the banks, to use the dollar as the international reserve currency.

The US has had a dominant role in managing political institutions, even civil society of other states and even to some extent redefining international law in terms of its understanding of liberal international order.

But are now we going towards a multipolar distribution of power as all of this seemingly begins to unravel?

Background

We're seeing big historic scale shifts in the way the world is organized and the way that people view the world.

Until 1500, China was the world's leading power, having - among other things - invented paper, movable-type printing, gunpowder, and the compass.

The situation changed with Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas and Vasco da Gama's circumnavigation of Africa.

Europe - previously an isolated, stagnant territory and an insignificant appendage of the Eurasian landmass - suddenly and unexpectedly became the centre of the world, a pivotal link between East and West.

Since then, history has been distorted, manipulated, and rewritten to portray Europe as having always dominated the globe, while Asia is dismissed as backward, savage, and ignorant.

Already by 1600 or so, the European powers that were colonizing North America and South America suddenly had two giant continents at their disposal.

Around 1750 European imperial powers started to gain a global ascendancy that lasted for about 200 years. And that was the age of high European imperialism with the conquests and repression of European powers that colonized the Americas.

In the following centuries Europeans dominated also over Asia.  Europe was thus the dominant force in the world. China and India were, anyway, the world leaders in population and in manufacturing.

Francis Bacon, an English thinker, wrote about the idea that through scientific experimentation, new technologies would arise that could strengthen human society and improve it. It was an absolutely stunning vision.

And this in fact is a description of what happened   while Isaac Newton with the scientific revolution complemented and gave impetus to a profound technological acceleration with the idea of organized research for technological advance and for economic benefit.

Britain became not only Europe's leading empire but the largest empire in the world with the conquest of India during the 19th century. So by the end of the 19th century, Europe was dominant. Asia was in significant decline.

Britain was the world's hegemonic power. But, at the end of the 19th century, the US finished its own imperial expansion across North America and said: "Okay, it's time for us to have our place in the sun with our own global empire."

And it started concocting wars to take its place alongside the European empires expanding its reach into the Pacific on its way to Asia and then in 1898 in a concocted war (not unlike the war with Iran) took the fruits of the fading disappearing Spanish empire that included in the western hemisphere Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Then the US took the Philippines and became an Asian imperial power as well and joined Britain and France in this claim of global dominance.

By the end of the 19th century Europe had almost totally colonized Africa.

By 1900 Europe and a rising US claimed to run the world. But after World War I and II (two essentially civil wars) Europe which had dominated the world and Britain which had dominated the European empires had exhausted themselves while former colonies in Asia and in Africa gained independence with the utter exhaustion and financial bankruptcy as well as moral bankruptcy of the European imperial powers.

Two powers remained in the non-Asian African world:  the US and the Soviet Union: but while the US had kept the war away from America, the Soviet Union had lost 28 million people in World War II and had faced unbelievable devastation in the cause of defeating Hitler.

China was a distinctive case. In 1839 Britain launched a war against China for the shocking but true reason to force China to open trade to British opium so that Brits could earn enough funds to buy the Chinese tea to which they have devoted their afternoons ever since.

Two opium wars ensued, 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860 (with the British military fleet bombarding coastal cities, causing thousands of deaths), then China went into its own internal civil war that killed tens of millions. China also faced massive imperial pressures from Europe and the United States at the end of the 19th century.

But suddenly the European overlords disappeared because they had destroyed themselves in the two civil wars from 1914 to 1945. And so newly independent Asia and Africa embarked on the beginnings of their own sovereignty. And it's in this context that the US led the world in 1945 with the competition from the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union faced growing internal, economic, financial, social and ethnic crises in the 1980s and it embarked on reform in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Communist Party and then president of the Soviet Union.

He was a great reformer and a great maker of peace and he wanted a democratic reformed Soviet Union and an end to the cold war divisions in Europe and helped to bring that about. But in the process he and the Soviet Union had to experiment Tocqueville's most famous warnings: “The most dangerous time for a government is when it tries to reform”. And he was speaking of the French reforms of the 1780s which led on to the French Revolution of 1789.

Exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s: reforms destabilized the Soviet Union and the US saw it as the end of the Cold War not in magnanimity but in victory. And in December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved into 15 successor state of which Russia was the dominant true successor state.

The US self-esteem went into overdrive into an orbit never reached before: the US suddenly said: “We are alone in running the world. We are the greatest colossus in the history of the world. We make the Roman Empire look like a little run power. We will dominate the world. We are the end of history.”

It's an accurate description of the way that American leaders and strategists viewed the world after December 1991.

China

Independence came for India in1947 together with the establishment of the people's republic of China in 1949 (after the century of humiliation) and with the emergence of independent Indonesia (1945) with these countries saying they want to be non-aligned in order to develop without choosing sides between two rival camps.

China, after more decades of some turmoil and missteps, starting in the late 1970s achieved the fastest economic recovery in all of human history. It had four decades of roughly 10% per year economic growth.

So, China led the rise and recovery of Asia, the return of Asia to centre stage. Asia is again half or more of the world economy. And China is now 30% larger than the United States in output measured in purchasing power parity prices.

Therefore, the idea of a Western-led world which the US has championed to this day with European support is no longer coherent.

The US has been overtaken in economic size by China which appears at the cutting edge in artificial intelligence.

BRICS

BRICS is the grouping of countries that has found its footing again in the world that was once colonized or battered by the western world but now has found its footing again. It is led in magnitude economically and technologically by China but India is not so far behind and the two, China and India together, are 37% of the world population and now China is around 20% of world output compared to 15% of world output found in the United States.

India is the third largest economy in the world and will become the second one by the middle of this century. So China's the top giant, India number two, and the US number three as the most likely scenario.

In the BRICS Summit that just took place there were five original BRICS members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and then five more recently new members: Ethiopia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Iran and Indonesia.  And then there are another 10 countries that are BRICS associate members.

By adding up the core 10 BRICS, they're almost 50% of the world population. They are about 41% of the world output. And by comparing that with the G7 countries (US, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan) it is only about 28% of world output.

The BRICS are a larger economic block. And in population, 450 million are in the European Union: by adding Britain, US, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand all together, it's a billion people as opposed to the BRICS which is four billion people.

But Trump says: "We're still the world's lead. I am the world's boss”.  He's not joking. He means it. And that's the American political class. They mean it too. And so wars are raging in Ukraine which is a war of US expansion invented by these neocons, these hegemonists in the 1990s saying they can expand NATO to Ukraine, Georgia to anywhere they run the world. This is why there is a war in Iran. This is why Israel is used as US military blocker to try to maintain hegemony in the Middle East.

The BRICS want to represent the emerging and developing countries: about 85% of the world population. They want their voice listened to. They want to have their say. They want their place because they're done with the US calling the shots. Those interesting historical anomalies lasted from 1750 to the year 2000 or so: 250 years. But that time has passed.

BRICS' new institutions and topics

In addition to founding dedicated institutions such as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), created in 2014 and the New Development Bank (NDB) established in 2015 , the coalition has (like the G7 and G20 forums) embraced networked minilateralism, launching transnational partnerships and working groups on topics of shared interest from energy security to health, climate change, sustainable development, and technology transfer.

The NDB and the CRA were designed as an alternative to the so-called Bretton Woods arrangement, the mainstream global financial system founded by leading industrial countries in the aftermath of World War II. Many countries of the Global South believe institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are failing to meet the needs of poorer nations.

“This system was created by rich countries to benefit rich countries.” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has argued. “Practically no African country was sitting at the table of the Bretton Wood Agreement.”

BRICS seeks to challenge Western-dominated institutions of global economic governance, as well as to displace the US dollar from its entrenched role in the world economy. Many analysts therefore depict BRICS expansion as a watershed moment in the shift to a more egalitarian international system.

BRICS' declaration

We are now truly in a multipolar world and we need to live peacefully within it. And the BRICS declaration, the New Delhi declaration that was signed supports the multilateral order calls for the rejuvenation and regeneration of the world trade order which the US has unilaterally gone out to break at the World Trade Organization.

BRICS defends the United Nations. One of the points: they take note that there has never been a woman Secretary General, and a woman from Latin America is what's in the cards right now.

They say: "We are speaking for the part of the world that was not the imperial powers that dominated the world in the last 250 years. We're speaking for a multipolar world. We're certainly speaking for ourselves because we represent half of humanity. And they pulled that off.

A very significant aspect of this year's meeting is that the next presidency is China. And China absolutely means business of creating a new peaceful world.

The BRICS have a lot of tasks ahead of them: diversifying the technologies, their transportation corridors, the financial powers while at the same time the US is lashing out using its military alliances to strike against its rivals, its economic architecture to weaponize it against adversaries.

The Europeans recognize that the US world order is going down while they don't want to embrace what the BRICS is suggesting so they're kind of stuck in a vacuum and reforming the international system will probably be quite a turbulent time ahead.

Asia share of the world economy rose by 20% points between 1995 and 2025   If the United States was smart, it could have started in 1995 to lay the foundations for the kind of world it wants to live in when the world is actually multipolar.

The world's going to have a different shape. That's natural. And what US could do in the 1990s was help shape not a permanent US hegemony, but rather a decent world of peace that would accommodate the new conditions of technology and economy that would likely ensue in the 21^st century. 

US just lost 35 years of that. It did exactly the opposite. It doubled down on US hegemony. China's rise is not bad and dangerous, it's natural. Just consider where China was for 2,000 years. US should stop trying to contain China, run China: none of that preaching has worked at all. So this is dangerous right now: a proper reading of history and an understanding of how politics and economics is intertwined are necessary.

How have Western countries responded?

Western countries have largely downplayed the group's growth. The Biden administration said Washington did not see BRICS as a geopolitical rival and largely dismissed its effort to move away from the dollar.

Still, some European policymakers have cautioned that the anti-West sentiment is growing more confrontational. They see the expansion as the result of a lackluster Western response to low-income countries' needs, and say Western countries need to begin reforming financial institutions in earnest.

The accusation that the West is arrogant toward the needs of the Global South is serious. It cannot be answered by offering “value-based partnership” and a “rules-based” multilateralism when the interest of the BRICS is focused on changing those rules in global finance, trade, and other standard-setting procedures.

Other analysts say the BRICS de-dollarization efforts could eventually undermine the strength of the dollar and thus the health of the US economy. Yet US President Trump has shown particular disdain toward the bloc, telling reporters in February 2025 that BRICS is dead. He has repeatedly threatened BRICS members with 100% tariffs if they move to undercut the dollar.

What are the new candidates looking for in the BRICS?

A common thread across disparate interests and motivations is the need to respond to and manage the consequences of American dominance. Some countries are seeking in BRICS a safe harbour from US diplomatic coercion and economic statecraft, an escape from pressure to democratize, and a means to mitigate the impact of sanctions and tariffs. Even countries that enjoy relatively positive relationships with the US value BRICS as a vehicle for greater international economic integration in an otherwise fragmenting Western-centric global economy, as well as an opportunity to garner greater power than they hold within traditional, Western-dominated multilateral forums. For developing countries, BRICS also offers a compelling prospect for obtaining development financing without political conditions and in local currencies rather than in dollars or euros. Countries engaged with BRICS are united in their desire to shift the global balance of power away from American unipolarity and in their belief that BRICS can help facilitate this transition.

At the same time, BRICS member states, partner countries, and aspirants remain divided on their engagement with the US, and in particular on the extent to which BRICS is or should be an explicitly anti-American bloc, designed to counter US interests. Some countries desire to maintain positive relations with the US, even as they welcome the advent of a more egalitarian world system. Others, not least Russia, seek to position BRICS as a rival bloc to the US-dominated West.

Conclusion

The potential of BRICS members and partner countries to fulfil their individual aspirations via BRICS - whether to create a more egalitarian mode of global governance, to hedge against Western instability while maintaining a geopolitical neutrality, or to participate in an alternate international economic system outside of the reaches of American sanctions - hinges on which vision of the future of world order ultimately wins out. It will also depend on the degree of common purpose demonstrated by countries of the West themselves - whose like-mindedness and solidarity the second Trump administration has suddenly called into question - as well as on the Trump administration’s willingness to countenance a more egalitarian global order rather than force middle powers to choose between BRICS membership and friendly relations with the US.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (US National Security Advisor during the Johnson and Carter presidencies), the main architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, abandoned in 2016 the scheme and called for the forging of ties with Russia and China.

While Zbigniew Brzezinski’s article in The American Interest titled Towards a Global Realignment was largely been ignored by the media, it showed that powerful members of the policymaking establishment no longer believed that Washington could prevail in its quest to extent US hegemony across the Middle East and Asia.

Brzezinski, who was the main proponent of this idea and who drew up the blueprint for imperial expansion in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, did an about-face and called for a dramatic revising of the strategy.

Here’s an excerpt from the article in the AI: “As its era of global dominance ends, the US needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.

Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signalling the coming of a new global realignment.

The first of these verities is that the United States is no longer the globally imperial power.”