Geopolitics · BRICS · Global Governance · Editorial
BRICS at a Crossroads: Can It Actually Challenge the Western World Order?
Eleven members. Over 45% of global population. A rival development bank. And a July 2025 summit where both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin refused to show up. The numbers say powerhouse. The reality says work in progress.
Santhosh Vishwamitra
·
March 8, 2026
The Big Picture
BRICS was never supposed to become a geopolitical story. It started in 2009 as an acronym invented by a Goldman Sachs economist to describe fast-growing emerging markets — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. A useful investment thesis. Then Russia decided it wanted a summit, and the world got a political project. Two decades later, that project has grown into an 11-member bloc that controls the majority of the world's population, over a quarter of global GDP, and a significant slice of energy and mineral resources. Indonesia joined in January 2025 as the first Southeast Asian member. India took over the rotating presidency in January 2026. The question everyone is now asking — can this actually challenge the IMF, the World Bank, the G7, and the financial architecture the West built after 1945?
The honest answer is: not yet. But the trajectory is no longer easy to dismiss.
What BRICS Has Actually Built
The most concrete institution BRICS has produced is the New Development Bank, established in 2014 as an explicit alternative to the IMF and World Bank. The NDB offers infrastructure financing without the political conditionalities that Western institutions routinely attach — the structural adjustment demands, the governance mandates, the strings. Algeria formally joined the NDB in 2025. Colombia has applied. The bank is growing its footprint across the Global South, funding renewable energy, logistics, and infrastructure in ways that developing nations find genuinely attractive.
On trade settlement, the shift is real but gradual. China and Russia already settle large volumes of bilateral trade in yuan and rubles, bypassing SWIFT entirely. India's UPI payment infrastructure is being linked with BRICS nations. The bloc has discussed a broader BRICS payment system — though a single BRICS currency remains more aspiration than architecture. Beijing has been pushing the renminbi as the natural dollar alternative. Most other members prefer a pluralistic system based on national currencies. That disagreement alone tells you something important about the internal dynamics here.
Bigger membership has not meant cleaner consensus. If anything, it has multiplied the fault lines.
The Cracks Are Real
The July 2025 Rio summit was supposed to be a demonstration of BRICS' growing clout. Instead, it exposed how fractured the bloc actually is. Xi Jinping did not travel to Rio — his first absence from a BRICS summit since becoming China's leader. Putin attended only virtually, constrained by an ICC arrest warrant. The foreign ministers' meeting in April 2025 failed to produce a joint communiqué. And the final summit declaration was notable mainly for what it avoided saying — the United States was never named directly, despite US tariffs being the elephant in every room.
Why the careful language? Because most BRICS members remain deeply economically tied to the West. Brazil, India, South Africa, the UAE — none of them can afford to trade Washington's market access for a political statement. This is what analysts mean when they call BRICS a hedging bloc rather than a confrontational one. Countries want more options, not a new Cold War. The problem is that China and Russia genuinely want a confrontational posture. India and Brazil genuinely do not. That fundamental tension does not disappear with declarations about multipolarity.
The India-China relationship remains the deepest structural fault line. The two countries share a disputed Himalayan border that produced deadly clashes as recently as 2020. They compete intensely for influence across the Global South. Beijing wants to use BRICS to challenge the dollar-based system directly and build a China-centric alternative. New Delhi's instinct — shaped by its own strategic autonomy doctrine — is to reform existing institutions rather than replace them. Modi at the Rio summit proposed redefining the BRICS acronym itself as "Building Resilience and Innovation for Cooperation and Sustainability." That is not the language of someone who wants to dismantle Bretton Woods. That is someone trying to make BRICS useful for India's actual interests.
What Washington Gets Wrong — and Right
Trump dismissed BRICS as "dead" in early 2025, threatening 100% tariffs on any member that pursued de-dollarization. That threat worked as a short-term signal. It kept the Rio summit cautious and de-escalatory. But it also illustrated exactly why more countries want into BRICS in the first place — because being subject to US economic coercion with no alternatives is an uncomfortable place to be. Every time Washington weaponizes the dollar or SWIFT, it makes the NDB and BRICS payment systems look more attractive, not less. Trump is simultaneously the biggest threat BRICS faces and its most effective recruitment tool.
At the same time, BRICS' structural weaknesses are genuine. The NDB's loan book remains small relative to IMF and World Bank scale, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement still leans on IMF decisions for a chunk of its funding — that is not independence. Saudi Arabia finally ratified at the 2025 Rio summit — after two years of hesitation that said plenty about confidence levels in BRICS' delivery capacity. The bloc has no secretariat, no binding charter, no enforcement mechanism. Useful coordination forum, yes. Governing institution, not yet.
India's Presidency — The Defining Test
With India chairing BRICS in 2026, this is New Delhi's moment to define what the bloc actually stands for. Modi's vision is deliberately non-confrontational — a people-centric platform focused on AI governance, climate resilience, and Global South representation at the UN and WTO, not a tool for Beijing and Moscow to wage economic war on Washington. That positioning is already yielding results: the 2025 BRICS declaration condemned cross-border terrorism in language widely read as a direct diplomatic win for India following the Pahalgam attack in April 2025. India is using BRICS for its own interests, exactly as every other member does. The question now is whether the 2026 presidency produces real deliverables — or just another polished declaration the world forgets in a week.
Editorial View · Santhosh Vishwamitra
Big Table, Too Many Agendas — But Dismissing BRICS Would Be a Mistake
BRICS is not the unified geopolitical bloc its supporters claim. But it is also not the hollow talking shop its Western critics insist. The truth sits in the uncomfortable middle. Tens of millions of people across the Global South are being financed by NDB without the IMF lecturing their governments on how to run their economies. That is real. Trade corridors are being built in local currencies. That is real. Over 30 countries are queuing to join or partner with a bloc that Washington says doesn't matter. That is also real.
India's G20 presidency in 2023 showed what effective multilateral leadership looks like. BRICS 2026 needs to be the sequel. If New Delhi can keep the China-Russia axis from hijacking the agenda while delivering on AI governance, climate finance, and payment infrastructure, BRICS becomes genuinely useful. The question is whether India leads this bloc — or just manages it.
The Bottom Line
BRICS is not a Western institution — and it is not yet a real counterweight to one either. What it is, right now, is the most significant attempt in decades to build a different kind of global order. Whether that attempt succeeds depends on whether its members can agree on what they actually want to build.
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