{"id":33404,"date":"2025-07-09T17:54:01","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T17:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=33404"},"modified":"2025-07-09T17:54:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T17:54:01","slug":"the-brics-lose-their-clout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=33404","title":{"rendered":"The Brics lose their clout"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> \n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description o3-type-body-base\">Your guide to what Trump\u2019s second term means for Washington, business and the world<\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=e2b3392f-ac37-44e3-b86c-5c2ecbaa192f&amp;newsletter-id=65b8fec772badb00166eafc6\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>The world has changed and the western-led postwar order is over, or so the Brics bloc of developing nations insists. Equally clear at the group\u2019s annual summit in Rio de Janeiro this week was that the Brics have changed too \u2014 and not for the better. The new model is bigger, less coherent and far less likely to achieve any of its putative goals.<\/p>\n<p>Gone is the select club of emerging market heavyweights, which traces its origins to an acronym coined by a Goldman Sachs economist, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. In its place is a more diffuse and contradictory cluster of 11 nations, including long-standing partners of the west such as Saudi Arabia \u2014 which participated in the summit as a member but has not completed membership formalities \u2014 and entrenched foes such as Iran.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/brics\" data-trackable=\"link\">Brics<\/a> boosters claim the recent expansion demonstrates its heft, highlighting that it now represents nearly half the world\u2019s population. Yet many leaders of its member countries seem to have more pressing business than Brics summits; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/8b83d73a-de7e-46df-8ca0-932808adfe61\" data-trackable=\"link\">only five heads of state<\/a> showed up in Rio, with the absence of China\u2019s Xi Jinping especially glaring.<\/p>\n<p>The enlargement also upset what was a delicate balance between democracies and autocracies. Authoritarian states including Egypt now greatly outnumber those with representative governments. Future admissions are unlikely to help: would-be members include Cuba and Belarus. The summit communiqu\u00e9 mentioned \u201cinclusive\u201d 39 times but \u201cdemocratic\u201d just twice.<\/p>\n<p>So what do the Brics now stand for? The bloc is at its most convincing when arguing for fairer representation for the developing world in the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. Few would dispute that their governance needs rejigging to give a greater voice to nations that now represent a far larger share of the global economy.<\/p>\n<p>The Brics\u2019 defence of multilateralism, backing for the Paris agreement to limit climate change and support for rules-based international trade will win it friends at a time when all three are under attack from President Donald Trump. There may be a case too in a fast-changing world for alternative systems to process international payments, using better technology and relying less on a single country.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But the Brics are much less cogent when hand-wringing about global conflicts and a sharp rise in military spending; China and Russia appear not to have got the memo. Moscow will surely be delighted by the summit\u2019s condemnation \u201cin the strongest terms\u201d of Ukrainian attacks on Russian bridges and railway infrastructure \u201cdeliberately targeting civilians\u201d. Kyiv will rightly ask why Brics leaders did not mention Russia\u2019s relentless onslaught against Ukraine\u2019s civilians.<\/p>\n<p>Brics membership used to offer a cost-free opportunity for such grandstanding on the global stage. Now that Trump has threatened an additional <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/93398b2a-fd6e-4389-b85b-74a709726738\" data-trackable=\"link\">10 per cent tariff<\/a> on nations supporting what he terms \u201cthe anti-American policies of Brics\u201d, that may no longer be the case.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Heady talk at the Brics last year of pushing for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/18b3d51d-1e4b-4189-bae2-c31248b6526b\" data-trackable=\"link\">de-dollarisation<\/a> of the global economy has lost its force. India\u2019s presence in the grouping seems increasingly performative. It may continue to indulge the Brics rhetoric but it values its defence alliance with the west and is in the advanced stages of trade negotiations with Washington. It will not be unhappy at the watering down of the Brics\u2019 heft, having long feared privately that the bloc could become a China club. <\/p>\n<p>If the Brics is to avoid the fate of the G77 bloc of developing nations, which faded into irrelevance as its membership ballooned, it should focus on issues where it is credible, such as reform of global governance. The western-led postwar order may have passed \u2014 but so has the era of Third Worldism.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/e2b3392f-ac37-44e3-b86c-5c2ecbaa192f\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free Your guide to what Trump\u2019s second term means for Washington,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":33405,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}