You only need to watch the news for the past six months to see it: the post-war liberal consensus is drawing to a close. Recent United States legislation has only accelerated a shift that has been inevitable for some time, the move from a unipolar world to a multipolar one.

To many in the West, it feels as though this change arrived suddenly in 2025, with headlines dominated by tariffs, immigration, and social unrest, all symptoms of the deeper transformation underway. Yet this financial realignment has been unfolding quietly for perhaps two decades.

I have been watching these shifts for much of the past 10 years, most visibly through the rise of BRICS as a parallel trading bloc, but also through the remarkable transformation of Chinese trade under initiatives such as the Belt and Road, which increasingly encourage settlement in renminbi. At the same time, Gulf sovereign funds have begun deploying capital across the Global South in South-South transactions that are now largely decoupled from Western financial systems.

The Bretton Woods System positioned the U.S, and, by extension, the dollar, at the center of global finance. But in 2025, as the U.S. turns inward, countries are acting differently, enabled by tech advances, new alliances, and deeper domestic capital or support from emerging partners.

Sanctions fatigue has set in, and nations are less willing to follow others when it no longer serves their interests.

When the global financial order was designed in the 1940s, the West, primarily the U.S., Canada, and Europe, represented about 35% of the world's population and almost 70% of its GDP. Today, those numbers have fallen to roughly 16% and 36%, a reminder that the institutions of that era now preside over a world fundamentally different from the one that created them.

This quiet reordering has been underway in one form or another since around the turn of the century. Recent policy shifts have accelerated it, lending legitimacy, or at least the perception of it, and quickening the pace.

It is not so much that the world is rejecting the old system; it's much more that it has simply outgrown it.

It is tempting, and common in the public discourse, to view this through a narrow economic lens, but to me, that misses the essence of what is happening. What is unfolding is not solely about interest rates and currency baskets. It's the slow (but getting quicker) transfer of trust from one architecture to another. This change makes for, or at least has the potential to, make the financial world much more participatory rather than permission-led.

The numbers tell the story. Once fully integrated, BRICS nations........

© International Business Times