Joseph S. Nye

CAMBRIDGE – One question that 2025 may begin to answer is whether the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) is becoming the new center of power in world politics. Now that the group has added new members (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates) and come to represent 45 percent of the world population, some believe that it is consolidating the (misleadingly named) “Global South” and posing a serious challenge to American and Western power. But I remain skeptical of such claims.

When Jim O’Neill (then the chief economist at Goldman Sachs) coined the “BRIC” acronym in 2001, his aim was simply to identify the four emerging economies that were most likely to dominate global economic growth by 2050. But the label soon acquired a political valence. It became an informal diplomatic grouping at the 2006 United Nations General Assembly, and then a formal organization with the first BRIC Summit in 2009. Hosted in Russia, the focus then – as it is now – was on advancing a multipolar world order. At the end of the following year, the group got its “S” when South Africa joined.

A Wall Street asset class evolved into an international organization partly because it aligned with Russia’s and China’s own aspirations to lead the developing world. The BRICS 16th summit in Russia in October 2024 was the first to include its new members (Saudi Arabia has not yet decided whether to accept the group’s invitation to join, and Argentina’s new government declined).........

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