On Jan. 7, Indonesia officially became a full member of BRICS. With the addition of the world’s fourth-most-populous country and eighth-largest economy by purchasing power, the bloc now encompasses around half of the world’s population and a greater share of its economic output than the G7—and it’s set to grow further. The group’s number of members has doubled in the past two years, and with more countries applying to join—including Turkey, Malaysia and Thailand—BRICS has quickly emerged as the world’s hottest multilateral ticket.
Western officials and commentators have long dismissed the group as an ineffectual hodgepodge: “BRICS Without Mortar,” as the headline of a 2013 column by Joseph Nye quipped. It is true that, unlike the G7, the bloc’s members are fractious, with no common political system or geostrategic interests uniting them. But increasingly, something beyond the benefits of economic cooperation is motivating countries in the Global South to join BRICS: a shared desire to shape an international order not so dominated by the United States and its allies.
That vision’s appeal and BRICS’ popularity should be setting off alarm bells in Western capitals and prompting the stewards of the existing international order to go to greater lengths to reform the system so as to give a bigger role to rising Global South nations. Otherwise, the U.S. and its allies will continue to lose ground to Russia, China and other autocracies that are seeking to reshape, and possibly remake, global governance according to their interests.