"BRIC" was coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill in 2001 as an investment category — not a political project. The four states formalized the grouping as a diplomatic forum in 2009, added South Africa in 2010, and underwent a significant expansion in 2024 to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Ethiopia. BRICS+ now spans primary energy producers, the world's two largest emerging economies, and key Global South states. Its New Development Bank provides an operational lending arm. But BRICS has no treaty obligations, no enforcement mechanism, no permanent secretariat, and no common strategic position on the defining conflicts of the era. Its power is entirely in what it represents: that the post-1945 Western-built institutional order does not speak for the world.
"BRIC" entered the geopolitical vocabulary as an investment thesis: Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O'Neill argued in a 2001 paper that Brazil, Russia, India, and China were on trajectories that would make them the world's dominant economies by 2050. The category was descriptive, not prescriptive. The four states transformed it into a diplomatic forum through a first formal summit in Yekaterinburg in 2009 — initially focused on coordinating positions on global financial governance reform in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. South Africa joined in 2010, producing the BRICS acronym.
The 2024 expansion — BRICS+ — was China's project. Inviting Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Ethiopia into the bloc significantly expanded its geopolitical footprint: it now includes major energy exporters on both sides of the Gulf rivalry (Saudi Arabia and Iran simultaneously), the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia by population), and a strategically located Arab state (Egypt, controlling the Suez Canal). Argentina was also invited but declined membership following Javier Milei's election and his rejection of BRICS alignment.
BRICS has one operational institution: the New Development Bank (NDB), headquartered in Shanghai and established in 2014. The NDB provides infrastructure and sustainable development loans, has approved $30B+ in financing across 96 projects in member and non-member countries, and has expanded membership beyond the original five (Bangladesh, UAE, Uruguay, and Egypt have joined the NDB). The NDB operates with a AAA credit rating and borrows on international capital markets — predominantly in US dollars, which limits its de-dollarization contribution.
Beyond the NDB, BRICS produces annual summits with joint declarations, working group outputs on financial governance, trade, health, and technology, and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) — a $100B currency swap mechanism to provide emergency liquidity to members. The CRA has never been activated. BRICS has no military arm, no dispute settlement mechanism, no common external tariff, and no secretariat. It is a diplomatic forum with a lending institution — everything else is aspiration.
The strategic significance of BRICS+ is not its operational capacity — it is its composition. A bloc that simultaneously includes Saudi Arabia and Iran (normalized diplomatically through Chinese mediation in 2023), the world's largest oil exporter and one of its most sanctioned states, has demonstrated that the Western-led sanctions and alliance architecture does not determine the global alignment map. Energy producers that sit inside BRICS have leverage over global oil pricing that is independent of US dollar denomination demands.
For China, BRICS provides legitimacy infrastructure — it is the largest non-Western multilateral forum, and China's hosting of the 2023 Johannesburg summit and leadership of the expansion process positioned Beijing as the convening power of the emerging alternative order. For Russia, membership provides isolation-breaking — BRICS participation demonstrates that Russia is not universally sanctioned or excluded. For India, BRICS provides strategic autonomy — the ability to participate in a non-Western bloc without committing to Chinese leadership of it. The India-China tension within BRICS is the bloc's central contradiction: its two largest members are strategic competitors with an unresolved border dispute.
China uses BRICS to advance three objectives simultaneously: de-dollarization momentum (framing the dollar-centric financial system as a Western political instrument), alternative institution-building (NDB as World Bank/IMF alternative), and diplomatic coalition management (building a non-Western bloc that challenges Western normative authority at international bodies). China's support for BRICS expansion to energy producers reflects a calculation that blocs including major commodity exporters have structural economic leverage over dollar-denominated pricing systems.
Russia uses BRICS primarily for isolation management — continued participation in BRICS summits, NDB membership, and annual declarations provides diplomatic optics that Russia is not internationally isolated despite Western sanctions. The 2023 Johannesburg summit, where Putin participated remotely to avoid potential ICC arrest, illustrated the limits: BRICS provides cover, not insulation. India uses BRICS as one of several simultaneous diplomatic tracks — it also deepens QUAD engagement, bilateral US defense cooperation, and EU trade negotiations, treating BRICS as one option rather than a strategic commitment.