When leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa meet this week, many observers may ask: Could this group of countries challenge the US and West?
At a particularly tense political moment as the West lines up to support Ukraine against Russia, and as the US and China escalate a new Cold War in the making, many countries are seeking alternatives.
Heller noted that there are things uniting the G7: They are all democracies, which makes it easier for the countries to coordinate and communicate; they are all large, developed economies; and the G7 still dominates the global governance institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and even patent agreements, which means that these countries have huge advantages within the international financial and economic system.
Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a progressive democrat, but the country is also recovering from its own January 6-style attack on its capital earlier this year and repairing the isolationist foreign policy of predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
Just days before the BRICS summit, President Joe Biden hosted the leaders of Japan and South Korea for an extraordinary meeting at Camp David.
BRICS countries are “consistent with a line that the Global South is rising and needs to be heard from, and has its imperatives and interests,” said Derek Mitchell, who worked as a senior Asia adviser and ambassador during the Obama administration and is now the president of the National Democratic Institute.
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