Russia
Source: en.interaffairs.ru

Europe is losing ground in the new world order. China, the US, and BRICS are actively shaping it, while Europe merely reacts. What does this mean for the future? A geopolitical analysis present by ‘Berliner Zeitung’.

The 62nd Munich Security Conference could hardly have been more aptly titled: “Under Destruction.” What was negotiated at the Bayerischer Hof from February 13 to 15, 2026, was nothing less than the burial of a world order that had guaranteed Europe prosperity and security for decades. But while China, the US, and even Russia are entering this new era with clear visions, Europe stands like a disgruntled spectator on the sidelines — unable to grasp that the caravan has long since moved on.

The end of the assumptions

In his keynote address, Friedrich Merz articulated what many suspected but no one wanted to hear: the existing international order no longer exists. The Chancellor identified the dependencies, the failures, and the necessity of European independence. It was a speech that precisely diagnosed problems. What was missing was the solution.

For this is precisely where the European dilemma is revealed: The continent has forgotten how to think strategically. While other major powers have been systematically working on their position in the new world order for years, Europe reacts at best — and usually too late.

China's long-term perseverance

Anyone who wants to understand what strategic patience looks like must look to Beijing. When Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, Western observers ridiculed the project as an oversized infrastructure initiative. Twelve years later, China has created a network that stretches from the ports of Pakistan to the train stations of Duisburg.

The Belt and Road Initiative is far more than just roads and railways. It is the backbone of a new geo-economic architecture. China has understood what Europe still refuses to acknowledge: Economic interdependence creates political dependencies. Whoever builds the infrastructure sets the rules of the game.

The numbers speak for themselves. The BRICS New Development Bank now manages a portfolio of over 90 projects totaling around US$30 billion. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement offers emerging economies an alternative to the Western-dominated International Monetary Fund. Currency swap agreements between China and Brazil, rupee-ruble deals for Russian oil — step by step, the dominance of the dollar is being undermined.

America’s transactional turn

If China is the patient strategist, then the US under Donald Trump is the impatient businessman. Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State, arrived in Munich with a message as simple as it was brutal: America first, everyone else negotiates.

Rubio's speech was a masterpiece of diplomatic duplicity. He invoked the transatlantic alliance while simultaneously making it clear that this alliance would henceforth be based on American terms. Migration, energy policy, defense spending — everything was declared a bargaining chip. The rules-based international order, for decades an American mantra, was reduced to a negotiable commodity.
The transcript of his speech, published by Foreign Policy, reveals the new American worldview: sovereignty and border control take precedence over multilateral obligations. International institutions are no longer seen as a framework that America helps shape, but rather as constraints to be overcome.

For Europe, this signifies a fundamental paradigm shift. The transatlantic partnership, upon which the European security architecture has rested since 1945, is becoming a business relationship. And in business relationships, those who have nothing to offer pay the price.

Russia's Eastern bet

Moscow, too, has learned its lesson from the Ukraine crisis — but not in the way the West had hoped. Instead of international isolation, Russia is seeking closer ties with the rising powers of the East. Putin's state visit to India in December 2025 marked this realignment. "A just, multipolar world order" with "a central role for the United Nations" — this is how the Kremlin formulated its vision…
As a defender of a rules-based order — just a different one than the Western one. The BRICS coordination, India's BRICS chairmanship in 2026, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — Moscow has understood that a multipolar world requires options.

India's strategic autonomy

If any actor at the Munich conference perfected the art of the both-and, it was India. Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar spoke of "strategic autonomy" — a term that sounds familiar to European ears but has a completely different meaning in Indian practice.

India buys Russian oil while simultaneously maintaining its partnership with Washington. It is a member of the BRICS and meets with the G7. It calls for reform of the UN Security Council and works pragmatically with all the veto powers. New Delhi has grasped what Berlin still needs to learn: In a multipolar world, flexibility is not a weakness, but a strength.

The meeting of the G4 nations – Germany, Japan, Brazil, and India – on the sidelines of the conference exemplified this dynamic. They discussed “reformed multilateralism,” as Jaishankar reported. But while India and Brazil, as BRICS members, are already helping to shape alternative structures, Germany remains fixated on reforming existing institutions – institutions whose reformability is becoming increasingly questionable.

The BRICS moment

What was only discussed peripherally in Munich had already manifested itself in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025: The BRICS summit under the Brazilian presidency marked a turning point. The Rio Declaration called for a “revitalized and reformed multilateralism” with a “central role for the UN” – a formula that sounds innocuous but demands a fundamental shift in power.

President Lula spoke of the “unprecedented collapse of multilateralism” and derived from this the necessity of far-reaching reforms. South African President Ramaphosa linked the debate to future-oriented topics such as AI governance. The message was unanimous: The Global South no longer wants to be a supplicant, but a co-creator.

The summit's six priorities — global health, trade and investment, development finance, climate policy, AI governance, and reform of the global security architecture — demonstrate the ambition: BRICS has long since become more than an economic forum. It is the institutional expression of a world that no longer wants to be governed by the West alone.

Europe's void

And Europe? Kaja Kallas, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, indignantly rejected the American rhetoric of the "civilizational annihilation" of Europe. Johann Wadephul, the German Foreign Minister, emphasized the "rules-based international order." These were the right reactions — and yet symptomatic of the European problem.

For in Munich, Europe is defining itself primarily by what it is not and does not want to be. Not American vassals, not Chinese puppets, not Russian victims. But what does Europe want to be? What role does the continent claim in the multipolar order? What instruments does it have to enforce this role? The honest answer is: Europe doesn't know. And worse still – Europe doesn't have a process to find out.

The missed decades

To understand the extent of this failure, one has to look back 26 years. In September 2000, 149 heads of state and government gathered in New York for the United Nations Millennium Summit. It was a moment of optimism. The Cold War was over, globalization promised prosperity for all, and the rules-based order seemed to be taking hold.

The Millennium Declaration identified the challenges: Security Council reform, poverty reduction, conflict prevention, and fair globalization. These were the right issues. But what followed?
Europe spent the next two decades getting bogged down in internal debates. While China was building the Belt and Road Initiative, Europeans were arguing about budget rules. While the BRICS countries were creating alternative financial institutions, Europe was debating limits. While India and Brazil developed their strategic autonomy, Europe became dependent on Russian gas and Chinese supply chains.

The Munich Security Index as a mirror

The Munich Security Index 2026, compiled by Kekst CNC, reveals the gap between Western and BRICS perceptions with alarming clarity. While G7 citizens are concerned about cyber threats,
While terrorist attacks and disinformation are seen as the greatest risks, BRICS populations prioritize climate change and social inequality.

These are not just different priorities — they are different worldviews. The West sees itself threatened from the outside, while the Global South struggles with structural injustices. Europe has failed to understand these differing perspectives, let alone bridge them.

What Europe lacks

The diagnosis is clear, the treatment complicated. First, Europe lacks a common strategic culture. National reflexes — French grandeur, German export fixation, Eastern European security anxieties — overshadow any comprehensive European strategy. What is discussed as “strategic autonomy” remains rhetoric without operational substance.

Second, Europe lacks the institutional capacity for swift decision-making. While China is pushing ahead with its Belt and Road Initiative by decree and the US, under Trump, is governing by executive order, Europe takes years for every change of direction. The unanimity rule in foreign policy is not a safeguard of sovereignty, but rather a guarantee of paralysis.

Third, Europe lacks a narrative. China offers the “Chinese Dream,” America “Make America Great Again,” and even Russia has its “Russian World.” Europe has the “rules-based order” — a concept that excites no one and whose rules are increasingly being written by others.

Fourth — and perhaps most importantly — Europe lacks the willingness to accept power as a legitimate instrument. For decades, the continent could hide behind American guarantees while simultaneously claiming moral superiority. This comfortable position no longer exists. In a multipolar world, Europe must either project power or become irrelevant.

The uncomfortable questions

The 2026 Munich Security Conference raised questions that Europe can no longer ignore. Is the EU ready to build a common army—not in ten years, but now? Is Germany prepared to subordinate its export interests to geopolitical necessities? Is France ready to Europeanize its seat on the UN Security Council? Is Eastern Europe ready to no longer define security primarily through Washington?
The honest answer to all these questions is probably: no. And therein lies the problem. Europe is discussing its future as if it had unlimited time. But the new world order isn't waiting for Europe to rediscover itself.

Potential is not policy. And the 2026 Munich Security Conference demonstrated that Europe has not translated its potential into action. The continent stands by the roadside, watching the caravan go by. "We were once great, too," it seems to be shouting. But greatness must be earned anew every day.
The coming years will show whether Europe learns this lesson. The alternative is not destruction — but irrelevance. In a world shaped by China, America, and emerging powers, Europe could become a museum of its own history. Beautiful to look at, but with no impact on the present.

That would be the real "underdestruction": not destruction by external enemies, but self-marginalization through strategic inaction. The Munich Security Conference 2026 was a warning. Whether Europe heeds it is the crucial question of the coming years.

Russia
Source: mid.ru

On February 17, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hosted a working lunch with the heads of diplomatic missions from BRICS member and partner countries accredited in Moscow.

The discussion focused on current global issues, highlighting the importance of preserving the UN’s central role. The participants stressed the need for joint efforts to reform the global governance system and enhance the influence of countries representing the Global Majority in international decision-making. A shared commitment was also expressed to raising BRICS international profile and strengthening coordination among its members in key multilateral forums.

The participants held a comprehensive exchange of views on enhancing the strategic partnership within the group, taking into account the priorities outlined under India’s BRICS chairmanship this year.

The UK
Source: www.e-ir.info

The World Economic Forum, which has met annually in Davos, Switzerland, since 1971, revealed—through remarks by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—the contested nature of the contemporary international order, even among global political and economic elites themselves. In his speech, Carney drew attention to the farce of the “rules‑based liberal international order,” whose reach, he argued, has never been truly universal but rather selectively imposed on less powerful states within the international system. According to the Canadian Prime Minister, this farce has sustained the illusion of the survival of an order that had already come to an end with the retrenchment of the role played by the United States after World War II as a provider of global public goods, both in the financial and security domains. For Carney, it is urgent to name this farce and to seek new grammars and “collective investments in resilience” through concerted actions among middle powers, including Canada. Carney received a standing ovation for his speech, which immediately gained global visibility and circulation, projecting the Canadian Prime Minister among Western elites as a visionary anticipating the contours of a new international order in the making.

The spotlight cast on Carney merely illuminates what Dipesh Chakrabarty termed the “inequality of ignorance”: the Global North’s privilege of ignoring much of the experience, production, and accumulation of knowledge in the Global South. The dissonant notes of Carney’s speech in Davos resonated with scholars, policymakers, and activists from the Global South, allowing us to affirm that we are at the forefront of discussions about the farce of the liberal international order constructed by the Global North and about the consequent reproduction of its privileges. Rather than representing the locus of backwardness and dysfunction—as portrayed in Western mainstream media and academia—the Global South represents the future: a space of innovation where alternatives are daily rehearsed, experienced, and debated. Yet this effervescence of ideas is rendered invisible and erased by the geopolitics of knowledge that, since colonial times, has authorized and amplified certain voices—such as that of a Canadian leader in Davos—while disauthorizing others, even when more numerous, such as those of the Global South.

BRICS can be understood precisely as one of these spaces of institutional innovation and political articulation of alternatives to the liberal international order. BRICS is a grouping of emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, an invited member still pending full formal accession—whose main purpose is to promote the transformation of the global governance system established after World War II through the reform of traditional financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. It also seeks to contribute to the construction of a multipolar order that reflects the distribution of power in the twenty‑first century and offers greater decision‑making power to countries of the so‑called Global South. Since 2009, the grouping has held annual meetings chaired by one of its member states. The first BRIC Summit—without South Africa—was held in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

However, BRICS did not emerge in 2009 as a tabula rasa; rather, it emerged imbued with memories and lessons from previous struggles conducted within various movements, groupings, and deliberative arenas of the “Third World,” such as the Non‑Aligned Movement, the Group of 77, and demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), among others. It is worth noting that all these spaces were permeated by demands for a revision of the liberal international order, which excluded less developed countries from international decision‑making and whose norms—such as sovereignty, proclaimed as universal—were routinely violated by great powers, not accidentally but as what Stephen Krasner termed “organized hypocrisy.”

It should be recalled that much of the Global South was still under colonial rule when the liberal international order was designed and institutionalized in the post‑World War II period. Looking at the design of its institutions—such as the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods Institutions (IMF and World Bank)—it becomes evident that they were structured by inequality, as great powers arrogated to themselves the privilege of veto power, which in practice allows them to invalidate the decisions of the majority of states in the international system. In the case of the Security Council, the victorious powers of World War II granted themselves permanent seats and veto power on the premise that the body’s efficiency depended on the military capacity and special responsibility of the great powers for maintaining order. The prevailing view is that a more democratic Security Council would compromise the body’s efficiency. Yet what we have today is an institution that is neither representative nor efficient. It is scandalous that, even today, when more than half of the world’s conflicts take place on the African continent, no African country is represented on the Council as a permanent member. Africa thus continues to be treated as an object of intervention—a topic rather than a subject with decision‑making power or an intelligible voice. Or, to use Carney’s expression, Africa is not at the table but on the menu.

BRICS has adopted a divergent vision: efficiency and representativeness are two sides of the same coin, thereby challenging the notion that the powerful possess an exceptional capacity to foresee and shape the world’s future. In line with critical and feminist authors such as Du Bois and Cynthia Enloe, the periphery is seen as better able to diagnose international problems, since it directly experiences the system’s inequalities and contradictions. Yet this vision is not free of contradictions. For example, Brazil has consistently called for the democratization of the Security Council and has pressed for the inclusion of the issue in BRICS declarations. However, when the time came to expand the number of full BRICS members beyond the original five, Brazilian diplomacy showed hesitation, fearing that expansion could transform BRICS into a new G77, create coordination problems, hinder consensus, and reduce Brazil’s influence within the grouping.
If the post‑World War II period was seen as a turning point giving rise to a new international order—one that, as Carney suggests, enabled countries like Canada to prosper—for the “Third World”, these promises never materialized. For this group of countries, the new order retained much of the old colonial order in terms of material and epistemic inequality. These countries remained subject to the international division of labor as commodity exporters, and their voices and aspirations were systematically disauthorized by political and economic elites.

Even so, these states were sufficiently adept to mobilize the rules of the new order in their favor. This became visible in the UN General Assembly, where, as a majority, they coordinated and voted for resolutions promoting a “new international economic order” (NIEO) aimed at ending structural inequalities embedded in the post‑war economic, financial, and trade architecture. The NIEO articulated an alternative model of development oriented toward transforming the colonial division of labor through industrialization, productive diversification, economic sovereignty, and practices of restitution for centuries of colonial exploitation and resource drain. This redirection of institutions toward the agenda of developing countries was also evident in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), which, although guided by liberal rationality, were reshaped under collective pressure from the “Third World.” As early as the 1960s, developing countries organized within UNCTAD and the G77 demanded equity in international trade rules, resulting in the inclusion of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) in their constitutive agreements. SDT constituted an important victory for these countries, as it recognized that the post-war order was asymmetric, requiring greater flexibility, time, technical support, and capacity-building for developing countries to implement trade agreements.

Ironically, today BRICS has become one of the main defenders of a rules‑based international order—albeit one that is qualified, reformed, and democratized. In BRICS declarations, we find support for sovereignty and territorial integrity, multilateralism, the centrality of the United Nations, and a rule‑based multilateral trading system, alongside calls for reform of the Security Council and Bretton Woods Institutions. What we witness today is that it is precisely the United States—one of the main architects of the “liberal international order”—that has been declaring its obituary.

In Gramscian terms, we are witnessing a transition from an old order that has not yet died but is agonizing, and that, as Carney notes, is nostalgically remembered by much of the Western elite. Indeed, it is still easy to identify significant segments of the European population that long for the return of the old normal, characterized by the liberal international order, by the welfare state — which exported its contradictions to the periphery of the international system — and by the sense of security provided by the transatlantic alliance, materialized in NATO, which guaranteed them material and psychological comfort. Yet the United States, under Trump’s leadership, has chosen to detach itself radically from that order, proclaiming it “obsolete.”

To this end, the United States has withdrawn from 66 international organizations, 33 of them linked to the UN, launched a tariff offensive against both rivals and allies, and has increasingly, and without hesitation, resorted to force to impose its will, as exemplified by the interventions in Iran in 2025 and in Venezuela in 2026. Yet there is one aspect of this order that the United States refuses to relinquish: the hegemony of the dollar, largely guaranteed by the Bretton Woods Institutions, which reproduces the centrality of a dollarized financial system. Trump warned BRICS countries not to continue playing the ‘de-dollarization’ game if they did not wish to become targets of a 100 percent tariff. BRICS countries’ efforts to increase the use of local currencies in trade transactions were perceived as an existential threat to the country, prompting Trump to declare that the ‘dollar is king’ and that no one can challenge it without facing severe consequences.

In Gramscian terms, these desperate actions by the United States can be read as ‘morbid symptoms’ of a declining hegemonic power. Realist theorists such as Edward Carr and Hans Morgenthau also warned that the effective use of force by a great power, far from being a sign of strength, signals its weakening, insofar as it reveals that the power in question has become incapable of imposing its will by other means, such as persuasion.

In this dispute over the contours of the new world order, BRICS countries are at the forefront. The main ideas advanced by Carney are present in BRICS discussions and in the foreign policy orientation of the group’s member states, such as the search for diversification, the combination of ethics and pragmatism, and the establishment of issue-based coalitions with partners who share sufficient common ground to act together, without the expectation that all will share the same values.
‘Collective investments in resilience’ advocated by Carney in place of self-help constitute precisely the core of one of the axes of the next BRICS Summit, to be held in India in the second half of the year. This axis aims at ‘strengthening economic, social, and institutional resilience to navigate global uncertainties, supply chain disruptions, health challenges, and climate risks.’ Indeed, navigating turbulent waters has been a historical learning process for states and peoples once colonized, who, over the years, have developed different strategies in the pursuit of autonomy in the face of the neocolonial and imperial dynamics of the great powers, which, as we have seen, have never recognized sovereignty as a norm in the periphery of the international system.

Faced with the turbulent context of Trump’s second term, which has spared neither allies nor rivals with its aggressive unilateralism, countries of the Global North—historically dismissive of the knowledge, experiences, and strategies of the Global South—have increasingly turned to diversifying partnerships to reduce their vulnerabilities, setting aside many of the narcissistic objections to forging alliances with states that have “different” political and economic systems. According to Carney, Canada has been resorting to a new decentralized strategy, forming alliances “issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together,” which, as he notes, “in some cases (…) will be the vast majority of nations.” In this way, it has been building a dense network of connections through trade, investment, and culture to deal with future challenges and opportunities. Moreover, Carney proposes the creation of a third-party locus with impact, capable of circumventing rivalry between the superpowers, reproducing—without attribution—the logic of the Non-Aligned Movement, which, during the Cold War, advocated the creation of a third autonomous space in relation to the disputes between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the strategies proposed by Carney have received different names: “non-alignment” during the Cold War and, in the post-Cold War period, “active non-alignment” and “multi-alignment,” both heirs of non-alignment but adapted to new configurations of power. As TK Arun notes: ‘The strategy that Carney outlined has been called Non-Alignment from Nehru’s time.’

The concept of active non-alignment has been further developed by Latin American political scientists who, in 2021, published the book “El no alineamiento activo y América Latina”, which formulated new strategies for navigating an increasingly globalized and interdependent world. According to Jorge Heine, in this context, a more flexible approach is required than that prescribed by the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, which ideally sought to maintain equidistance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Under this new approach, rapprochement with either the United States or China is not rejected a priori, provided it is grounded in national interests and each course of action is evaluated on its merits rather than on abstract principles. The game becomes more complex as it unfolds across multiple fields and requires assessing which powers offer the most favorable conditions for each specific project. Brazil’s foreign policy under President Lula’s third term has been cited as an example of “active non-alignment.” To give one example, after Brazil became the target of Trump’s tariff offensive, which imposed fifty-percent tariffs on the country, it launched the “Plano Brasil Soberano,” (Brazil Sovereign Plan) combining emergency compensation measures for the most affected sectors with a strategy of market diversification aimed at reducing excessive dependence on both Washington and Beijing while expanding trade partnerships with the European Union, Arab countries, and the Global South.

The notion of multi-alignment was first advanced by India, inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement and grounded in the need to diversify relations to avoid excessive dependence on power poles. India, for example, is part of BRICS, a vocal platform for developing countries; it is also a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) — which includes China — while simultaneously participating in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) with the United States, Japan, and Australia—aimed at containing China in the Indian Ocean — alongside other bilateral and multilateral arrangements.

In a Foreign Affairs article published in December 2025, Tanvi Madan had already anticipated the appropriation of the doctrine of multi-alignment by Global North states under U.S. unipolarity. Indeed, it is no mere coincidence that two agreements—between the European Union and Mercosur, and between the EU and India—that had stalled for more than twenty years were unlocked precisely after U.S. threats to annex Greenland and distance itself from NATO.

The Western world long showed little confidence in the durability of the BRICS grouping, largely because it adopted Western institutions such as the European Union as its point of reference. Using such institutions as benchmarks for evaluating BRICS, the grouping was understood in terms of what it lacked: institutional density and convergence in domestic governance models. Yet reading BRICS as a lack overlooks the alternative trajectory of its member states relative to that of the great powers. As we have seen, these countries have been systematically subjected to foreign interference in their domestic affairs and therefore value institutions characterized by high levels of informality and resistance to rigid obligations and imperative conditionalities that might limit their autonomy.
One illustration of this flexibility is the positioning of BRICS countries regarding the recent Peace Council launched in Davos, from which Canada was disinvited following Carney’s speech. Eight Muslim countries, acting collectively, decided to join the Council; among them are Indonesia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—three new BRICS+ members—as well as Saudi Arabia, invited to BRICS but not yet formally admitted. Brazil, for its part, seeking to preserve its autonomy in the face of the new Monroe Doctrine announced by Trump for the Western Hemisphere, imposed two conditions: that, to join the Council, a Palestinian representative be included, and that the Council focus exclusively on Gaza. China justified its refusal by emphasizing the UN’s centrality, but it avoided escalation, reflecting its reluctance to provoke Trump at a time when trade negotiations were pending. Modi has kept his response open, partly to avoid displeasing the United States.

These divergent positions reflect pragmatic approaches calculated by each actor or group of actors, given the risks and opportunities associated with each choice. In this sense, Brazil’s position cannot be measured by the same criteria that guided the entry of countries such as Egypt, which has long played a central mediating role in regional diplomacy in Gaza, or the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which seek to project themselves as competent international mediators in the Middle East. Such moves should not be interpreted as signs of geopolitical alignment with Washington, but rather as an attempt to influence the transition process in Gaza from within.

Despite predictions of a short lifespan, BRICS has not only proven resilient but has also doubled its number of full members, adding further heterogeneity. Differences in political models, development paths, languages, and currencies among its members have been re-signified. Far from being seen—as developed by Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney—as a “problem” in the traditional sense of Western modernity, they have instead come to be viewed as a strength of the grouping. Although the expansion in membership has made achieving consensus more difficult, members have worked with an achievable consensus without forcing alignment across all dimensions. At the same time, a vision of a flexible BRICS has prevailed—one that does not impose conditions on its members but rather general principles, such as the rejection of unilateral sanctions imposed outside multilateral arrangements, including the UN Security Council and the WTO. It is noteworthy that flexibility, the search for possible consensus, and the need to engage with difference are increasingly recognized by the Global North as survival strategies, perhaps because it now finds itself in an exceptional situation of vulnerability that is, in fact, the regular and everyday condition of developing countries.

Hong Kong
Source: asiatimes.com

BRICS basket or digital clearing unit backed by currencies and commodities could supplant the buck and fulfill Keynes’s bancor vision

By any honest reading of history, the international monetary system was never neutral. It was a political settlement, forged in 1944 at Bretton Woods, that elevated one country’s currency to the status of global money.

That settlement—shaped by the ideas of Harry Dexter White and accepted despite the objections of John Maynard Keynes—served the world well for the post-World War II period. But its core asymmetry has outlived its legitimacy.

Today’s global economy is multipolar in production, consumption and distribution, but unipolar in its financial system. The dominance of the US dollar has created a structural imbalance: the issuer of the reserve currency can run persistent deficits, while the rest of the world must struggle to adjust through painful austerity, reserve accumulation or volatile capital flows.

This has created a persistent challenge for the global economy: dollars are American, but its problems are shared by developing countries. This is the very dilemma Keynes warned against when he proposed a neutral international currency, known as “bancor”, managed through a clearing union that disciplined both trade surplus and deficit countries.

Eighty years later, the case for a modern bancor has returned—not as a nostalgic revival, but as a practical necessity of the time. The most credible impetus for reform is emerging not from Washington or Brussels, but from the Global South, particularly the expanding BRICS grouping and its New Development Bank.

Beyond dollar hegemony

The debate is often caricatured as a geopolitical contest between the dollar and rival national currencies. That is the wrong frame.

Replacing one hegemonic currency with another would simply reproduce the instability of the current system. A Chinese renminbi-dominated order, for example, would raise the same concerns about asymmetry, external constraint and political leverage that now surround the greenback.

It seems that China, as the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods and technology, does not want its currency to become a global reserve currency. Doing so would likely cause the renminbi to appreciate, making Chinese exports more expensive and potentially reducing global demand for its goods, services and technology.

The real alternative is not another national currency, but a non-national one. This is why both the Global South and Global North should consider a BRICS currency for settlement purposes rather than as a reserve currency.

A BRICS-led reserve asset, structured as a basket or digital clearing unit anchored in a diversified set of currencies and commodities, could approximate Keynes’s vision for bancor.

Its purpose would not be to displace national currencies, but to act as a neutral unit of account and settlement for international trade and finance. Crucially, it would be governed multilaterally, with no single country able to weaponize it for domestic or geopolitical ends, as the US has been doing with the dollar.

This is not a utopian idea. Elements already exist in bilateral currency swaps, local-currency settlement mechanisms and pooled reserve arrangements. What is missing is integration into a coherent clearing system with automatic stabilizers—precisely what Keynes proposed 80 years ago.

Restoring symmetry and stability

At the heart of Keynes’s design was a principle still absent from today’s system: symmetry of adjustment.

Under a modern clearing union, persistent surplus countries would face charges on excess reserves, incentivizing them to expand domestic demand or invest abroad. Deficient countries, meanwhile, would have access to overdraft facilities that prevent sudden contraction.

This is not merely a technical fix. It would rebalance the global economy away from chronic underconsumption and deflationary bias towards stable, demand-led economic growth. It would also reduce the need for developing countries to accumulate vast dollar reserves as self-insurance for payment of import and foreign debt service—a practice that diverts resources from the domestic investment and social development they desperately need.

For many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, such a system would offer what the current one does not: macroeconomic policy space for their economies. Governments could pursue job creation, industrialization and climate investment without the constant threat of currency crises, global North economic shocks or World Bank- and IMF-imposed austerity measures.

Critics of reform often argue that the dollar system underwrites global trade and financial openness.
Yet, in practice, it has increasingly been used as an instrument of coercion—through sanctions, financial exclusion and regulatory overreach. This erodes trust and fragments the very globalization it claims to support. It is imperative to respond to US policy instability every four years and recently to its rising protectionism.

A neutral clearing currency would delink trade from geopolitical leverage. It would make sanctions more targeted and legitimate rather than resort to system-wide disruptions. It would also encourage genuine free trade by lowering transaction costs and exchange-rate volatility across diverse currency zones.

This is not an argument against open markets. On the contrary, it is an argument for a fairer infrastructure for open global markets—one that does not privilege the domestic policy needs of a single country over the stability of the global financial system as a whole.

Multipolar order

If Bretton Woods reflected the power realities of 1945, a new settlement must reflect those of 2026. Emerging economies now account for the majority of global growth and a rising share of trade, savings and investment. Yet they remain underrepresented in the governance of Western-dominated legacy institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.

A BRICS-anchored clearing union would not replace these institutions overnight. But it would create a parallel pillar, one that is more representative, more development-oriented and less loan-conditionality-driven. Over time, it could catalyze reform within older institutions, forcing them to become more inclusive and responsive to the concerns of Global South nations.

To succeed, any new system must avoid becoming a vehicle for the dominance of its largest member. That requires transparent rules, rotating leadership and voting structures that balance economic weight with regional representation.

The principle must be clear: no country, however large, can monopolize or weaponize the global financial system. That only levels the playing field for the Global South countries.

Skeptics will note that global financial orders do not change easily. They are embedded in legal contracts, financial markets and political alliances. But history shows that they do change, often in response to crisis. The breakdown of the gold standard, the creation of Bretton Woods and the shift to floating exchange rates were all once deemed improbable before 1944. Now we are at the same moment.

The transition to a 21st-century bancor need not be abrupt. It can begin with incremental steps of expanding local-currency trade within BRICS and partner countries; issuing bonds and development loans denominated in a common unit; creating a digital clearing platform for cross-border payments; and gradually widening membership to include other emerging and advanced economies willing to participate in the system.

What matters is the direction of the trajectory: away from a system defined by a powerful nation’s privilege and towards one grounded in multilateral balance.

New Keynesian moment

At the end of day, the choice is not between the status quo and chaos in the global financial system. It is between an aging system that generates recurrent instability and a reformed one that internalizes the lessons Keynes taught eight decades ago.

To be sure, a neutral, rules-based, symmetric financial order would not eliminate crises. But it would make them less frequent, less contagious and less unjust for every country. It would allow countries to trade more freely, invest more productively and grow more inclusively together in ways that best serve their nationals.

For too long, the architecture of global financial system has been written in the language of power. It is time to rewrite it in the language of justice, fairness and inclusivity.

The Global South, through BRICS+ and beyond, now has both the incentive and the capacity to lead that effort. The question is no longer whether a new bancor is desirable. It is whether the world can afford to wait any longer to create it.

Qatar
Source: www.aljazeera.com

Jim O’Neill, the economist who coined the term ‘BRIC’ 25 years ago, argues that the group is losing its relevance.

At its peak, the BRICS coalition of economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – was seen as a serious attempt to move away from the United States dollar and the domination of Western economic institutions like the World Bank, Group of Seven (G7), and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But BRICS members have different political agendas, and new forces are at play, argues economist Jim O’Neill, a member of Britain’s House of Lords.

O’Neill, who coined the term “BRIC” 25 years ago, tells host Steve Clemons that the US’s economic policies may be the driver of its own decline, coupled with the economic rise of China and India.

Switzerland
Source: unctad.org

As one of the world’s most important economic cooperation platforms, BRICS has expanded from 5 members to the 10 official members and 10 partner countries, with significant increase of its role in the international economic landscape. 

The trade among the 10 members has expanded very rapidly in the last two decades. On the export side, the intra-BRICS merchandise trade increased from $84.2 billion USD in 2003 to $1.17 trillion USD in 2024, growing at an annual average rate of 13.3 per cent, much higher than the rate for global trade (5.7 per cent) or overall South-South trade (9.5 per cent) in the same period.

Despite the rapid growth in the last 2 decades, the scale of intra-BRICS trade is still not comparable to their economic size or their trade capacity. The BRICS members collectively accounted for 27 per cent of global GDP or 68 per cent global South’s GDP. In terms of total exports, the share of BRICS is 24 per cent of the world’s or 53 per cent of the South’s total. But the scale of intra-BRICS trade only accounted for about 5 per cent of world trade and 20 per cent of South-South trade as of 2024.

The structure of intra-BRICS trade has evolved. Many BRICS members demonstrate persistent dependence on primary products exports while importing manufactured goods with higher technology intensity, though some of them show mixed pictures with exports of technology intensive products as well. India has seen moderate progress in export diversification. China represents the case of successful industrial upgrading, marked by transformation from labor-intensive to higher technology intensive manufactured goods exports.

On trade policy side, BRICS members so far mainly rely on soft initiatives to lay groundwork for deeper and more concrete cooperation. The ten BRICS member countries have joined numerous preferential trade arrangements, but a comprehensive trade agreement encompassing the entire bloc has yet to be established. This report suggests that BRICS may adopt a Trade+ strategy to build political willingness, initiate a region-wide trade agreement, foster linkages between trade and other policy action areas and reform BRICS trade workstreams. UNCTAD and other relevant international organizations can assist BRICS to strengthen the institutional capacities for stronger economic and trade cooperation with their expertise, experiences and networks.

Russia
Source: brics-plus-analytics.org

Earlier this week UNCTAD released a report on BRICS trade figures, with well-targeted and timely recommendations for the bloc’s trade policy. The report comes at a time when the BRICS is facing unprecedented pressure in the trade sphere, with a more coherent policy agenda for trade cooperation becoming a top priority for the coming years. We broadly support the policy recommendations provided by UNCTAD and believe that the BRICS could greatly benefit from putting some of these key recommendations into practice.

The first part of the BRICS report from UNCTAD presents summary stats and analysis on intra-BRICS trade over the course of the past several decades. Some of the key conclusions derived in the UNCTAD report include the following[1]:

• The total merchandise exports from BRICS countries to the world surged from $906 billion in 2003 to $5.9 trillion in 2024. This dynamic growth led to an increase in BRICS’ share of global exports from approximately 12 per cent to about 24 per cent.
• Intra-BRICS trade (on export side) rose from $84.2 billion USD in 2003 to $1.17 trillion USD in 2024, growing at an annual average rate of 13.3 per cent, much higher than the rate for global trade (5.7 per cent) or overall South-South trade (9.5 per cent) in the same period
• In terms of total exports, the share of BRICS stands at 24 per cent of the world’s or 53 per cent of the South’s total. But the scale of intra-BRICS trade in 2024 only accounted for about 5 per cent of world trade and 20 per cent of South-South trade which falls short of their role in international economic and trade landscape.

Importantly, the UNCTAD report also presents a number of policy recommendations for BRICS, most notably in the sphere of trade policy. These policy proposals in our view are very much on target and include the following (below is a condensed version that does not contain all the report’s recommendations)[2]:

1. Managing heterogeneity and policy diversity: recognizing complementarity as a strategic strength can serve as a foundation for deeper cooperation.
2. BRICS members may consider a Trade+ strategy, which includes three components:
3. BRICS may consider a bold decision to initiate a BRICS trade agreement/arrangement.
4. Fostering Trade + linkages with other policy action areas. On the basis of the existing initiatives, it is suggested to establish various task forces (TFs) with scopes focusing on selected issues such as a). trade + macro-finance coordination; b). trade + industrial development; c) trade + digital finance including discussion on a BRICS-wide regulatory framework; d). trade + agricultural development; e). trade + digital and data policies; f). trade + green low carbon transition;
5. Reforming BRICS trade workstream:

• For technical discussion at the BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues (CGETI)[3], it may introduce a Troika approach including two permanent co-Chairs + presidency country.
• Under the CGETI, designing a non-binding and voluntary dispute settlement procedure to help member states resolve trade and investment frictions.
• Establish a regular dialogue between CGETI and international organization/mechanism such as NDB, UNCTAD, WTO, World Bank, IMF, etc. to improve the relevance and influence of the BRICS trade policy discussion with multilateral trade agenda.

We support these policy recommendations and further note that they are very much in line with the thrust of our proposals on BRICS policy priorities in the trade sphere. In particular, we have argued in favour of a Troika approach to greater policy continuity, with our proposed BRICS Troika modality being modelled on the G20 framework and hence somewhat different from the Troika format proposed by UNCTAD[4]. The call on BRICS to recognize complementarity as a strategic strength is also in the vein of our earlier concept of BRICS “strategic complementarity” as a guiding principle for BRICS economic policy cooperation[5]. 

We also very much support UNCTAD’s call for a BRICS trade agreement – this would be broadly in line with our earlier proposals for BRICS+ and BEAMS frameworks predicated on trade agreements coordinated by BRICS across the main regional integration arrangements in which BRICS economies are members[6]. In this respect, given the rising role of RTAs in developing economies’ trade policies, we believe that a bit of a greater emphasis on the potential role of Global South regionalism and regional development institutions could have been made by UNCTAD in the list of its trade policy recommendations.

Overall, the latest report on BRICS produced by UNCTAD builds on earlier research efforts of this UN organization, including a BRICS Investment report[7] in 2023 as well as the reports “A BRICS Agenda for Enhancing Climate Finance”[8] and “Fostering BRICS leadership on climate ambition amid trade and climate tensions”[9] in 2025. In effect, UNCTAD is becoming the leading research platform on BRICS across international organizations – something that calls for greater cooperation on the part of the bloc with UNCTAD in designing future policy frameworks in the sphere of trade and economic cooperation.

The UNCTAD report on BRICS trade patterns may be accessed via the following link:
https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tcsgdsinf2025d2_en.pdf
[1] As per the report’s formulations: https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tcsgdsinf2025d2_en.pdf
[2] As per the report’s formulations: https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tcsgdsinf2025d2_en.pdf
[3] The BRICS Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues (CGETI), established in 2011, is a key contact group for BRICS Members to discuss trade and economic policy issues.
[4] https://brics-plus-analytics.org/a-brics-troika-format-for-chairmanship-transition/
[5] https://brics-plus-analytics.org/on-brics-strategic-complementarity/
[6] https://brics-plus-analytics.org/a-coordinated-trade-response-from-brics/
[7] https://unctad.org/publication/brics-investment-report
[8] https://unctad.org/publication/brics-agenda-enhancing-climate-finance
[9] https://unctad.org/publication/fostering-brics-leadership-climate-ambition-amid-trade-and-climate-tensions

Ireland
Source: internationalbanker.com


By Hilary Schmidt, International Banker

The prevailing global financial architecture has long been dominated by Western institutions and currencies, especially the US dollar. So, when the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, along with the bloc’s new members, unveiled BRICS Pay at the Kazan Summit in 2024, it marked a significant addition to the growing global stack of de-dollarisation initiatives that are challenging that dominance like never before. What might have initially seemed like just another cross-border payment project is becoming a key representation of broader geopolitical shifts worldwide. Indeed, if successfully launched, BRICS Pay could prove a powerful conduit for major emerging economies to achieve unprecedented levels of financial sovereignty.

At its core, BRICS Pay is an effort by emerging economies to build a cross-border payment infrastructure that reduces reliance on systems such as SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), the leading financial messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions worldwide and that defaults to transaction settlement in US dollars. This extensive network thus reinforces Western influence over global finance. But while it had long been regarded as a politically neutral infrastructure, SWIFT has recently become increasingly used to strategically sanction various entities, largely by restricting access to the system.

Framed as a viable alternative to SWIFT, BRICS Pay is being touted as a potentially significant threat to the West’s financial hegemony. The system involves several technologies, such as blockchain, digital platforms and mobile applications, to enable direct transactions between participating countries using their national currencies—or possibly in the future, a shared digital currency—and aims to offer a novel kind of financial architecture in which member countries can settle transactions in their own currencies.

The BRICS Pay protocol is also being developed as open source, with the platform’s decentralised nature helping to minimise transaction fees and ensure interoperability among participating nations. What’s more, it is expected to integrate members’ existing payment platforms that currently operate at national levels, including Brazil’s Pix system, China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and UnionPay network, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS).

In so doing, they could potentially circumvent any punitive measures from the West, if applicable, and continue conducting cross-border transactions. So, if a Brazilian company can transact with an Indian supplier in both reals and rupees—and without needing to use SWIFT messaging or US dollar accounts—they become less vulnerable to the full force of future sanctions. For many of its proponents, therefore, BRICS Pay’s most important attribute is its ability to promote financial sovereignty among participating nations.

Among the most fervent of those supporters is Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “It’s not about replacing our currencies, but we need to work so that the multipolar order we aim for is reflected in the international financial system,” Lula told the BRICS conference in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024, arguing that BRICS nations should develop alternative methods for cross-border payments to what he called “failing” Bretton Woods institutions.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the sheer onslaught of sanctions it has faced over the last four years, Russia has also been keen to push the development of a payment system that can blunt the dollar’s hegemony. “It’s not us who refuse to use the dollar,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said during the Kazan Summit. “But if they don’t let us work, what can we do? We are forced to search for alternatives.”

Regarding BRICS Pay, members of the powerful economic bloc have since heeded the calls of Lula and Putin, expediting the development of a more multipolar global financial framework that gives emerging economies additional options beyond the dollar. And today, the technology is being developed not only as a strong geopolitical indicator of financial sovereignty but also as a highly effective tool for trade efficiency.

“BRICS Pay also experiments with digital currencies, such as the e-CNY, which would, for example, allow Ethiopia to buy things from China without first having to exchange its currency into US dollars,” according to a May 2025 research paper published by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank and academy focusing on international relations. “Should digital currencies take off—which, although government policy is moving in that direction, is still a question for the e-CNY—this could potentially help to streamline global trade. More importantly, however, BRICS Pay serves as a defence mechanism against the dominance and weaponisation of the US dollar.”

From the West’s perspective, BRICS Pay may not represent an immediate threat to the dollar’s global supremacy. That said, it is already clear that should it succeed in its aims, such an initiative will do more to wean much of the world off its dependence on the US currency than to further boost its adoption. A weaker dollar, alongside reduced reliance on SWIFT, means that the traditional leverage on which Western nations rely for international diplomacy and sanctions enforcement could become markedly weaker—a shift that may well prove irreversible should a threshold level of worldwide adoption of de-dollarisation-focused solutions such as BRICS Pay be reached.

While US President Donald Trump did not single out BRICS Pay by name, he is evidently watching developments within the group with such concerns in mind. As president-elect, Trump threatened to implement “100 percent tariffs” on BRICS should they create “a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US Dollar”, before repeating the threat against “seemingly hostile” BRICS countries a few months later.

Relief for the West in the interim, however, might come from the fact that the development of BRICS Pay remains in its infancy, with achieving consensus across a number of key issues remaining a distinct challenge for member nations. “The technical goals of BRICS Pay include secure, real-time processing, full regulatory compliance and mutual access without interference from external institutions,” an October 2025 report published by GIS, an independent organisation for geopolitical analysis and forecasting, explained. “However, deep disparities in financial regulation, capital mobility, anti-money laundering rules and political trust among member states continue to obstruct meaningful progress.”

BRICS Pay’s current technical implementation also remains in the early stages. Reports indicate that various elements of the infrastructure—such as integration among national systems, including China’s CIPS, India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix and Russia’s SPFS—are still being explored and piloted. This suggests that the BRICS leaders themselves acknowledge that the project is part of a longer-term strategy to rebalance financial sovereignty, rather than a short-term disruption.

With such challenges in mind, it is clear that BRICS Pay will not displace the world’s predominant financial architecture any time soon. GIS also suggested that the eventual solution members may commonly accept would involve interoperable linking of national payment infrastructures rather than a single currency or centralised system. If so, such a compromise could still facilitate cross-border trade and financial messaging in local currencies—indeed, pilot programmes for cross-border settlements in local currencies have reportedly already occurred between Russia and China and India and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

“This approach avoids the immense political and technical difficulties of establishing a unified digital currency or clearinghouse, while still working toward BRICS’s goal of de-dollarisation,” explained Bob Savic, the head of international trade and sanctions consulting at the Global Policy Institute (GPI) and head of European Union trade and industry regulatory advisory at the Federal Trust for Education and Research, writing for GIS. “However, due to differing regulatory approaches, currency convertibility issues (notably with the Chinese yuan and Indian rupee) and competing national interests, the system will likely remain heavily reliant on bilateral agreements for several years.”

Whether BRICS Pay ultimately succeeds in achieving its ambitions remains to be seen. But at the very least, the project is raising pertinent issues surrounding financial sovereignty, the control of cross-border payment infrastructure and the future of global economic governance. As such, the technology represents one of a growing list of crucial milestones in a new era in which Western economies no longer have carte blanche to shape global systems as they see fit. Rather, emerging powers now have both the ability and the will to script their own financial futures.

USA
Source: globalsecurityreview.com

How could a quiet sentence from Washington rattle an entire European nation? Newly installed in the Oval Office, Donald Trump caused Europe to hold its breath when, in one of his most baffling statements, he claimed that Spain was part of the BRICS. An apparent presidential slip-up was enough to shake an entire national government and highlight the symbolic and political weight behind this acronym.

Far from being a mere slip of the tongue, the episode revealed the extent to which BRICS have established themselves as increasingly influential players in international politics and economics. The fear aroused by those words was no accident; it reflected the growing perception that this bloc represents a direct challenge to the established international order.

The informal BRICS alliance was formed in 2009, when several emerging economies decided to coordinate their efforts to strengthen their financial, economic, and political cooperation. Brazil, Russia, India, and China formed the group, which was joined by South Africa in 2010. Since then, the bloc has steadily increased its influence, becoming a central player in the international system. It currently represents about 50% of the world’s population and approximately 40% of global GDP in terms of purchasing power parity.

Today, BRICS is once again at the center of global debate. For those who failed to understand the significance of Trump’s words, or the reasons for the nervousness they provoked, it is essential to pause and analyze exactly what this organization is and why its rise is generating growing concerns about the international balance of power. The question, in this context, is inevitable: why is this institution attracting so much attention today?

After the end of World War II, the United States and the major Western democracies promoted a framework of rules, institutions, and relationships that is now known as the “liberal international order.” This system was based on liberal principles—both political and economic—and cooperation among states through multilateral organizations designed to ensure stability, growth, and collective security.

However, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the bipolar system, the international scene underwent a profound transformation. Washington emerged as the sole global superpower, a situation that led Francis Fukuyama to formulate his thesis of the “end of history.”
Over the last few decades, Uncle Sam has maintained its hegemony through the liberal international order, relying on political and military alliances, shared norms, and universalist values, with institutions such as NATO and the IMF serving as fundamental pillars. This framework has guaranteed the hegemony of the dollar and its so-called “exorbitant privilege,” which has allowed the United States to borrow on more favorable terms than any other country, finance its deficits without immediate risk, and consolidate its debt as the safest asset in the global financial system.

To fully understand this analysis, it is essential to add another key element of the Western system’s success: the SWIFT network. This global payment infrastructure connects most of the world’s banks and acts as an intermediary in international transfers, the vast majority of which are conducted in dollars. In this way, the dollar has become the dominant currency worldwide. However, despite its power and influence, the liberal international order is beginning to show increasingly evident cracks.
Over time, a series of events have contributed to weakening this system. The financial crises of recent decades have undermined confidence in Western elites’ ability to manage the global economic order, while the U.S. strategy of shaping the world according to its own interests has fostered a coalition of states that reject its hegemony. Similarly, specific episodes such as Brexit in 2016, President Obama’s blockade of the WTO Appellate Body—considered the guardian of free trade—and Donald Trump’s return to the White House have intensified doubts about the soundness and legitimacy of this system.

Added to this context is the use of the dollar as a tool of political pressure, particularly visible in the sanctions imposed on Russia, a move that has reinforced the perception that the U.S. currency also functions as a geopolitical instrument.

This set of factors has led many powers to seek alternatives that reduce their dependence on the system dominated by the U.S. In this scenario of a weakening liberal international order, recent moves by BRICS are perceived as a direct threat to Washington, once again placing the bloc at the center of global debate.

As already noted, the BRICS is an informal intergovernmental organization whose main objective is to increase its global influence and offer alternatives to Western-dominated institutions. Since its creation, the bloc has progressively expanded its reach and sought to reduce its dependence on the U.S.-led international financial system.

A key step in this strategy was the 2014 creation of the New Development Bank, aimed at financing development projects in emerging economies, as well as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a $100 billion fund designed to protect member countries from financial crises. These initiatives are perceived as direct challenges to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, essential pillars of the liberal international order.

Added to this institutional progress is the growing economic weight of the bloc. BRICS countries have established themselves as one of the main drivers of global growth, accounting for a significant share of industrial production and strategic resources.

It is in this context that BRICS found an historic opportunity to challenge the rules of the international economic game. In addition to developing their own institutions, in 2018 BRICS introduced a new international payment mechanism called “NIPS,” later known as BRICS Pay. Although the project progressed slowly for several years, it regained prominence in October 2024 during the 16th BRICS Summit, held that same year. On this occasion, the member countries formally presented and endorsed what was now called BRICS Pay.

BRICS Pay aims to facilitate international transactions in local currencies and reduce the centrality of the dollar. The system would rely on DCMS, a decentralized messaging network developed in Russia and distributed among member countries, allowing each state to control its own financial infrastructure and trade without using the dollar, thereby weakening its dominance. At the same time, the absence of a hegemonic actor within the system aims to foster more balanced cooperation and potentially reduce geopolitical tensions.

This project represents a direct challenge to both the United States and the SWIFT system and, by extension, to the liberal international order. If BRICS countries succeed in consolidating the success of BRICS Pay in the future, we could be witnessing a notable change in the world order as we know it today.

However, significant obstacles remain between ambition and reality. Although an initial prototype of BRICS Pay has been presented in Moscow, and it has been suggested that it could be operational by 2026, the path to a fully functional system is complex. The experience of the European Union shows that financial integration requires time, coordination, and a high degree of economic convergence.
Furthermore, BRICS countries have profound differences in their levels of development, monetary policies, and strategic priorities, which makes it difficult to build a stable and cohesive framework. Similarly, despite their growing economic weight, their global political influence remains limited and, for the time being, it is insufficient to displace Western primacy.

Even so, the bloc’s rapid rise in a brief time has altered the international balance and raised fundamental questions about the future of the global system. The central question is whether BRICS countries will succeed in consolidating themselves as a real alternative to the liberal order led by the United States or whether their challenge will remain, at least for now, a symptom of an increasingly fragmented and multipolar world.

Ana Lorenzo López is a geopolitical analyst currently collaborating with The Political Room, where she writes in-depth political and strategic analysis on international affairs. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.