Is BRICS Losing Its Mojo?

Filed 1h ago · Via Foreign Policy · The Buffoon Desk

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Waltz Primordial

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: European Parliament · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

BRICS expanded from five members to ten core states plus ten partner countries after 2023, adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE, and promptly discovered that more members means more ways to fail to agree on anything. Egypt and Ethiopia declined to back South Africa's UN Security Council bid despite apparent prior commitments, and joint statements collapsed in September 2024 and again in April 2025 — the first such failures in the bloc's history.

The 2026 war involving the US, Israel, and Iran, which drew in the UAE, further split the group; a fragile 2025 joint statement did not survive the conflict's expansion, and May 2026's foreign ministers meeting again produced no joint statement. Iran pushed to have BRICS condemn 'state terrorism' aimed at the US and Israel; other members balked, leaving India to issue a chair's statement instead of a consensus document. A January 2026 naval drill branded as a BRICS exercise saw the UAE keep its ship docked and India stay away entirely, while India now hosts the group's 18th summit under a sunny agenda of resilience and cooperation that the last three years have not exactly modeled.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

An organization that cannot produce a joint statement about basic terrorism condemnations is not a bloc so much as a seating chart with a shared acronym. Growth was supposed to mean clout; instead it delivered new members who won't back each other's UN bids and a host nation performing unity it clearly doesn't feel. The agenda's four nouns — resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability — read less like priorities than a wish list.

Source: Read the original at Foreign Policy → Scored: Waltz Primordial · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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