Picture this: a club that now represents almost half of humanity decides to build its own financial lifeboat while the old Titanic—the U.S.-led order—keeps ramming icebergs on purpose. That’s BRICS in late 2025. Everyone cheers the expansion, the new members, the talk of a common currency. Yet the ocean around them has never been angrier.
I’ve followed emerging markets for years, and right now something feels different. The optimism of the Kazan summit still echoes, but the threats have moved from theoretical to immediate. 100% tariffs are no longer a tweet—they’re policy. Proxy conflicts aren’t simmering on the periphery anymore; they’re lapping at the borders of core members. And the West’s economic “strength” increasingly looks like one giant AI hallucination waiting for a reality check.
The Real Test Has Only Just Begun
Forget the glossy headlines about BRICS+ now being bigger than the G7 in purchasing-power wise. Size isn’t resilience. The Soviet Union was huge too—right until it wasn’t. What matters is whether this loose coalition of sometimes-frenemies can withstand a coordinated squeeze most observers still underestimate.
America’s New Playbook: Aggression Toward Everyone
Let’s call it what it is. The current U.S. approach isn’t just tough negotiation—it’s economic coercion on steroids, and it’s being applied indiscriminately. Long-time allies get the same treatment as adversaries. Switzerland gets frozen assets shaken down “for Ukraine.” Europe is told to buy American LNG at triple the price or face tariffs on cars. Even Canada and Mexico aren’t spared.
This isn’t strength from confidence. It smells like desperation dressed up as dominance. When you have to threaten Spain—yes, Spain—over whether it joins a club you dislike, you’ve already lost the plot.
“Require commitment from these countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty U.S. dollar—or face 100% tariffs.”
— Official U.S. statement, early 2025
That single sentence tells you everything. Washington understands dedollarization is an existential threat. But instead of making the dollar attractive again—say, by running responsible deficits or respecting property rights—it reaches for the tariff hammer. Good luck selling Treasuries to nations you just strong-armed.
The AI Bubble Masking a Hollowed-Out Economy
Across the Atlantic, markets keep hitting all-time highs while Main Street feels recession. How is that possible? Simple: the rally is almost entirely concentrated in a handful of tech mega-caps riding the AI narrative.
Think back to 1999. Companies added “.com” to their name and shares went parabolic. Today they whisper “AI-enabled” and the same magic happens—except the valuations are roughly twice as insane. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, your grandma’s retirement account—everyone is stuffed to the gills with these names because index rules demand it.
When—not if—this unwinds, the wealth destruction will make 2000 or 2008 look quaint. And unlike those crises, the fallout will be truly global because emerging-market investors piled in too, chasing U.S. “safety.”
- Capital investment promises in AI measured in trillions
- Actual profitable business models still measured in… almost none
- Energy requirements that would need dozens of new nuclear plants just to keep ChatGPT-7 humming
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, sure. But gravity eventually wins.
Pressure Points: Where the West Is Turning the Screws
The strategy is straightforward: make membership (or even partnership) so painful that countries calculate neutrality—or outright alignment with the West—is the less bad option.
Russia’s Western Flank – Still the Hottest Front
Four years into the Ukraine conflict, the battlefield math is brutal. Kiev’s losses are catastrophic, yet European leaders keep writing checks and sending wonder-weapons that arrive too late and too few. Why? Because peace would expose the grift—hundreds of billions siphoned off, careers built on permanent crisis.
Meanwhile the Baltics accelerate ethnic cleansing by paperwork: Russian-speaking residents stripped of rights, pensions, even residency for “failing” language tests. It’s ugly, it’s illegal under EU law, and Brussels says nothing—because weakening Russia internally matters more than principles.
The Caucasus – Quietly Slipping Away
Armenia’s pivot westward after the Nagorno-Karabakh disaster is complete. Leaving the CSTO, inviting U.S. private military companies to patrol its southern border—these aren’t small moves. Azerbaijan plays both sides masterfully: Western arms contracts one day, massive fruit exports to Russia the next.
Kazakhstan performs the tightrope walk of the decade. Uranium giant, Turkic brother, Russian neighbor, Chinese Belt-and-Road hub—and now signing “critical minerals” deals in Washington. One wrong step and the country becomes the next color-revolution target.
Energy Choke Points and Currency Experiments
Look at Serbia—surrounded, sanctioned on its only refinery because it’s Russian-owned, yet still refusing to join anti-Russia sanctions. How long before street protests (spontaneous, of course) demand “European integration”?
Or Venezuela—literally having its oil tankers seized on the high seas while new BRICS partner status is still warm. The message is crystal clear: join BRICS and we will make an example of you.
So How Resilient Is BRICS, Really?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve come to after watching this unfold: BRICS is stronger than Western commentators admit and weaker than its own propaganda claims.
- Strengths nobody can take away: demographic weight, resource control, manufacturing capacity, and a burning memory of Western hypocrisy.
- Weaknesses nobody can hide: no common security architecture, wildly divergent interests (India vs China, Saudi vs Iran), and still far too much trade invoiced in dollars out of sheer habit.
The bloc has survived the first shock—expansion happened despite threats. The next two years will test whether it can survive the counter-shock.
My baseline scenario: BRICS doesn’t collapse. It probably doesn’t launch a gold-backed currency in 2026 either. What it almost certainly does is muddle through—deepening bilateral payment systems, expanding the New Development Bank, and quietly routing more energy and commodity trade outside dollar SWIFT. Slow, frustrating, uneven—but enough to keep the project alive while the West wrestles with its own crises.
Because here’s the part most analysts miss: time might not be on Washington’s side. An AI bubble burst combined with trillion-dollar deficits and a president who thinks debt is free could accelerate the very dedollarization he’s trying to stop.
In other words, BRICS doesn’t have to win outright. It just has to not lose faster than the current hegemonic system implodes under its own contradictions.
And right now, that feels like a bet I wouldn’t mind taking.
The storm is here. The question is no longer whether BRICS will be tested—it’s whether the testers themselves can weather what comes next.
