Leading officials of the BRICS nations met last week for the 17th annual summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As American hegemony continues to strain and the U.S.-led unipolar world shows signs of stress and fractures, BRICS, the leading alternative to international governance, along with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, continues to organize and grow.

The seeds of BRICS were sown in 1996 with the core RIC grouping of Russia, China and India. Brazil joined in 2009, and BRIC held its first summit. A year later, South Africa became a member, and BRICS was formed. In 2024, Egypt, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Ethiopia joined. The international organization swelled to its current membership of ten when Indonesia became a full member at the beginning of this year.

BRICS is an international organization whose primary purpose is to balance U.S. hegemony in the new multipolar world. The group is neither an alliance nor a bloc, and it does not oppose the United States, with which many of its members have good relations. But it does seek to end the American-led unipolar world and replace it with a world with many poles and many nations who have equal voices regardless of their economic or military strength.

Though the U.S. and its Western allies dismiss BRICS with a broad brush as being, at its core, an alliance of autocracies, its membership list refutes that criticism. Multipolarity, which the organization promotes, includes respect for polyculturalism. Some BRICS members are autocracies, some are democracies, and some are a mix. Notably, BRICS includes three of the four largest democracies in the world, and with India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, four of its 10 members are democracies.

BRICS is a truly global organization, with members from Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It also now has ten partner countries hailing from a variety of regions: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Uganda, Cuba, Bolivia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dozens more states are lining up at the door. BRICS now represents half the population of the world and 41.4 percent of GDP.

The BRICS group is diverse. Members lack a common ideology and have different and sometimes even conflicting goals. That is the meaning of multipolarity—a point often missed by Western critics who identify as potential weaknesses the “questions about the shared goals” and the “increasingly heterogeneous” nature of a group that is “divided.” When The Guardian says that the “recent rapid expansion… has diluted its coherence as a body,” it is misunderstanding the entire meaning of multipolarity.

After the welcoming and introductory remarks, paragraph five of the 2025 BRICS Rio de Janeiro Declaration reaffirms the group’s commitment to multipolarity: “We reiterate our commitment to reforming and improving global governance by promoting a more just, equitable… representative… multilateral system.” Paragraph eight declares that multipolarity is already a reality and says, “it is crucial that developing countries strengthen their efforts to promote dialogue and consultations for more just and equitable global governance and mutually beneficial relations among nations.”

“If international governance does not reflect the new multipolar reality of the 21st century,” Brazil’s President, Lula da Silva, said in his opening remarks, then “it is up to BRICS to help bring it up to date.”

Despite Western warnings of BRICS’ heterogeneous nature, da Silva seems to have succeeded in his goal of keeping the members unified. In the section on “Peace, Security and International Stability,” the declaration stresses the need to prevent conflicts “through addressing their root causes” while “underscore[ing] that security among all countries is indivisible.” The mentions of “root causes” and the “indivisibility of security” are both coded support for Russia and its demand that the West cannot increase its security goals at the expense of Russia’s by expanding NATO into Ukraine. The declaration condemns Ukraine’s recent strikes on civilians and civilian infrastructure without criticizing Russia or blaming it for the war.

The declaration similarly supports Iran, condemning “the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It says that the strikes “constitute a violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations” and that “deliberate attacks on… peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency” are “in violation of international law and relevant resolutions of the IAEA.”

Many of President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, including his recent threat that “Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff,” were plainly intended to protect U.S. hegemony and erect a roadblock to the emerging multipolarity. But they’ve had the opposite effect, pushing targeted countries further into the embrace of BRICS and enhancing trade between its member states, including trade in local currencies instead of the U.S. dollar.

The declaration expresses “serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff[s]” that “are inconsistent with WTO rules.” It calls for the elimination of unilaterally-imposed sanctions, “which undermine international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter.”

One long-standing goal of BRICS that has most concerned the U.S. is emancipation from U.S. dollar hegemony, which the U.S. has used to coerce ideological, economic and political adjustment form other countries, and which has allowed it to be the only country in the world that can impose crippling sanctions on virtually any country it wants.

Following Trump’s recent threat that  BRICS countries “will face 100% Tariffs” if they challenge the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by “creat[ing] a new BRICS Currency” or “back[ing] any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar,” the declaration was carefully quiet on de-dollarisation, though it did support member cooperation on financing development.

But core individual leaders were less quiet in their remarks. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his video statement, said, “It is important to continue expanding the use of national currencies in mutual payments.” He added that “creating an independent payment and monetary system within BRICS will expedite currency transactions while also ensuring their effectiveness and security.” Putin then reported that the trend toward using national currencies for trade between BRICS partners is growing and that last year “the share of Russia’s national currency, the ruble, and the currencies of our friendly states in transactions with Russia and other BRICS countries reached 90 percent.”

Lula da Silva argued that the world “needs to find a way that our trade relations don’t have to pass through the dollar.”

Western media has claimed that this apparent unity is belied by the decisions of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping not to attend the summit. In fact, Putin did attend, albeit virtually. And his decision not to attend in person may be explained by the International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest that would in theory have to be executed by Brazil, a signatory to the ICC statute. Putin made the same decision for the 2023 BRICS summit in South Africa. As with South Africa, Brazil probably couldn’t provide sufficient guarantees that Putin wouldn’t be arrested. Lula was likely protecting Putin, and Putin was likely protecting Lula.

Tremendous significance has been read into Xi’s decision not to attend. Reuters reports that it stole “some thunder” from the summit. The Guardian reports that Xi’s decision not to go caused “dismay” and prompted speculation “that China’s enthusiasm for the organisation may have diminished.” The Guardian ’s diplomatic editor says Xi’s and Putin’s decisions “may be a sign that the group’s recent expansion has reduced its ideological value to the two founding members.”

But Xi’s absence was not a snub to Lula or Brazil: Xi went to Brazil in November for a state visit, and the two leaders signed several cooperation agreements. It is not a snub to Putin or Russia: the Chinese-Russian partnership is only getting closer. It may, however, have been a mild snub to India. Alexander Lukin, who is Head of Department of International Relations at National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an authority on Russia-China relations, suggested to me that Xi has missed some other events because of India, because “he is too big now to be lectured by anybody.” Still, Lukin said one can only speculate as to Xi’s reasons.

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CNN provides a more sober assessment than most of the rest of the mainstream press. Citing expert observers, it maintains that “the Chinese leader’s decision not to attend—sending his No. 2 official Li Qiang instead—doesn’t mean Beijing has downgraded the significance it places on BRICS.” CNN suggests that weakened U.S. relations with key partnerships that had threatened China, heightened focus on China’s domestic economy, along with only modest expectations of a major breakthrough at the summit this year, may simply have made the trip a lower priority. Still, Xi did send his prime minister, Li Qiang, who is a highly trusted second-in-command.

“I don't think there's any international significance” to Xi’s decision, Sarang Shidore, who is director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, told me. “It probably reflects some domestic dynamics within China. As far as Chinese commitment to BRICS is concerned, I don't see any pullback.”

Despite Western warnings that are more wish-casting than sober analysis, the just-concluded BRICS summit suggests that the international organization is a growing multipolar alternative to the U.S. unipolar model of world governance—an alternative that is increasingly attractive to the global majority.