Name: BRICS: The Rise of a New Global Order?
Uploaded: 2025-12-29T00:27:16.000Z
Duration: 9 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is a story about how the world's most powerful, richest country is slowly losing its influence.

Adverbs of degree

And it's evident here we can see across Brazil, thousands of Ford cars almost disappear.

Adverbs of manner

Meanwhile, China's BYD is becoming increasingly common.

Ford left a plant, abandoned byd, they modernized the plant.

They are now producing electric cars from Brazil.

It's evidence of the growing connection between Brazil and China.

This is a group that hopes to rival the US led G7.

The most important emerging economies in the world are the four BRICs.

My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.

This mantra, america first has created an opening.

The trade war increased the solidarity between BRICS nations.

The BRICS are now emerging as really the only global forum, global, that can stand up to Trump's trade war.

They want a multipolar world in which there are multiple centers of geopolitical influence.

But can these countries unite to become a meaningful global force?

To answer this, it takes an understanding of how economic power collided with circumstance and whether the group can overcome some big hurdles.

But first, the acronym BRIC was coined in 2001 by Jim O', Neill, who at the time was an economist with Goldman Sachs.

I thought it was quite clear that so called emerging markets were going to become more important to businesses.

And so I sort of played around with the idea and I wrote a piece called the world needs better economic bricks and the rest is history, so to speak.

Eventually it went on to be popular among the governments of these countries who held their initial summit and established BRIC in 2009.

The first ever BRIC summit is getting underway in Russia in 2010.

South Africa was invited because it was a major economy on the African continent.

Over time, more countries started expressing interest in joining brics.

China became a major trading partner and a major foreign direct investor in many countries across the Global South.

And a lot of countries saw this as an opportunity to elevate themselves geopolitically as they were not part of other multilateral groupings such as G20.

For instance, Brics is an inclusive formation that has the ability to change the trajectory of the Global South.

Four members joined in 2024 and this year Indonesia joined as well.

Look at how the original BRICs have grown compared to the G7 in terms of global GDP since 2009.

Now add in the expanded lineup and its share is nearly 40% in terms of GDP by purchasing parity, it has overtaken the G7 countries.

For most of them, this boom in population and wealth has also given the group more political might, which in turn has made more countries interested in joining brics main objective is to challenge the established world order which appeared after the end of the Cold War.

Russia is definitely interested in more member states of BRICS, partly to offset its relative diplomatic isolation after 2022.

Sanctions imposed by the US and Europe on Russia are one reason why trade among the bloc's first five members rose 40% to over 700 billion from 2021 to 2024.

Sanctions also contributed to an increasing amount of all this trade being done in local currencies.

That's use of the yuan bypassing the dollar in China's overseas transactions.

China represents more than 35% of Russia's external trade.

BRICS has even talked about a common currency.

Overall, BRICS countries supports reduced trade in US dollar as a tool as a method to reduce overall Western economic dominance in the global economy.

China's influence within the BRICS club cannot be overstated.

China is the biggest, most powerful, richest country in the BRICS group.

So the BRICS works as an instrument for China to improve its economic and political power on the global stage.

Since before the beginning of the brics, Lula has always been enthusiastic about China.

Brazil, under his first presidency in 2004 was one of the first countries to recognize China as a market economy.

Lula realized that China and Brazil had very complementary economies.

China wants to have access to a huge consumer market and it needs food security that Brazil can provide.

This graph shows Brazil's exports to the US.

From 2009, China was Brazil's top exporting partner and now it imports more too.

Well, there are some hurdles for Brazil and other BRICS plus nations.

Trade relationships within brics are not as developed as, say, within the eu.

Each country is dealing with the issue of tariffs individually.

Brazil doesn't really want to pick sides.

Brazil wants to have the ability to trade with the us, trade with China, with the European Union, all at the same time.

A variety of tensions between different BRICS members have kept the group from forming a united front.

But they have managed it with the New Development bank which finances projects across the Global south and provides loans with fewer economic and political conditions compared to the World Bank.

It's not focused on advancing Western values and human rights issues in the same way.

Small at the moment but with potential for growth.

So even as the US steps back from its role as a global leader, the disparate nature of the BRICS coalition is its weakness.

Although size gives it clout and opportunity, divisions may keep it from bending the global order towards its goals.

I think it's difficult for the BRICS countries to really pursue a joint path on the things that really matter for them collectively as well as for the world.

It's very effective as a symbolic grouping, but

how that evolves is probably going to depend to some degree how on all their individual economies do how they perceive the US is moving economically and politically and how seriously they themselves want to move on big global issues like climate change, infectious diseases, global trade and so on.