At the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 6 and 7, the group’s leaders will celebrate a significant expansion of their organization. Since 2024, the core BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have been joined by Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, bolstering the group’s status as a club of major emerging economies. Together, they now account for nearly 40 percent of global GDP by purchasing power, compared to just 30 percent for the Group of Seven (G-7) nations.
Curiously, Southeast Asian economies have been noticeably absent from BRICS activities for the vast majority of the bloc’s existence. The region’s largest economy, Indonesia, only joined in January. Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam recently decided to participate as partner nations, which could be a first step toward membership. The trend clearly demonstrates rising interest among Southeast Asian states in becoming enmeshed in this multilateral organization. What has changed?
One factor is the growing maturity of BRICS. For much of its existence, it was only an informal club with no clear goals other than to meet once a year. But with a growing membership and a list of aspirants, BRICS is here to stay and growing in heft. The question, however, is whether the bloc can switch from talking shop to policy mode and deliver substantial economic and trade benefits for participants.
The bloc does have a few initiatives. All four Southeast Asian participants have expressed keen interest in accessing the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA). The NDB is a multilateral development bank that could help countries diversify their sources of foreign investment in infrastructure and green technologies, shielding them from overdependence on China. Meanwhile, the CRA is a collective financial safety net that allows members’ central banks to draw on liquid funds in emergencies, whether due to short-term balance of payment pressure, currency crises, or other scenarios.
Beyond the economic incentives, another key selling point for Southeast Asian governments is that involvement in BRICS—now more than ever—is a smart strategic decision. Participation gives them the opportunity to engage in cooperative multipolarity on the one hand and express their aversion to intensifying great-power competition on the other—even though BRICS is co-led by China and Russia and viewed in many Western capitals as anti-Western (more on this contradiction below).
Southeast Asian states seek to elevate their engagement and cooperation with other parts of the global south—commonly known as south-south cooperation—for mutual benefit. To be sure, Russia is not part of the global south. But as nations such as Brazil, China, and India continue to rise, they are accelerating the transition from unipolarity to multipolarity in the international system, thereby offering developing countries more partners to work with, not least as a hedge against potential challenges and future geopolitical shifts.
Relatedly, Southeast Asian countries that participate in BRICS may hope to reduce their economic dependence on China, the United States, or both, making it harder for Beijing or Washington to force them to choose. This will become even more salient in the years to come if China and the United States cannot adequately address their core differences, such as those over the political status of Taiwan. But significant economic benefits from BRICS will hinge on whether the group can develop concrete policies to boost trade and investment.
Although the upcoming summit in Rio de Janeiro will help analysts further evaluate how the four new Southeast Asian participants are fitting in, perhaps the more important event to watch will be this October’s summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), hosted by Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. Serving as the ASEAN chair this year, Malaysia has prioritized BRICS-ASEAN relations—for example, by inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin and other BRICS leaders to the upcoming summit.
Malaysia is very likely to run into trouble with its approach, however. Not all ASEAN members are involved in BRICS or even interested in joining. One sticking point is China’s role as a core BRICS member. The Philippines and Singapore (and even BRICS member Indonesia and partner Vietnam)—might have serious concerns about granting Beijing a new access point to influence ASEAN as an organization, which already has to contend with splits on China strategy among its members.
Manila and Hanoi, for instance, would not want Beijing to gain any more leverage over ASEAN-led negotiations to establish a legally binding code of conduct in the South China Sea, where the Philippines and Vietnam have substantial sovereignty and territorial disputes with China.
Additionally, by encouraging cooperation between ASEAN and BRICS, Malaysia could inadvertently undermine ASEAN’s own strategic influence. ASEAN members routinely tout the importance of maintaining “ASEAN centrality,” meaning that the group as a whole should be cohesive and speak for the region, especially in the face of competing regional multilateral organizations such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and AUKUS.
But because ASEAN is quite diverse in its members’ views of their region and the world, it is highly unlikely to reach any type of consensus on joining BRICS as a bloc. Instead, individual ASEAN members are taking it upon themselves to engage BRICS, further diluting and weakening ASEAN from within. From the perspective of ASEAN member capitals, the bloc would rather remain focused on its own initiatives, such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a multilateral trade agreement between ASEAN and Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Like most of its members, ASEAN as a bloc has also sought to avoid the perception of choosing China over the United States, and further ASEAN integration with BRICS might do exactly that. U.S. President Donald Trump has railed against BRICS in the past, threatening a 100 percent tariff on its members if the organization created a new currency or supported any currency other than the U.S. dollar.
Indeed, by partnering more with BRICS, ASEAN might ruin its neutral reputation and thus any chance that it has to negotiate collectively with the Trump administration on tariffs. (Trump imposed additional tariffs of up to 49 percent on ASEAN members, although the rates are now all paused and set at 10 percent until July 9.)
Even if additional ASEAN members join in the coming years, it is unlikely that the bloc as whole will ever fully embrace BRICS. Participation in BRICS, which provides new outlets for economic cooperation and strategic alignment with other countries of the global south, should be sufficient for the individual states seeking to participate. From the perspective of the United States, it will be imperative to offer viable alternatives to BRICS so that ASEAN members feel less compelled to join it in the first place.
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