Last week, there was much handwringing in Western capitals over Russia’s hosting of the BRICS summit in the city of Kazan. Western nations have poured resources into ostracizing Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the attendance of representatives from 36 countries underscored that President Vladimir Putin was hardly a global pariah.
Parading in front of the cameras, a glowing Putin embraced Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, conversed with Chinese President Xi Jinping, discussed the Middle East with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and welcomed none other than U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
Last week, there was much handwringing in Western capitals over Russia’s hosting of the BRICS summit in the city of Kazan. Western nations have poured resources into ostracizing Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the attendance of representatives from 36 countries underscored that President Vladimir Putin was hardly a global pariah.
Parading in front of the cameras, a glowing Putin embraced Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, conversed with Chinese President Xi Jinping, discussed the Middle East with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and welcomed none other than U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.
The meeting was the largest held by BRICS since its creation in 2009. Initially composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and later South Africa, the bloc welcomed four new members this year: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Now, the group represents more than 40 percent of the world’s population, and some 30 additional countries are considering joining it, including Turkey, a NATO member.
As BRICS has grown in size, Western analysts have expressed increasing concern over its reach. Some claim that the bloc is fanning anti-Western sentiment in the global south and that China and Russia have propped it up as an alternative or rival to the postwar order rooted in the United Nations and other key institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Yet these fears are overblown. Instead, BRICS should be seen as what it truly is: an effort to rebalance power within the existing order away from Western hegemony rather than to overthrow it.
The grouping’s official positions reflect not only the preferences of its most authoritarian members but compromises reached with other members, including democracies such as Brazil, India, and South Africa. The joint statement from last week’s summit is a case in point: Far from advocating for a break from the current international architecture, the Kazan Declaration reads like a cri de coeur for the existing order.
“[W]e reaffirm our commitment to multilateralism and upholding the international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN) as its indispensable cornerstone, and the central role of the UN in the international system,” the declaration states.
Throughout the 32-page document, the solutions proposed for nearly every issue—from peace and security to development aid and conflict resolution—are routed through existing institutions. Trade disputes should go through the World Trade Organization (WTO), financial reforms through the IMF and World Bank, pandemic prevention under World Health Organization guidance, climate action through U.N. climate change conferences, and human rights through the U.N. Human Rights Council. BRICS also advocates implementing U.N. General Assembly resolutions and supports a broad array of U.N.-led initiatives.
The group also explicitly endorses the G-20, an intergovernmental forum dominated by the United States and its allies, as “the premier global forum for multilateral economic and financial cooperation.” So much for BRICS as a rival to the current economic order.
Even democracy and human rights—topics not exactly favored in Abu Dhabi, Beijing, Cairo, Moscow, or Tehran—receive an unambiguous endorsement in the declaration: “We reaffirm our commitment to ensuring the promotion and protection of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all with the aim to build a brighter shared future for the international community based on mutually beneficial cooperation.”
So, is it time for the international community to rush to cast their vote for BRICS as “Best World Citizen of the Year”? Not quite.
First, a glaring gap exists between the declaration’s affirmations and the actual conduct of individual members. Russia is flagrantly violating the U.N. Charter’s fundamental norm of respecting another sovereign nation’s territorial integrity. China’s actions in the South China Sea directly contravene international law. Iran backs armed groups throughout the Middle East, some of which engage in terrorism. It’s difficult to reconcile Ethiopia’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Tigray or the UAE’s support for proxy groups in Yemen and Sudan with “full respect of the international humanitarian law in conflict situations.” India’s Muslim communities might well question the Modi government’s commitment to human rights. And the list goes on.
Second, sprinkled throughout the declaration are elements that counter or propose alternatives to existing international frameworks. A mention of the need to consider “the legitimate and reasonable security concerns of all countries” echoes justifications used by China and Russia for the war in Ukraine. The emphasis that “all energy sources” are critical for “just energy transitions” reads as a significant carve-out for major fossil fuel exporters such as Russia and Iran and coal-consuming economies such as India and China, despite these countries’ Paris Agreement commitments. Additionally, there is a push to elevate the group’s own financial instruments, such as its New Development Bank and a proposed payment system that could “de-dollarize” trade among members.
Yet such a mix of legitimate demands (rebalancing the international system toward a fairer world order), self-interests (evading U.N. sanctions), empty promises (“African solutions to African problems”), and brazen lies (respect for the laws of war) is typical of most multilateral statements. Past G-20 joint statements, for instance, are full of pledges on global rebalancing, IMF reform, and climate action that have never materialized.
Moreover, focusing solely on the perceived anti-Western elements of the summit overlooks significant diplomatic developments that bringing together countries with vastly divergent geopolitical alignments, economies, and political systems can achieve. While Western media coverage of the Kazan summit largely framed it as a win for Putin and as an anti-dollar initiative (one many experts believe will have minimal impact), three major outcomes went underappreciated.
The most important one is that Xi used the occasion to spell out Beijing’s red lines on the war in Ukraine: “We must uphold the three key principles,” Xi pointedly said in Putin’s presence. “No expansion of the battlefields, no escalation of hostilities, and no fanning of flames to strive for swift de-escalation of the situation.” This may fall short of the repudiation of Russia’s actions that international law demands, but given China’s critical—and mounting—role in propping up Russia’s economy, this is a consequential statement and unambiguous warning to Moscow not to escalate the conflict.
The second diplomatic result was the impetus it gave India and China to reach an agreement on their disputed border, following years of tortuous negotiations, prior to the meeting itself. It might be in the West’s interest to drive a wedge between the two countries, but lowering the risk of conflict between two Asian nuclear powers can hardly be considered a bad thing in itself.
The third achievement might be more tenuous but should not be ignored: The Kazan Declaration is a far cry from radical pronouncements about what shape the international order should take, such as Beijing’s vision for an order in which China would “take center stage” and Iranian lawmakers’ calls for “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Indeed, it orients BRICS further than before toward the existing international system. If that is the price that Indian, Brazilian, and South African diplomats managed to extract from their authoritarian counterparts for the platform they gave Putin, this should be recognized as skillful multilateral diplomacy on their part.
While some BRICS members may want to overhaul the international system, new world orders don’t emerge easily. History teaches us that they are forged only in the aftermath of major wars, when exhausted polities lay down new principles for how they intend to interact: the Westphalian system after the Thirty Years’ War, the Concert of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, the League of Nations after World War I, and the United Nations after World War II. Neither BRICS nor any individual country today has the power to create an alternative to the postwar order.
True, some of this recalibration might come at the expense of Western influence and interests, potentially advancing goals counter to a liberal international order. The bloc may indeed provide cover as a significant diplomatic platform for actors or actions that violate or attempt to subvert the basic norms of the global order. However, as a multilateral forum—not a global institution—BRICS fundamentally lacks the mandate to address deeply divisive issues such as conflict resolution or U.N. Security Council reform.
BRICS countries aren’t necessarily more guilty of these types of double standards than Western ones. Washington insists that it stands by the rules-based international system even as it continues to carve out special rules for itself, as evidenced by its violation of WTO rules, its shielding of Israel at the U.N. Security Council, and its refusal to join key international agreements, including the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Labeling attempts by non-Western groups to gain more weight in international relations as a breakdown of multilateralism, as is often heard in Western capitals, sidesteps the West’s own responsibility and unwillingness to take steps toward long overdue reform—whether that’s the need to fix the global financial architecture, respect climate pledges and assume responsibilities for climate impacts in developing countries, curb double standards in the invocation of international humanitarian law, fulfill aid and development commitments, or lessen drastic intellectual property rules that prevent poorer countries from producing lifesaving medicine.
When the West conflates demands for a fairer international system with a plot to dismantle it—the perennial “me or chaos” argument—it undermines the legitimacy of the principles that urgently need global safeguarding: adherence to international law, the prohibition of wars of aggression, recognition that individuals and civilians have both a legal status and rights, and the necessity of global governance beyond mere multilateralism. If the West refuses to lead on these, it can hardly complain about the rise of groups such as BRICS.
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