Who’s afraid of BRICS?

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

This is a podcast by The Straits Times.

Bhagyashree Garekar (0:11)

Hello, and welcome to Asian Insider. I'm your host, Bhagyashree Garekar, signed on from Philadelphia, and we're recording this episode on Tuesday, the 15th of September, 2026 Our guest today is an expert on geopolitics, global order, and Asian security issues. All the hot topics we want to know more about. Specifically, we are talking about Brics. Brics now, as we know, started out as a meeting of five emerging powers, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. That was 17 years ago. Today these are consequential nations. They want to have their say on everything important, trade, finance, global governance, wars, and peace. Brics membership has also expanded to Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Ethiopia. So now we're talking about a club that has about half the world's population and fast growing economies that make up around 40% of the world's GDP.

Telling us more about Brics is Sarang Shidore. He's the Director of Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.

Welcome, Sarang.

Sarang Shidore (1:24)

Thank you, Bhagya. Very nice to be here. I know we have been planning this for a while and it's great to be here.

Bhagyashree Garekar (1:30)

So my first question to you, Singapore and most ASEAN nations are not members of Brics.

So why should we pay attention? Give me, let's say, your top three reasons why Brics matters.

Sarang Shidore (1:43)

Yeah, well, I think from ASEAN's perspective, actually, Indonesia, of course, is a member now, and Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia by far. So that's one big thing. But more than that, there's also Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia who have joined as what's called partner countries. This is a tier below the full membership. And, you know, many international clubs have dialogue partners and so forth. So this is perhaps something of that sort, still being defined. But they're certainly a part of Brics. They attend the Brics. I mean, they were there in New Delhi. They're going to be there in the coming years throughout. So in a sense, Southeast Asia is actually very much a part of Brics. And this has happened just in the last two years.

So there's actually a lot of opportunity here for Southeast Asia and ASEAN to get to know this grouping that has been around for quite some time and has some successes to its credit. And is important. Not because it has revolutionized something, massively changed any aspect of the world just yet. But then, you know, very few multilateral organizations managed to do that.

And Brics is relatively new. I mean, given that the G7 is decades old. Brics is really in all its five original members, came alive in 2011 And then, so it's 15 years. And it has expanded in the last couple of years, from five to 10 full members, and then adding 10 partner countries in total. So we have 20 Brics countries now. So one reason why we should care about Brics is the fact that actually is now quite large and covers practically all regions of the world outside the wealthy west.

And this is a very significant aspect of Brics because we have clubs that include wealthy western countries, either exclusively or mostly, let's say, like the G7, or as a very large part like the G20. And of course, in places like the UNSC and so forth, they have the majority of seats. The UN system is as well, they have disproportionate influence. In general, if you look at most international bodies, international organizations, they headquartered in Europe, very few are headquartered outside Europe and the United States. So this is a very interesting experiment of countries in the Global South. And now the Global South is a majority of Brics. And if you define it, if you exclude and I exclude the former Soviet states, but if you exclude them, then you have 16 out of 20 Brics countries are from the Global South. And we have a sort of an interesting coalition between these Global South countries, most of whom are, in fact, I would say all of them are developing in some form or the other. Some of them are middle income, for sure.

But they are not wealthy in the traditional sense of the term. They're not a Germany or Japan. But they are in coalition with China and Russia, which of course are great powers, which are rivals of the United States is quite clear at this point. But the Global South is not a rival to the US., except for Iran in that list. None of these Global South countries, and Cuba is the other one, actually. But none of these Global South countries have an adversarial relationship as such with the United States.