BRICS was formed to counterbalance the G7. While the G7 holds its annual summit in May, BRICS holds its own each September. This past weekend, leaders of an 11-nation bloc gathered in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit, and the joint declaration, as expected, keeps advocating a “multipolar world.”
It’s worth asking, plainly: is this a fortress under construction, or a bubble still waiting to pop? The honest answer is that BRICS has real mass, but mass is not the same as real teeth. Set against the G7, three cracks run through the foundation, and none of them will be repairable any time soon.
Crack one: Institutions that haven’t caught up to modernization
A fortress needs load-bearing walls — courts that enforce contracts, regulators that don’t bend to political whim, bureaucracies that move at the speed of commerce rather than the speed of patronage. This is where the gap with the G7 is starkest and least discussed. China and Russia run one-party or heavily centralized systems with no meaningfully independent judiciary. India has democratic institutions, but ones installed top-down by the British rather than built bottom-up by its own people — a foundation for how the state should relate to its citizens today. South Africa is still repairing state capacity after years of corruption.
The stark fact is that while BRICS carries real economic potential, its members have yet to catch up with the G7 on the civilizational floor. Until it builds an open, democratic, and predictable rule of law, its economic weight will keep outrunning its credibility, and the bloc will keep lacking the fundamental common values that hold a fortress together from within. Unfortunately, the institutional change that would fix this often means regime change — a prospect that remains unthinkable to some of BRICS’s more entrenched governments.
Crack two: A loose club mainly for hedging against the West, not united by mutual love
Just weeks before this summit, BRICS foreign ministers couldn’t even agree on a joint statement, because Iran wanted the war on it named explicitly and the United Arab Emirates refused. That is not a footnote — it is the club’s defining contradiction. Add India and China’s unresolved border standoff, the long shadow of Russia-China mutual suspicion beneath their current tactical marriage of convenience, and now Ethiopia and Egypt glaring at each other over the Nile dam, and you have a bloc where expansion has diluted coherence rather than building it.
A fortress needs a garrison that trusts one another to the core. BRICS has a garrison that mostly agrees on what it’s trying to counterbalance, and argues bitterly about everything else. That is a coalition of convenience, not an alliance.
Crack three: An export engine with no real customer base of its own
Here is where the bubble talk gets concrete. Beijing loves to point out that trade with Belt and Road partners now exceeds trade with the G7, that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is now China’s largest trading partner, and that the “Global South” is absorbing the exports the West won’t. Run the numbers, though, and the story falls apart fast.
ASEAN’s entire combined economy is roughly $4 trillion; the G7’s is roughly $52 trillion — 13 times larger. A single year of China-ASEAN trade already equals a quarter of ASEAN’s total economic output. No population at that income level organically consumes at that scale. What’s actually happening is that Chinese components flow into Vietnamese, Thai, and Malaysian factories, get assembled, and ship onward — very often straight to the same American and European shelves they were supposedly “decoupling” from. The customer hasn’t changed. Only the customs paperwork has.
And China’s own household market — the one force genuinely big enough to replace that demand — remains deliberately underbuilt. “Dual circulation” has been Beijing’s slogan since 2020, and the household consumption share of GDP has barely moved. This isn’t incompetence. Raising it would mean transferring income and autonomy from local governments and state-favored firms to ordinary households — households who, once financially secure, tend to start asking uncomfortable questions about how they’re governed, and to want more of a say in how things are run.
It would also mean pulling investment away from the cheap-labor export machine that still anchors the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy bargain. Meanwhile, the state-owned enterprises that soak up subsidized capital remain the least productive part of the economy, forcing Beijing into an uneasy dependence on the private firms it needs but doesn’t fully trust — a double-edged sword, as Jack Ma and Ant Group discovered when the state moved against them. Keeping consumption capped isn’t a policy failure in China so much as a coherent, if brittle, political choice.
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So: fortress or bubble? BRICS has genuine gravitational pull — it has shifted the conversation about representation in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and it offers real alternatives to countries tired of choosing sides. But a fortress needs institutions that outlast any one leader, allies who trust one another over historical grievances, and a domestic market strong enough to stand on its own two feet. On all three, BRICS is still pouring concrete, not standing on it.
Until the walls harden, the “multipolar world” on display in New Delhi last week is less a fortress than a large, loud tent — impressive from a distance, still flapping in the wind up close.
David W. Wang (@DavidWWang203) is a senior international business executive, geopolitical affairs consultant, analyst, and writer based in the Washington, D.C., metro area.