When leaders of the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa announced at their 15th summit in Johannesburg that they would invite six new members to join the bloc, representatives of those countries responded with enthusiasm. Mohammad Jamshidi, Iran’s deputy chief of staff for political affairs to the president, called the invitation to join BRICS a “historic achievement and a strategic victory.” Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed celebrated the invitation as a “great moment” for the east African nation. United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan underlined the group’s important role in global affairs and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he looked forward to working with BRICS to “raise the voice of the global south.” Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan underlined the contributions his country could make to the grouping, though he said his government needed to look at the details before making a final decision. Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández, for his part, hailed the BRICS invitation as a “great opportunity” that would “strengthen” his country.
When leaders of the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa announced at their 15th summit in Johannesburg that they would invite six new members to join the bloc, representatives of those countries responded with enthusiasm. Mohammad Jamshidi, Iran’s deputy chief of staff for political affairs to the president, called the invitation to join BRICS a “historic achievement and a strategic victory.” Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed celebrated the invitation as a “great moment” for the east African nation. United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan underlined the group’s important role in global affairs and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he looked forward to working with BRICS to “raise the voice of the global south.” Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan underlined the contributions his country could make to the grouping, though he said his government needed to look at the details before making a final decision. Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández, for his part, hailed the BRICS invitation as a “great opportunity” that would “strengthen” his country.
Yet while the governments of Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates can safely be expected to officially join the BRICS grouping on Jan. 1, 2024, the situation in Argentina is different. South America’s second-largest nation will hold presidential elections on Oct. 22 and Fernández’s successor will be inaugurated in December—and will have to quickly decide whether to accept the BRICS grouping’s invitation. While the governing party’s candidate Sergio Massa (whose bloc came in third in the recent primaries) would no doubt follow Fernández’s lead and join, Javier Milei and Patricia Bullrich—the candidates whose coalitions came in first and second during the primaries—quickly vowed to reject the invitation. Milei, a far-right maverick candidate surfing an anti-establishment wave, has been fiercely critical of China and Brazil and categorically criticized the BRICS grouping, saying: “I defend liberty. China, Putin, and Lula don’t.” On another occasion, Milei said China had an “assassin government.” Meanwhile, the center-right Bullrich promised to reject the BRICS invitation, citing both the war in Ukraine and Argentina’s troubled relationship with Iran, in the context of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that remains unresolved until this day—adding Argentina still had “an open wound” with Iran.
It is easy to brush off such rhetoric as little more than campaign tactics. Former Argentine President Mauricio Macri, a Bullrich ally, also promised to reduce the country’s dependence on China when he was on the campaign trail in 2015, only to recognize China’s irreplaceable importance once in office. Recognizing the grouping’s increasing relevance, Macri even participated, as a guest, in a BRICS summit in 2018. A pro-BRICS stance by both Argentine opposition candidates would, perhaps, be an implicit recognition of the current government’s foreign-policy triumph, especially given the long list of BRICS applicants that have not received an invitation. And with the far-right insurgency candidate largely setting the tone of the debate and forcing the others to respond to his proposals, it may be only natural that Bullrich may see herself forced to take a tougher stance on China, which is one of Milei’s favorite targets.
Yet while Bullrich may repeat Macri’s turn towards pragmatism, frontrunner Milei is unlikely to do the same if elected: He has called for abandoning Argentina’s peso and adopting the U.S. dollar, a posture diametrically opposed to the BRICS grouping’s efforts to reduce the relevance of the U.S. currency. Provided that Milei does not abandon many of his radical campaign promises, his victory would probably make Argentina the first country to decline the invitation to join the BRICS bloc—a blow to China’s ambition for the grouping to become part of a China-centric order, as well as a setback for Brazil, which lobbied on behalf of Argentina’s accession.
Setting aside the politics, what are the merits of the proposal for Argentina itself? The somewhat unexpected invitation to join the BRICS grouping has led to a lively debate among foreign-policy analysts about the advantages and costs of becoming a member. Most describe the invitation as an opportunity. BRICS accession would help Argentina engage in “soft balancing” against the United States, argued Bernabé Malacalza and Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, who teach international relations at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. It would, they wrote, help Argentina adapt to a multipolar world while crafting a strategy that allows it to be on good terms with both the West and the rest, a trick Brazil pulled off. In the same way, Mariela Cuadro, Bruno Dalponte, Julián Kan, and Alejandro Rascovan wrote that BRICS was “not an anti-United States alliance”; membership would help Argentina prepare for a more “plural and heterogenous” world. After all, as the authors pointed out, more than 40 percent of Argentina’s exports in 2022 went to BRICS member countries, above all to China and Brazil. Moreover, Argentina would potentially benefit from gaining access to funds from the New Development Bank.
Yet despite these arguments, Macri emphatically backed Bullrich’s skepticism vis-à-vis joining the bloc, echoing her geopolitical concerns. Like Bullrich, he pointed to the risks of committing Argentina to joining the group, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s entry.
Read More
BRICS Faces a Reckoning
Enlargement would be a sign not of the group’s strength, but of China’s growing influence.
A BRICS Currency Could Shake the Dollar’s Dominance
De-dollarization’s moment might finally be here.
Milei’s Rise Exposes Argentina’s Malaise
The presidential front-runner may be hard to pin down politically, but his “us vs. them” rhetoric is part of a long Latin American tradition.
Even as both the governing party and the majority of analysts backed Argentina’s BRICS accession, the loud chorus of opposition highlights three ways in which the BRICS grouping has changed over the past years. First, even BRICS enthusiasts will recognize that including Iran—governed by an increasingly repressive regime that violently cracked down on dissent over the past years and that is the subject of broad Western sanctions due to its nuclear program—as a member changes the nature of the bloc, making it politically more costly for countries that seek to craft a foreign-policy strategy that is, broadly speaking, non-aligned.
Second, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an epoch-defining event with profound consequences for global order, is making it even more difficult for countries such as Brazil, India, and South Africa to articulate a neutral stance. This is because tensions between the West and the Sino-Russian alliance have worsened considerably since Russia’s full-scale attack. Those tensions will be on display next year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts the next BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan. Certainly keen to invite as many “friends of BRICS’’ as possible in order to prove he is not diplomatically isolated, Russia’s president can also be expected to invite the likes of Belarussian President Alexandr Lukashenko or Syrian Bashar al-Assad. Both men would lend the encounter a strongly anti-Western dynamic. And while democracies currently hold a 3-2 majority in the BRICS grouping, the addition of Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates will hand autocracies the majority, even if Argentina were to join.
The third and potentially most important change within the BRICS grouping is the way China has actively sought to take control of the group, with potentially significant consequences for the other member countries’ autonomy. Specifically, China’s ascent has weakened those countries’ capacity to block parts of summit declarations they do not like. In the past, Brazil and India have routinely blocked Russia’s demands for more anti-Western language. While China was always the dominant member of the grouping, boasting an economy larger than that of all other member countries combined, Beijing was traditionally careful to preserve the appearance of equality among members. At this year’s summit, however, China showed little inclination to hide the hierarchies within the grouping, starting with choreography prior to the first day of the summit. Chinese President Xi Jinping was greeted by South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa at the airport; no other participant received such VIP treatment upon landing. When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi realized he would be welcomed by a relatively insignificant cabinet member, he refused to deplane, only agreeing to leave his aircraft after South Africa’s Vice President Paul Mashatile left the ceremony of the Chinese state visit and rushed to the airport to greet him. (The Daily Maverick, the South African outlet that broke that story, then reported a cyberattack originating from India).
On the first day of the conference, BRICS leaders were supposed to address a business forum, yet Xi failed to appear. Intead, Modi, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Ramaphosa, and Putin (who joined virtually) were greeted by China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao, who read a speech without providing an explanation for Xi’s absence. Intentional or not, the gesture seemed to underline a division between two types of BRICS members: China and the rest, thankful to be part of BRICS to get valuable face time with the group’s leader.
Yet it was the way the Chinese government communicated its desire to expand the grouping that gave the clearest hint Beijing is becoming more comfortable exercising leadership within the bloc—and less tolerant of individual members holding up the implementation of its plans for BRICS. China has sought to promote a debate about BRICS expansion since 2017, when it launched the BRICS+ concept, a sort of pre-accession status that would help institutionalize expansion; but India and Brazil, aware that such a move may dilute their influence, were always able to kick such debates down the road. Brazilian diplomats regularly said behind closed doors that they were opposed to expansion and expressed confidence they would be able to prevent it into the foreseeable future. Yet at the Johannesburg summit in August, Chinese negotiators increased the pressure. In public, China’s constant talk about expansion helped create a narrative that India and Brazil were holding up expansion, potentially complicating Brazil’s efforts to project itself as a defender of the global south. The inclusion of Iran—the accession candidate with the most anti-Western stance—is also a sign that Beijing not only imposed expansion but also dictated the countries it wanted to invite.
As Indian scholar Raja Mohan recently pointed out: “One principal objective of the Non-Aligned Movement was to stay away from rival power blocs. The BRICS, in contrast, is led by one of the competing blocs—the Sino-Russian alliance.” This points to the underlying question Argentina faces as it weighs the invitation to join BRICS: Is the grouping still a vehicle to pursue a foreign policy free from the constraints alliances with superpowers imply? Or has expansion, and especially the inclusion of anti-Western powers such as Iran, turned BRICS, as Mohan argues, into a political platform for Beijing?
All this suggests the overall environment for countries such as Argentina and Brazil, keen to strengthen ties to China but also eager to preserve ties to the West, is becoming more challenging. It may be only natural that China would like to gain greater control over the BRICS grouping in response to a far more unified G-7. At the same time, platforms that seek to build broader consensus, such as the G-20, are struggling enormously—and middle powers such as Argentina are getting stuck, well, in the middle.
