BRICS

Leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are meeting in Kazan, Russia, for the 16th BRICS summit, marking a pivotal moment for the bloc.

It’s a fact: the trade partnership known as BRICS+ is on its way to becoming the largest partnership in the world, and undoubtedly also the most important one, not only from a trade perspective but, more importantly, politically and potentially strategically. 

In the new global geopolitical formatting, Russia – as the Heartland according to classical geopolitics – continues to play the central role in writing the new multipolar routes. The new international cooperation in the Eurasian key is confronted with the strategic positioning of Turkey, where the key turning point is, again, the question of effective opposition to the U.S. strategy in the region.

Over the years, the global political and economic system has undergone seismic transformations. International political order went from a bipolar configuration between 1945 and 1989 to a unipolar alignment between 1989 and 2008, before entering what we today call intricate multipolarity. This emerging multipolar era results from combining three dynamics. First, a broader distribution of wealth in the world; second, states’ inclination to assert themselves strategically and ideologically; and third, an increasingly transactional international system based on bilateral deals rather than global rules.