Notably, this year also marks the 25th anniversary of my paper coining the Brics (originally Brazil, Russia, India, and China) acronym. As I have emphasised before, my argument for these countries’ importance was never about investment. Rather, it was about the need for fairer, more representative, and effective global governance, based on what I saw as emerging economic and strategic realities.
In a recent commentary, Gemma Cheng’er Deng and I argued that the West needs to open its eyes to how the world is evolving, especially in light of the US’s new National Security Strategy, which appeared to call for the world to be divided into three blocs (around the US, China, and Russia). Now, with 2026 barely underway, President Donald Trump has pulled the rug out from under anyone who still believed in the salvageability of the old international order. The midnight raid to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, confirms that we are in a new era.
Trump has shown that his administration intends to do whatever it wants, according to its own definition of “right” and regardless of international law or rules of engagement. That means the rest of the West must get real and stop hiding behind niceties and standard diplomatic language. America’s old friends, partners, and allies must offer substantive explanations of where they stand on the world stage. Hortatory platitudes will no longer do. New economic, geopolitical, and diplomatic realities are becoming clearer by the week.
