During its unipolar moment US foreign policy was that it could and should intervene to promote liberal democracy and human rights everywhere and anywhere it deemed warranted. It did this through military intervention, economic sanctions, or in the case of China, (until recently) constructive engagement. This was not always or necessarily malignly intentioned. But international law, and especially article 2 of the UN charter (which requires members to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force) is based in concepts of territorial integrity and sovereign equality, rather than on whether a country practices enough liberal democracy. So, in practice US unipolarity created a gap between legality and legitimacy.
BRICS does not seek to divide the world into “us and them” camps based on what the US President thinks, often quite selectively, about whether a particular country practices enough liberal democracy. BRICS does not seek to promote peace based on political allegiance but through economic ties.
So, does BRICS pose a challenge the West economically? In some ways no. But in some ways yes.
The US, the EU and NATO confidently predicted that the unprecedented economic sanctions against Russia would weaken, even destroy, it’s war machine and would hopefully lead to the demise of Putin’s regime. But the sanctions did not have this effect. Like it or not, a major reason for this was the refusal of the BRICS countries, and the rest of the global South (which includes the countries that are apparently interested in joining BRICS) to apply them. This included countries a large majority of which had voted to condemn Russia’s invasion in the UN general assembly.
An article by David Milibrand, reviewed here, analyses the reasons why the Global South did not apply sanctions against Russia in more detail.
The other thing that the BRICS countries have in common is the desire to create alternatives, or supplements, to Western economic institutions- the World Bank, IMF, and the supremacy of the US dollar. As my post from yesterday mentions BRICS has already started on the first two of these. The last, challenging the supremacy of the US dollar in the international financial system, is complex, is a longer term aim.
Recently BRICS was briefed by the New Development Bank about alternative currencies to the US dollar for the conduct of international trade.