The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Stop Worrying About the BRICS Alliance || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

The BRICS alliance is like a clown at a five-year-old's birthday party...terrifying when your five, but just kind of weird and sad for all the adults. And if you're still scared of the BRICS alliance, I hate to break it to you, but you might be the five-year-old in this analogy.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/stop-worrying-about-the-brics-alliance

Hey, L. Peter Zion here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 7th of July. You will be seen in this on July 8. And the issue is BRICS, the organization that was supposedly founded to cause a new world order shift away from the United States, what everyone would call it. Anyway, Donald Trump today said that anyone who joins BRICS and forms part of this anti-American access will be facing an additional 10% tariff on everything that's done. This is both really interesting and kind of hilarious. So quick backdrop. Bricks was formed. Well, the original idea of BRICS.

had nothing to do with geopolitics. It was just some guy up in finance in New York who said, hey, here are a bunch of largesh emerging markets that have a lot of bond. We can trade them as a group. And so that was Brazil, Russia, India, and China. South Africa joined later. It was only in the year since then that Bricks has taken on any sort of a geopolitical hint, but really, it's been really minor. They do have a bank, but it's run by China for Chinese interests and nobody else puts money into it in any meaningful way. And this last, summit that is occurring right now. The Chinese didn't even show up. In fact, the Russians didn't show up because there's an international arrest word for the war crimes in Ukraine

and the Brazilians are a signatory to the war crimes treaty so they would have felt obliged to, you know, arrest the guy. Anyway, in the last couple of years, BRICS has started to admit new members, India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia. And that's how you know that BRICS means nothing because a lot of these countries are are at each other's throats in any meaningful way. So getting agreement on anything is next to impossible. And that's certainly how it played out with this most recent issue because issues between India and China and Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia and everyone

have basically led them to just kind of have this generic statement that doesn't say anything about anyone or any topic. It really is a non-organization. And if you go back a couple of years to the Johannesburg Summit, in their opening statements, the finance ministers of China and India and South Africa all said we have no interest in forming a bricks currency. We have no interest in a non-U.S. denominated dollar system and will people please stop asking us about it? So it's a talk shop or maybe a way to caucus with the Chinese because

they're a bigger economy than everyone else put together. But it's nothing more than that. It's never been anything more than that. But it continues to live on in American circles as some sort of big thing. enter Donald Trump's threat, that if you join Bricks or become part of this axis, that you're going to be looking at supplementary tariffs. So two things here. Number one, it shows that among the Maga right, the idea that Bricks is something really has resonated, an almost allergenic response to anything that is not led with USA, which is obviously coloring policy at the top on any number of levels. but number two and perhaps more importantly, it's a direct link of the tariff question to something that has nothing to do with economics whatsoever. Tariffs are clearly Donald Trump's favorite

policy tool. And if you go back for everything that he has done internationally since day one, there's not a single example that I've been able to see except for maybe the bombing of Iran that is not inextricably woven together with tariff policy. So if, for one, whatever reason the White House's ability to enact tariffs is impinged in any way. And keep in mind, the Constitution makes it very clear that tariffs are congressional prerogative, not an administrative one, then everything that the Trump administration has done with foreign policy just kind of goes up and smoke overnight. So the focus is interesting. The vulnerability is interesting. The expansion of new vistas is interesting. There's no part of this that I'm not

paying attention to. It's going to be really interesting to see. I'm using that word too much. It's going to be really interesting to see how it evolves in the weeks to come. One more thing. Almost forgot. There is a country that is in the bricks grouping that does want to use bricks to oppose American power and tear down the American order. And that does want a different currency to displace the U.S. dollar. And that country is Russia. So we're now in a situation where the country that has been doing the most, albeit failing, to turn bricks into exactly the sort of thing that MAGA fears, is also the country that MAGA broadly wants. wants to give a pass to. How these two things get resolved one way or the other? I have no idea.

Geopolitics in general knows very strange bedfellows, and the Trump administration and Trump personally has never had a problem with inconsistencies. But there's a level of disconnect now that is starting to make it into strategic economic policy that is really colorful. And I can't wait to see how this unmesses or messes itself.