--- title: "What If BRICS Became a Military Alliance?" description: "In late October 2024, a collection of leaders and dignitaries from thirty-six world nations descended upon the city of Kazan, in Russia. Boasting striking architecture, more than a million residents, and the status of capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan is a vibrant city accustomed to welcoming tourists from across the globe. On this occasion, however, its visitors had come strictly on business. Delegations from places as far-flung as China, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Malaysia, and dozens more had not gathered to celebrate Russian President Vladimir Putin, to engage in geopolitical pageantry, or even to plead with him to halt the war in Ukraine. They had come to be part of a little something called BRICS.\n\nFirst founded over fifteen years ago by Russia, Brazil, China, and India, BRICS is an intergovernmental organization that has grown from a geopolitical curiosity into a rising global powerhouse. Today it comprises nine powerful nations, conducts business in eight official languages, spans thirty percent of the world's land surface, and holds forty-five percent of the global population. Its waitlist includes dozens of nations across four continents. The bloc runs a global financial institution that rivals the International Monetary Fund, intends one day to rival the Western world on every conceivable economic metric, and hopes to become an enduring counterweight to the G7, the World Bank, and other institutions dominated by the influence of the global West.\n\nAs BRICS grows in power and pulls in a widening array of nations that the United States, the European Union, and other Western players consider hostile, analysts have begun to center on a single critical question. What if BRICS became a military alliance?\n\nThis WarFronts analysis examines the prospect of a militarized BRICS: the motivations that might drive its members toward such a step, the considerable military power such an alliance could command, and the real likelihood that the bloc would ever take the leap. The conclusion is that a BRICS defense pact is plausible on paper but strategically hollow, lacking the concrete threat that gives an alliance like NATO its purpose.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- BRICS has grown from a four-nation economic club into a nine-member bloc holding forty-five percent of the world's population and thirty percent of its land surface, with a long waitlist of aspirant members.\n- A combined BRICS military would, on paper, field the world's three largest active forces — China, India, and Russia — alongside immense reserves of armor, artillery, and air power.\n- Geography is the alliance's first fatal flaw: six of the nine members share no land border with any other member, with continental distances separating Brazil, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the rest.\n- BRICS nations lack the strategic airlift and blue-water sealift to honor a NATO-style mutual defense pact, and most have little recent large-scale combat experience to fall back on.\n- The bloc's genuine advantages are manufacturing depth, vast manpower, world-class aerospace firms, and a potential nuclear umbrella from Russia, China, and India.\n- Internal rivalries — China-India border disputes, Putin's ICC arrest warrant, Gulf-Iran tension, Egypt-Ethiopia friction — make even procedural agreement difficult, let alone a binding defense treaty.\n- The decisive problem is purpose: BRICS faces no shared external threat that collective defense would solve, leaving any future pact as \"nuclear-capable window dressing\" for an organization whose real power lies elsewhere.\n\n## From Acronym to Powerhouse: BRICS Explained\n\nWhen the organization first came into being, it was known as BRIC, each letter standing for a founding nation: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The name was not even their own idea. It came from a 2001 article by Jim O'Neill, an American working for Goldman Sachs, who predicted that those four rapidly advancing economies were destined to grow and rival the United States and Europe. The four nations, perhaps unsurprisingly, liked the idea. After nearly a decade of meetings — meetings about meetings, and meetings to schedule still more meetings — they finally sealed the arrangement in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009.\n\nThe goal at the outset was for the four founders to band together, leverage their shared economic weight, and address problems that had long plagued them. Those included the world's Western-controlled, inefficient, and arguably broken financial institutions; the tendency of developing nations to be shut out of geopolitical decision-making; and a collective vulnerability to economic shocks such as the then-ongoing Great Recession. Catastrophes like that downturn, and institutions like the World Bank or the IMF, had a way of becoming the BRIC nations' problem even though they had little say in how those bodies were run.\n\nA year and a half after BRIC formed, South Africa joined courtesy of an invitation from China, and with a catchier name — BRICS — the group got to work.\n\n## Building an Alternative Order\n\nSince its founding, BRICS has worked to create financial machinery to rival the IMF and the World Bank. Its New Development Bank now does business with ten core members rather than the original five. Headed by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, the bank leverages the equivalent of hundreds of billions of US dollars and now cooperates with the World Bank while supporting a range of development initiatives. By the end of 2022, BRICS contributions to global infrastructure development totaled over 32 billion dollars.\n\nThe bloc has also pursued an alternative network of optical-fiber submarine cables, intended to allow secure communication between members without exposure to America's National Security Agency. It has worked toward an organization-wide alternative to the global SWIFT payment system, a challenge most members have already met on their own.\n\nExpansion has continued without the indignity of an ever-lengthening acronym. On the first of January 2024, BRICS welcomed Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia is still weighing its invitation, while Argentina, the sixth nation invited, declined on foreign-policy grounds. Turkey — a NATO member — along with Pakistan, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan are among those under consideration, and nine other nations, including Nigeria, Malaysia, and Vietnam, are counted as partners.\n\n## The Vibe Shift\n\nWhile BRICS has kept both its core members and its core priorities over fifteen years, the organization has undergone what can only be described as a shift in mood. It was founded when China's economic power still lagged behind the United States, when Russia was fresh off the sting of losing superpower status, when Narendra Modi was not yet a household name in India, and when Brazil's long-run economic potential was unclear. In those days, World Bank inefficiency and dependence on the dollar carried real consequences but were rarely matters of life and death.\n\nThat has changed. China is now the world's newest superpower. India and Brazil are increasingly critical players. And the bloc's outlook has been fundamentally reshaped by a difficult decade. Russia has absorbed years of Western economic punishment, intensifying since it began an invasion of Ukraine it insists was justified. China has found itself in trade wars with the United States and has confirmed, the hard way, that whatever sweet talk the West once offered, those same nations never intended to come gently into a multipolar world.\n\nIndia has been transformed under Modi. Brazil has learned hard lessons through the cycle of Lula, then Bolsonaro, then Lula again. South Africa has struggled to stay afloat. And the four newest members raise the stakes further: Ethiopia, with an expansionist leader fresh off a genocide; Egypt, which has weathered two revolutions since the original BRIC arrangement; the UAE, which has backed warlords and revolutions abroad; and Iran, currently squared off against one of America's closest allies, Israel.\n\n## A Bloc United by Grievance\n\nTo call the change a \"vibe shift\" may understate it. When the group convened in 2024, the summit was a landmark moment for Putin's Russia, proof that the country had survived Western attempts to isolate it. Member nations issued joint declarations decrying the disruptive effect of \"unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions,\" and tacitly looked past elements of international law that, on paper, might have obliged some attendees to confront others over divisive issues.\n\nAnalysts pointed to the bloc's growing power, its shared dissatisfaction with the West, and its grievances over a world order its members increasingly work to supplant. As reporter Keith Johnson put it in Foreign Policy: \"Outside of Washington, and the G-7 and the European Union, it is hard to appreciate just how much resentment there is of Western hypocrisy and hegemony, all mortar helping to bond the loose membership of BRICS.\"\n\nNot every member approaches that challenge the same way. For China, BRICS is a financial extension of its global infrastructure and development efforts — above all the Belt and Road Initiative — and a vehicle for becoming the undisputed leader of the Global South. For Russia, and for Iran, it is a way to count and court friends at a sensitive moment, leaning on a non-Western collective to survive a split from Europe. For India, it is insurance that the country will be a power player in the multipolar world that comes after the present one — perhaps in twenty years, perhaps in a hundred. For several aspirants, membership would be a guarantee of solvency even if they took actions that landed them in trouble with a sanctions-happy West. Every member has its own goals and its own reading of the group, but together their stance is clear: opposition to a world order centered on Europe and America.\n\nIt is not a large leap, then, to imagine BRICS as more than an economic organization. For nations that want immunity from the Western order, the step after countering the G7 or the IMF could plausibly be to counter NATO, or the American-led alliances of the Indo-Pacific. Discussing that prospect demands nuance, but it must begin with the least nuanced element of all: sheer military power.\n\n## A Collection of Power Players\n\nBRICS today consists of nine nations, each able to leverage substantial military strength in its own way, several of them powerhouses on a regional or global stage. Rather than account for the totality of each country's forces, the relevant lens is what each brings to an international military coalition: advanced hardware, major naval vessels, aggregate manpower, and available air power — the metrics that would let the bloc stand up to existing alliances, primarily NATO.\n\nRussia continues to prove itself viable in large-scale open warfare despite early stumbles in Ukraine. The Russian Armed Forces are the world's fifth-largest military, with 1.15 million active-duty troops and nearly two million reservists, and active numbers are expected to climb to one and a half million within three years. On the ground, Russian forces have taken a heavy beating in Ukraine, losing massive numbers of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, yet according to Ukraine's military commander-in-chief, Russia still fields some 3,500 tanks and nearly 9,000 armored personnel carriers in combat. Its greatest strength, artillery, runs to many thousands of pieces capable of firing staggering volumes of shells. At sea, the Black Sea Fleet and the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov have disappointed Moscow, but Russia still maintains three relatively strong fleets besides. Its air wing is its most impressive asset: hundreds of modern fighters, hundreds more attack aircraft, over a hundred strategic bombers, and the purportedly stealthy, fifth-generation Sukhoi Su-57.\n\n## China, India, and the Tier of Heavyweights\n\nAlongside Russia, China would serve as the other great powerhouse — and quite possibly the more formidable of the two. China fields over two million active personnel, the largest active force in the world, plus another half-million in reserve. It leverages nearly five thousand main battle tanks, tens of thousands of other heavy fighting vehicles and artillery pieces, and a robust rocket force, despite persistent concerns about corruption within the Rocket Force ranks. Its navy is the country's pride and joy, soon to boast three aircraft carriers, some fifty destroyers, hundreds of other combat-ready ships, and several ballistic-missile submarines. In the air, China flies one of only two meaningful fleets of stealth aircraft on Earth, with an estimated 200-plus J-20 multirole fighters, hundreds of fourth-generation aircraft, and well over two hundred strategic bombers.\n\nThe Indian Armed Forces are not to be trifled with either, boasting the world's second-largest active force at nearly 1.5 million, plus close to 1.2 million reservists. India is as proud of its navy as China, fielding two active aircraft carriers, two ballistic-missile submarines, and several dozen major surface and subsurface combatants. Its army holds over 1.2 million soldiers and roughly five thousand more main battle tanks to add to the bloc's collective total. Though India lacks advanced artillery, it commands immense numbers of field guns suited to the grinding, attritional warfare Russia knows well. In the air, India brings about 350 advanced fighters plus a couple hundred older-model aircraft.\n\n## Where the Heavyweights End\n\nIt is there, however, that the list of major power players is cut short. Brazil brings far less in raw numbers, though its 334,000 active troops and 1.3 million reservists make it Latin America's largest fighting force. On the ground it leverages only a few hundred main battle tanks — none particularly new — and a few hundred artillery pieces. At sea it fields just eight major surface combatants and four attack submarines, while its air force consists of a handful of advanced JAS 39 Gripen aircraft and a mix of older jets and prop-driven attack planes. South Africa's military counts only about a hundred thousand active and reserve personnel combined, with fewer than a hundred main battle tanks in active service, a few hundred infantry fighting vehicles, and little sophisticated artillery. It sails four frigates and three attack submarines, and though it too flies the Swedish-made Gripen, it operates a total of seventeen for combat, with only minimal backup.\n\nThe four newest arrivals each have strengths, but none transforms the equation. The UAE can field a fairly substantial ground force — several hundred relatively modern French tanks and many hundreds of infantry fighting vehicles — and flies dozens of American F-16s, with dozens of French Rafales soon to follow, yet it falls short in manpower, naval power, and aggregate numbers. Iran brings the world's ninth-largest active force, over 600,000 personnel, with a robust unconventional-warfare branch and a large stock of ground equipment that is mostly outdated and in questionable repair; how much of its aging air force can fly is an open question, and its navy is small. Ethiopia fields predominantly Soviet-era ground equipment, a handful of post-Soviet fighters, and no meaningful naval vessels, having only reconstituted its navy in 2018 after shutting it down in 1996. Egypt is probably the most formidable newcomer: a decently sized army of over 300,000, more than 1,300 American-designed M1 Abrams tanks, and ridiculous aggregate numbers of older kit. Its navy fields eight attack submarines and twenty meaningful surface combatants, and it flies over 200 F-16s, with plans for another hundred-odd Russian and French advanced aircraft by the end of the decade.\n\n## The Tyranny of Distance\n\nMilitary viability as a cohesive alliance involves far more than each nation's arsenal, and the first complication is simple geography. Compare NATO: its members are concentrated in Europe, and despite a nearly 1,600-mile, 2,600-kilometer border with Russia following Finland's 2023 accession, the alliance enjoys decisive advantages. It controls both coasts of the North Atlantic, holds the chokepoints to the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas, and faces meaningful military threats only across one broad front — toward Russia and the Middle East — and across one ocean, when accounting for the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada.\n\nFor BRICS, the picture is far messier. Six of the nine members — Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Brazil, and South Africa — share no land border with any other member. South Africa's nearest fellow member, Ethiopia, sits almost five thousand kilometers away; Brazil's nearest, South Africa, is nearly eight thousand kilometers away. One can trace a continuous land path from India to China to Russia, but the China-India border is blocked by the high Himalayas, while China connects primarily to the vast open expanses of Russia's Far East, with its most significant city on the Russian border, Heihe, more than 5,500 kilometers from Moscow.\n\nA BRICS military alliance would therefore face geographic constraints of a kind NATO simply never confronts.\n\n## Could the Bloc Honor an Article 5?\n\nThe constraints need not end the discussion. The real test is whether the bloc could use logistics to make good on a collective-defense pact. Assume BRICS adopted a principle like NATO's Article 5 — an attack on one member treated as an attack on all. Could its members actually rush to one another's defense?\n\nThe honest answer is probably not, at least not meaningfully. Without land bridges, members would depend on air and sea power to move troops, and the picture there is grim. Consider a hypothetical in which BRICS rushed to defend Ethiopia against an attack from some version of Sudan capable of posing an existential threat — noting that today's Sudan decisively is not. Landlocked Ethiopia could be supported only by air, while any counterattack staged through Egypt to Sudan's north would depend on whatever mass of troops could reach Egypt by sea.\n\nStrategic airlift would matter most, and BRICS does not possess airlifters in large numbers. Using a reasonable portion of its fleet — not some fantasy where every aircraft is perfectly positioned — Russia could move perhaps three to five thousand troops from the southern city of Krasnodar to Addis Ababa within a couple of days, drawing on the subset of its longest-range airlifters that might plausibly reach Krasnodar promptly. Moving fighters or attack aircraft would be far harder: Russia owns only twenty-odd aerial-refueling tankers, a subset of which might shuttle a few dozen aircraft to Ethiopia's limited airfields over several days.\n\n## The Logistics Verdict\n\nThe wider tally is bleak. The Emirati Air Force has eight strategic airlifters and three tankers. India has six tankers and twenty-eight airlifters. Even China has fewer than thirty tankers and seventy airlifters. Assume one in three of those aircraft from each nation could be devoted to collective defense in a pinch, and the capacity is dismal — further constrained by Ethiopia's limited airfields and infrastructure, which could take over a decade to upgrade to an alliance standard. Every other member would be functionally unable to intervene by air, and Ethiopia is not even a worst case. Imagine attempting the same for South Africa or Brazil.\n\nGetting troops in place for the hypothetical Egyptian counterattack would be a separate ordeal, requiring either the Suez Canal or the less reliable, broadly NATO-controlled Mediterranean. China and India could each probably send an aircraft carrier, but neither's troop-transport ships are thought ready for intercontinental operations, and most other navies are simply not up to the task. Russia has very few blue-water landing ships even in theory, before accounting for vessel or crew readiness; the nearby UAE has almost no capacity; Iran might send a few ships, if they can stay afloat for the voyage; Brazil and South Africa have none to spare.\n\n## The Experience Gap\n\nBeyond its limited rapid-response capability, the alliance would face a deeper problem: a lack of combat experience. Unlike NATO's members, who have at least rotated through US-led coalitions and gathered nominal experience, most BRICS nations have had a militarily quiet few decades. China and India have hardly fought at all; the same goes for Brazil and South Africa. Iran has operated in the Middle East, but not at large scale beyond its unconventional-warfare branch and its exchanges of strikes with Israel. The UAE has fought in Yemen and intervened in Libya, and Ethiopia has waged internal conflicts while patrolling neighboring Somalia with thousands of troops. Russia is the exception, fighting a war in Ukraine now nearly three years old.\n\nAs Russia learned, inexperience in large-scale combat is about more than worrying that troops might hold their knives by the pointy end. Recall the failure and collapse of Russia's first-wave advance on Kyiv in the early days of the 2022 invasion: until complex logistical plans are tested in real time, no country can reasonably trust that they work. None of Russia, China, or India has ever attempted an urgent strategic airlift on the scale a BRICS defense pact would demand. Done right, such an airlift is a beautiful thing — witness the United States' stunningly efficient air operations amid an otherwise disastrous withdrawal from Kabul. But for the US, well-honed logistics underpin everything else. For nearly every BRICS member, that capacity has never been attempted at scale in a crisis.\n\n## The Genuine Advantages\n\nA BRICS alliance would, nonetheless, hold real advantages. First is manufacturing capacity. Russia is pivoting toward a semipermanent war economy and has proven it can produce munitions at a mind-bending scale. India and China rank among the world's five largest manufacturing economies and could win wars on sheer numbers, especially if they directed conscription toward their combined population of 2.8 billion. Several members boast world-class aerospace bureaus: Sukhoi and Mikoyan in Russia, Hindustan Aeronautics in India, Embraer in Brazil, and Chengdu and Shenyang in China. The bloc also has a quiet but meaningful potential ally in Saudi Arabia, still weighing its invitation, which would bring both vast quantities of oil and vast sums of oil money if it lent its support.\n\nThen there is the nuclear angle. Much as the United States, France, and Britain do for NATO, Russia, China, and India could extend a nuclear umbrella over the bloc's six non-nuclear members. India is the smallest of the three, with an estimated 172 warheads per the Arms Control Association — not even enough to wipe out every major city on Earth. Russia is the largest, with over 5,500 total warheads including those in storage and over a thousand deployed. China sits in the middle with about five hundred estimated, but is on pace to catch Russia and the United States within the next decade or two. The three are well accustomed to nuclear dialogue; this past September they agreed to collaborate on building a nuclear power plant on the Moon, in keeping with China and Russia's lunar-base ambitions and India's goal of a crewed Moon mission by 2040. Forming a credible umbrella is about more than handshake deals, but the basis for one clearly exists — and where several members are nuclear-armed, the non-nuclear states can feel far safer about the credibility of their allies' deterrent.\n\n## Would BRICS Actually Militarize?\n\nThat is the potency of a potential BRICS military alliance: not a union of nine equal powers, and not one whose capacity for rapid conventional response could be trusted, but one where a nuclear umbrella, diplomatic and economic clout, and sheer numbers on paper could go a long way. The ultimate question remains: would they actually do it?\n\nAs with any geopolitical choice, there is a list of reasons to engage and a list of reasons not to — and here, the divides the members share could become real barriers to organizing under a collective-defense framework. China and India just spent years in a bitter border dispute they have only recently resolved. Putin cannot visit South Africa without fear of arrest, because the country is party to the International Criminal Court, which has called for his detention. Egypt and the UAE both maintain strong defense ties with the United States, and Egypt is one of the IMF's largest debtor nations. Several members have defense relationships with NATO countries despite broad opposition within the bloc to NATO itself.\n\nSouth Africa's energy troubles, Brazil's political volatility, China's economic downturn, the sanctions crushing Russia and Iran, and pre-existing rivalries — Gulf states against Iran, Egypt against Ethiopia, China against Russia — all add to the potential for friction. The group has struggled to reach even basic procedural agreements, and its four founders are split on enlargement, with China and Russia generally in favor and Brazil and India generally against. Its core nations also reckon with fundamental divides over democracy versus authoritarianism, and over whether the United States is a friend, an enemy, or something between.\n\n## The Question of Purpose\n\nIt is hard to ignore the bloc's drift toward a more sharply anti-US, anti-EU, anti-democratic posture, with the addition of authoritarian, West-averse members in Iran and Ethiopia, balanced only by relatively neutral additions in the UAE and Egypt rather than countervailing viewpoints. The choice between waiting for the West's eventual decline and taking proactive steps to accelerate it is one the bloc will increasingly be forced to confront. Yet the value of forming a collective-defense organization might be unchanged regardless of the answer. For nations that actively want to bring about the West's decline so they can take its place, gathering into an explicit counterweight to NATO would advance that goal. Even those content to watch the process unfold would be securing their membership in the world-leading organization that follows.\n\nThere is an argument that BRICS risks saying the quiet part out loud — inviting the United States, Europe, and East Asia into a formalized two-party competition and prompting those adversaries to reverse or slow what BRICS sees as a decline. But the bloc is already saying that quiet part out loud. Organizing militarily would say it louder, not differently; the West has already received the message.\n\nThat leaves the decisive question: concrete purpose. Waiting for the downfall of the West is not nothing, but it is a decades-long, partly theoretical ambition. Contrast NATO, born of very real fear of the Soviet Union at the Cold War's outset and sustained afterward largely by fear of Russian aggression — fear that has since materialized repeatedly in the twenty-first century. BRICS has no equivalent. If members agree the West is in decline, and reasonably expect that neither the US nor Europe would rather end the world by fire than settle for second place a few decades hence, then what, exactly, is there to fight? India has its rivalry with Pakistan, but that has been contained for well over half a century. Ethiopia worries about Somalia, but the combined power of BRICS is overkill there. Russia has its invasion of Ukraine — yet not even the most generously worded treaty could interpret Russia's choice to invade Ukraine as an attack on Russia.\n\n## Nuclear-Capable Window Dressing\n\nLook at the actual interests of the BRICS nations and the threats they face, and collective defense simply is not the right answer. For some, collective offense is not inconceivable — but that is a difficult thing to commit to paper without driving most of the bloc away and explicitly setting Earth on the path to a third world war. Barring that, most members have little to gain from a military alliance. Russia's interests lie in Eastern Europe, in brinksmanship and land grabs of its own making. China's expansionism in the South China Sea and its designs on Taiwan are acts instigated by China, however the CCP might wish to reframe them, and its policies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have far more to do with economic outreach than war. Brazil and South Africa face no meaningful external threats to their sovereignty. The UAE has far too much money to waste it on war, and Iran is too mired in its own troubles to help anyone else. India works to become a bridge between East and West; Egypt to bridge Israel, the US, and the Arab world; and Ethiopia simply does whatever its leader Abiy Ahmed decides on a given day.\n\nThe point is not that a mutual-defense treaty has zero value. Ask each member the binary question — would you like these other nations to help ensure you are not attacked, yes or no — and the answer is obviously yes. But there is a vast difference between preferring the convenience of a defense treaty and having a specific reason to chase one. Right now, there is no such reason.\n\nWill BRICS one day agree to a treaty of collective defense? Maybe, maybe not. If it does, it will not be a concrete agreement to destroy the West, and even its basic value as a guarantee of response to conventional attack may not be as reliable on paper as NATO's, or that of other multilateral pacts around the world. Bringing the members under a nuclear umbrella, offering assurances that should deter any attacker, building a geopolitical counterweight to NATO — there are sound arguments for all of it. But should such an alliance materialize, it is best understood as nuclear-capable window dressing for an organization whose real power is concentrated elsewhere.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is BRICS, and how large has it grown?\n\nBRICS is an intergovernmental organization founded over fifteen years ago by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa added about a year and a half later. It now comprises nine nations, conducts business in eight official languages, spans thirty percent of the world's land surface, and holds forty-five percent of the global population. On the first of January 2024, it welcomed Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Ethiopia, while Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan are among those under active consideration for membership.\n\n### Which BRICS members have the strongest militaries, and what do they bring?\n\nChina, India, and Russia are the heavyweights. China fields over two million active personnel — the world's largest force — nearly five thousand main battle tanks, a navy soon to carry three aircraft carriers, and an estimated 200-plus J-20 stealth fighters. Russia, the world's fifth-largest military, brings hundreds of modern fighters, strategic bombers, and a war-hardened land force despite heavy Ukraine losses. India adds the second-largest active force at nearly 1.5 million troops, two aircraft carriers, and roughly five thousand more main battle tanks.\n\n### Why would geography be a fatal obstacle to a BRICS military alliance?\n\nSix of the nine members — Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Brazil, and South Africa — share no land border with any other member. South Africa's nearest fellow member sits almost five thousand kilometers away; Brazil's is nearly eight thousand. Even the India-China-Russia land corridor is blocked by the high Himalayas and vast Siberian distances. Without land bridges, the bloc would depend on strategic airlift and blue-water sealift it largely lacks: China has fewer than thirty tankers and seventy airlifters, Russia owns only twenty-odd aerial-refueling tankers, and most navies cannot carry troops intercontinentally.\n\n### What genuine military advantages would a BRICS alliance possess?\n\nThe bloc's real strengths are manufacturing depth, manpower, and nuclear deterrence. Russia is shifting to a war economy and can produce munitions at massive scale; India and China rank among the world's five largest manufacturing economies with a combined population of 2.8 billion. Aerospace firms including Sukhoi, Hindustan Aeronautics, Embraer, and Chengdu and Shenyang give the bloc serious aviation capacity. Most importantly, Russia, China, and India could extend a nuclear umbrella over the six non-nuclear members, providing deterrence regardless of conventional shortfalls.\n\n### Why is a BRICS military alliance considered unlikely despite the bloc's size?\n\nThe decisive obstacle is the absence of a shared external threat that collective defense would actually solve. Unlike NATO, which was founded around a very real fear of Soviet aggression, BRICS faces no comparable enemy. Internal rivalries further complicate any treaty: China and India have only recently resolved years of border disputes, Putin faces an ICC arrest warrant in South Africa, Egypt and the UAE maintain strong US defense ties, and the bloc's four founders are split on enlargement and strategy. Most members' interests are better served by economic and diplomatic weight than by binding military commitments.\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-66525474\n2. https://www.reuters.com/world/spurred-by-shared-grievances-brics-gathers-pace-2024-10-24/\n3. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-brics-group-and-why-it-expanding\n4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-putin-brics-summit-china-ukraine-war-us-nato-sanctions-perverse-methods/\n5. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/brics-summit-emerging-middle-powers-g7-g20?lang=en\n6. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/21/brics-russia-china-kazan-summit-west-dollar/\n7. https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/brics-summit-2023-seeking-alternate-world-order\n8. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/turkey-applies-to-join-china-and-russia-in-brics-economic-bloc-kremlin-says\n9. https://www.dw.com/en/a-new-world-order-brics-nations-offer-alternative-to-west/a-65124269\n10. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240905-nato-member-turkey-balancing-act-brics-bid-russia-china\n11. https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2024/07/09/the-new-new-development-bank-a-decade-plus-in-the-making/\n12. https://www.un.org/en/ga/sixth/73/new_development_bank.shtml\n13. https://www.france24.com/en/economy/20230824-how-the-brics-nations-failed-to-rebuild-the-global-financial-order\n14. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/the-brics-is-not-a-strategic-threat-to-the-united-states/\n15. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/11/china-russia-alliance-cooperation-brics-sco-economy-military-war-ukraine-putin-xi/\n16. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/india-china-russia-to-jointly-build-massive-nuclear-power-plant-on-moon-to-establish-a-future-human-lunar-colony/articleshow/113182566.cms?from=mdr\n17. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-has-what-glance\n18. https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/worldwide\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/brics-military-alliance.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/brics-military-alliance datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/xe7r8MFEBJM/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: c1abf82613afce4705222050dc5313ff37d22487486c850869cfa4ccf735148e tokens: 8746 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/brics-military-alliance.md.summary.md --- In late October 2024, a collection of leaders and dignitaries from thirty-six world nations descended upon the city of Kazan, in Russia. Boasting striking architecture, more than a million residents, and the status of capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan is a vibrant city accustomed to welcoming tourists from across the globe. On this occasion, however, its visitors had come strictly on business. Delegations from places as far-flung as China, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Malaysia, and dozens more had not gathered to celebrate Russian President Vladimir Putin, to engage in geopolitical pageantry, or even to plead with him to halt the war in Ukraine. They had come to be part of a little something called BRICS. First founded over fifteen years ago by Russia, Brazil, China, and India, BRICS is an intergovernmental organization that has grown from a geopolitical curiosity into a rising global powerhouse. Today it comprises nine powerful nations, conducts business in eight official languages, spans thirty percent of the world's land surface, and holds forty-five percent of the global population. Its waitlist includes dozens of nations across four continents. The bloc runs a global financial institution that rivals the International Monetary Fund, intends one day to rival the Western world on every conceivable economic metric, and hopes to become an enduring counterweight to the G7, the World Bank, and other institutions dominated by the influence of the global West. As BRICS grows in power and pulls in a widening array of nations that the United States, the European Union, and other Western players consider hostile, analysts have begun to center on a single critical question. What if BRICS became a military alliance? This WarFronts analysis examines the prospect of a militarized BRICS: the motivations that might drive its members toward such a step, the considerable military power such an alliance could command, and the real likelihood that the bloc would ever take the leap. The conclusion is that a BRICS defense pact is plausible on paper but strategically hollow, lacking the concrete threat that gives an alliance like NATO its purpose. ## Key Takeaways - BRICS has grown from a four-nation economic club into a nine-member bloc holding forty-five percent of the world's population and thirty percent of its land surface, with a long waitlist of aspirant members. - A combined BRICS military would, on paper, field the world's three largest active forces — China, India, and Russia — alongside immense reserves of armor, artillery, and air power. - Geography is the alliance's first fatal flaw: six of the nine members share no land border with any other member, with continental distances separating Brazil, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the rest. - BRICS nations lack the strategic airlift and blue-water sealift to honor a NATO-style mutual defense pact, and most have little recent large-scale combat experience to fall back on. - The bloc's genuine advantages are manufacturing depth, vast manpower, world-class aerospace firms, and a potential nuclear umbrella from Russia, China, and India. - Internal rivalries — China-India border disputes, Putin's ICC arrest warrant, Gulf-Iran tension, Egypt-Ethiopia friction — make even procedural agreement difficult, let alone a binding defense treaty. - The decisive problem is purpose: BRICS faces no shared external threat that collective defense would solve, leaving any future pact as "nuclear-capable window dressing" for an organization whose real power lies elsewhere. ## From Acronym to Powerhouse: BRICS Explained When the organization first came into being, it was known as BRIC, each letter standing for a founding nation: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The name was not even their own idea. It came from a 2001 article by Jim O'Neill, an American working for Goldman Sachs, who predicted that those four rapidly advancing economies were destined to grow and rival the United States and Europe. The four nations, perhaps unsurprisingly, liked the idea. After nearly a decade of meetings — meetings about meetings, and meetings to schedule still more meetings — they finally sealed the arrangement in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009. The goal at the outset was for the four founders to band together, leverage their shared economic weight, and address problems that had long plagued them. Those included the world's Western-controlled, inefficient, and arguably broken financial institutions; the tendency of developing nations to be shut out of geopolitical decision-making; and a collective vulnerability to economic shocks such as the then-ongoing Great Recession. Catastrophes like that downturn, and institutions like the World Bank or the IMF, had a way of becoming the BRIC nations' problem even though they had little say in how those bodies were run. A year and a half after BRIC formed, South Africa joined courtesy of an invitation from China, and with a catchier name — BRICS — the group got to work. ## Building an Alternative Order Since its founding, BRICS has worked to create financial machinery to rival the IMF and the World Bank. Its New Development Bank now does business with ten core members rather than the original five. Headed by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, the bank leverages the equivalent of hundreds of billions of US dollars and now cooperates with the World Bank while supporting a range of development initiatives. By the end of 2022, BRICS contributions to global infrastructure development totaled over 32 billion dollars. The bloc has also pursued an alternative network of optical-fiber submarine cables, intended to allow secure communication between members without exposure to America's National Security Agency. It has worked toward an organization-wide alternative to the global SWIFT payment system, a challenge most members have already met on their own. Expansion has continued without the indignity of an ever-lengthening acronym. On the first of January 2024, BRICS welcomed Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia is still weighing its invitation, while Argentina, the sixth nation invited, declined on foreign-policy grounds. Turkey — a NATO member — along with Pakistan, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan are among those under consideration, and nine other nations, including Nigeria, Malaysia, and Vietnam, are counted as partners. ## The Vibe Shift While BRICS has kept both its core members and its core priorities over fifteen years, the organization has undergone what can only be described as a shift in mood. It was founded when China's economic power still lagged behind the United States, when Russia was fresh off the sting of losing superpower status, when Narendra Modi was not yet a household name in India, and when Brazil's long-run economic potential was unclear. In those days, World Bank inefficiency and dependence on the dollar carried real consequences but were rarely matters of life and death. That has changed. China is now the world's newest superpower. India and Brazil are increasingly critical players. And the bloc's outlook has been fundamentally reshaped by a difficult decade. Russia has absorbed years of Western economic punishment, intensifying since it began an invasion of Ukraine it insists was justified. China has found itself in trade wars with the United States and has confirmed, the hard way, that whatever sweet talk the West once offered, those same nations never intended to come gently into a multipolar world. India has been transformed under Modi. Brazil has learned hard lessons through the cycle of Lula, then Bolsonaro, then Lula again. South Africa has struggled to stay afloat. And the four newest members raise the stakes further: Ethiopia, with an expansionist leader fresh off a genocide; Egypt, which has weathered two revolutions since the original BRIC arrangement; the UAE, which has backed warlords and revolutions abroad; and Iran, currently squared off against one of America's closest allies, Israel. ## A Bloc United by Grievance To call the change a "vibe shift" may understate it. When the group convened in 2024, the summit was a landmark moment for Putin's Russia, proof that the country had survived Western attempts to isolate it. Member nations issued joint declarations decrying the disruptive effect of "unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions," and tacitly looked past elements of international law that, on paper, might have obliged some attendees to confront others over divisive issues. Analysts pointed to the bloc's growing power, its shared dissatisfaction with the West, and its grievances over a world order its members increasingly work to supplant. As reporter Keith Johnson put it in Foreign Policy: "Outside of Washington, and the G-7 and the European Union, it is hard to appreciate just how much resentment there is of Western hypocrisy and hegemony, all mortar helping to bond the loose membership of BRICS." Not every member approaches that challenge the same way. For China, BRICS is a financial extension of its global infrastructure and development efforts — above all the Belt and Road Initiative — and a vehicle for becoming the undisputed leader of the Global South. For Russia, and for Iran, it is a way to count and court friends at a sensitive moment, leaning on a non-Western collective to survive a split from Europe. For India, it is insurance that the country will be a power player in the multipolar world that comes after the present one — perhaps in twenty years, perhaps in a hundred. For several aspirants, membership would be a guarantee of solvency even if they took actions that landed them in trouble with a sanctions-happy West. Every member has its own goals and its own reading of the group, but together their stance is clear: opposition to a world order centered on Europe and America. It is not a large leap, then, to imagine BRICS as more than an economic organization. For nations that want immunity from the Western order, the step after countering the G7 or the IMF could plausibly be to counter NATO, or the American-led alliances of the Indo-Pacific. Discussing that prospect demands nuance, but it must begin with the least nuanced element of all: sheer military power. ## A Collection of Power Players BRICS today consists of nine nations, each able to leverage substantial military strength in its own way, several of them powerhouses on a regional or global stage. Rather than account for the totality of each country's forces, the relevant lens is what each brings to an international military coalition: advanced hardware, major naval vessels, aggregate manpower, and available air power — the metrics that would let the bloc stand up to existing alliances, primarily NATO. Russia continues to prove itself viable in large-scale open warfare despite early stumbles in Ukraine. The Russian Armed Forces are the world's fifth-largest military, with 1.15 million active-duty troops and nearly two million reservists, and active numbers are expected to climb to one and a half million within three years. On the ground, Russian forces have taken a heavy beating in Ukraine, losing massive numbers of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, yet according to Ukraine's military commander-in-chief, Russia still fields some 3,500 tanks and nearly 9,000 armored personnel carriers in combat. Its greatest strength, artillery, runs to many thousands of pieces capable of firing staggering volumes of shells. At sea, the Black Sea Fleet and the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov have disappointed Moscow, but Russia still maintains three relatively strong fleets besides. Its air wing is its most impressive asset: hundreds of modern fighters, hundreds more attack aircraft, over a hundred strategic bombers, and the purportedly stealthy, fifth-generation Sukhoi Su-57. ## China, India, and the Tier of Heavyweights Alongside Russia, China would serve as the other great powerhouse — and quite possibly the more formidable of the two. China fields over two million active personnel, the largest active force in the world, plus another half-million in reserve. It leverages nearly five thousand main battle tanks, tens of thousands of other heavy fighting vehicles and artillery pieces, and a robust rocket force, despite persistent concerns about corruption within the Rocket Force ranks. Its navy is the country's pride and joy, soon to boast three aircraft carriers, some fifty destroyers, hundreds of other combat-ready ships, and several ballistic-missile submarines. In the air, China flies one of only two meaningful fleets of stealth aircraft on Earth, with an estimated 200-plus J-20 multirole fighters, hundreds of fourth-generation aircraft, and well over two hundred strategic bombers. The Indian Armed Forces are not to be trifled with either, boasting the world's second-largest active force at nearly 1.5 million, plus close to 1.2 million reservists. India is as proud of its navy as China, fielding two active aircraft carriers, two ballistic-missile submarines, and several dozen major surface and subsurface combatants. Its army holds over 1.2 million soldiers and roughly five thousand more main battle tanks to add to the bloc's collective total. Though India lacks advanced artillery, it commands immense numbers of field guns suited to the grinding, attritional warfare Russia knows well. In the air, India brings about 350 advanced fighters plus a couple hundred older-model aircraft. ## Where the Heavyweights End It is there, however, that the list of major power players is cut short. Brazil brings far less in raw numbers, though its 334,000 active troops and 1.3 million reservists make it Latin America's largest fighting force. On the ground it leverages only a few hundred main battle tanks — none particularly new — and a few hundred artillery pieces. At sea it fields just eight major surface combatants and four attack submarines, while its air force consists of a handful of advanced JAS 39 Gripen aircraft and a mix of older jets and prop-driven attack planes. South Africa's military counts only about a hundred thousand active and reserve personnel combined, with fewer than a hundred main battle tanks in active service, a few hundred infantry fighting vehicles, and little sophisticated artillery. It sails four frigates and three attack submarines, and though it too flies the Swedish-made Gripen, it operates a total of seventeen for combat, with only minimal backup. The four newest arrivals each have strengths, but none transforms the equation. The UAE can field a fairly substantial ground force — several hundred relatively modern French tanks and many hundreds of infantry fighting vehicles — and flies dozens of American F-16s, with dozens of French Rafales soon to follow, yet it falls short in manpower, naval power, and aggregate numbers. Iran brings the world's ninth-largest active force, over 600,000 personnel, with a robust unconventional-warfare branch and a large stock of ground equipment that is mostly outdated and in questionable repair; how much of its aging air force can fly is an open question, and its navy is small. Ethiopia fields predominantly Soviet-era ground equipment, a handful of post-Soviet fighters, and no meaningful naval vessels, having only reconstituted its navy in 2018 after shutting it down in 1996. Egypt is probably the most formidable newcomer: a decently sized army of over 300,000, more than 1,300 American-designed M1 Abrams tanks, and ridiculous aggregate numbers of older kit. Its navy fields eight attack submarines and twenty meaningful surface combatants, and it flies over 200 F-16s, with plans for another hundred-odd Russian and French advanced aircraft by the end of the decade. ## The Tyranny of Distance Military viability as a cohesive alliance involves far more than each nation's arsenal, and the first complication is simple geography. Compare NATO: its members are concentrated in Europe, and despite a nearly 1,600-mile, 2,600-kilometer border with Russia following Finland's 2023 accession, the alliance enjoys decisive advantages. It controls both coasts of the North Atlantic, holds the chokepoints to the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas, and faces meaningful military threats only across one broad front — toward Russia and the Middle East — and across one ocean, when accounting for the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada. For BRICS, the picture is far messier. Six of the nine members — Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Brazil, and South Africa — share no land border with any other member. South Africa's nearest fellow member, Ethiopia, sits almost five thousand kilometers away; Brazil's nearest, South Africa, is nearly eight thousand kilometers away. One can trace a continuous land path from India to China to Russia, but the China-India border is blocked by the high Himalayas, while China connects primarily to the vast open expanses of Russia's Far East, with its most significant city on the Russian border, Heihe, more than 5,500 kilometers from Moscow. A BRICS military alliance would therefore face geographic constraints of a kind NATO simply never confronts. ## Could the Bloc Honor an Article 5? The constraints need not end the discussion. The real test is whether the bloc could use logistics to make good on a collective-defense pact. Assume BRICS adopted a principle like NATO's Article 5 — an attack on one member treated as an attack on all. Could its members actually rush to one another's defense? The honest answer is probably not, at least not meaningfully. Without land bridges, members would depend on air and sea power to move troops, and the picture there is grim. Consider a hypothetical in which BRICS rushed to defend Ethiopia against an attack from some version of Sudan capable of posing an existential threat — noting that today's Sudan decisively is not. Landlocked Ethiopia could be supported only by air, while any counterattack staged through Egypt to Sudan's north would depend on whatever mass of troops could reach Egypt by sea. Strategic airlift would matter most, and BRICS does not possess airlifters in large numbers. Using a reasonable portion of its fleet — not some fantasy where every aircraft is perfectly positioned — Russia could move perhaps three to five thousand troops from the southern city of Krasnodar to Addis Ababa within a couple of days, drawing on the subset of its longest-range airlifters that might plausibly reach Krasnodar promptly. Moving fighters or attack aircraft would be far harder: Russia owns only twenty-odd aerial-refueling tankers, a subset of which might shuttle a few dozen aircraft to Ethiopia's limited airfields over several days. ## The Logistics Verdict The wider tally is bleak. The Emirati Air Force has eight strategic airlifters and three tankers. India has six tankers and twenty-eight airlifters. Even China has fewer than thirty tankers and seventy airlifters. Assume one in three of those aircraft from each nation could be devoted to collective defense in a pinch, and the capacity is dismal — further constrained by Ethiopia's limited airfields and infrastructure, which could take over a decade to upgrade to an alliance standard. Every other member would be functionally unable to intervene by air, and Ethiopia is not even a worst case. Imagine attempting the same for South Africa or Brazil. Getting troops in place for the hypothetical Egyptian counterattack would be a separate ordeal, requiring either the Suez Canal or the less reliable, broadly NATO-controlled Mediterranean. China and India could each probably send an aircraft carrier, but neither's troop-transport ships are thought ready for intercontinental operations, and most other navies are simply not up to the task. Russia has very few blue-water landing ships even in theory, before accounting for vessel or crew readiness; the nearby UAE has almost no capacity; Iran might send a few ships, if they can stay afloat for the voyage; Brazil and South Africa have none to spare. ## The Experience Gap Beyond its limited rapid-response capability, the alliance would face a deeper problem: a lack of combat experience. Unlike NATO's members, who have at least rotated through US-led coalitions and gathered nominal experience, most BRICS nations have had a militarily quiet few decades. China and India have hardly fought at all; the same goes for Brazil and South Africa. Iran has operated in the Middle East, but not at large scale beyond its unconventional-warfare branch and its exchanges of strikes with Israel. The UAE has fought in Yemen and intervened in Libya, and Ethiopia has waged internal conflicts while patrolling neighboring Somalia with thousands of troops. Russia is the exception, fighting a war in Ukraine now nearly three years old. As Russia learned, inexperience in large-scale combat is about more than worrying that troops might hold their knives by the pointy end. Recall the failure and collapse of Russia's first-wave advance on Kyiv in the early days of the 2022 invasion: until complex logistical plans are tested in real time, no country can reasonably trust that they work. None of Russia, China, or India has ever attempted an urgent strategic airlift on the scale a BRICS defense pact would demand. Done right, such an airlift is a beautiful thing — witness the United States' stunningly efficient air operations amid an otherwise disastrous withdrawal from Kabul. But for the US, well-honed logistics underpin everything else. For nearly every BRICS member, that capacity has never been attempted at scale in a crisis. ## The Genuine Advantages A BRICS alliance would, nonetheless, hold real advantages. First is manufacturing capacity. Russia is pivoting toward a semipermanent war economy and has proven it can produce munitions at a mind-bending scale. India and China rank among the world's five largest manufacturing economies and could win wars on sheer numbers, especially if they directed conscription toward their combined population of 2.8 billion. Several members boast world-class aerospace bureaus: Sukhoi and Mikoyan in Russia, Hindustan Aeronautics in India, Embraer in Brazil, and Chengdu and Shenyang in China. The bloc also has a quiet but meaningful potential ally in Saudi Arabia, still weighing its invitation, which would bring both vast quantities of oil and vast sums of oil money if it lent its support. Then there is the nuclear angle. Much as the United States, France, and Britain do for NATO, Russia, China, and India could extend a nuclear umbrella over the bloc's six non-nuclear members. India is the smallest of the three, with an estimated 172 warheads per the Arms Control Association — not even enough to wipe out every major city on Earth. Russia is the largest, with over 5,500 total warheads including those in storage and over a thousand deployed. China sits in the middle with about five hundred estimated, but is on pace to catch Russia and the United States within the next decade or two. The three are well accustomed to nuclear dialogue; this past September they agreed to collaborate on building a nuclear power plant on the Moon, in keeping with China and Russia's lunar-base ambitions and India's goal of a crewed Moon mission by 2040. Forming a credible umbrella is about more than handshake deals, but the basis for one clearly exists — and where several members are nuclear-armed, the non-nuclear states can feel far safer about the credibility of their allies' deterrent. ## Would BRICS Actually Militarize? That is the potency of a potential BRICS military alliance: not a union of nine equal powers, and not one whose capacity for rapid conventional response could be trusted, but one where a nuclear umbrella, diplomatic and economic clout, and sheer numbers on paper could go a long way. The ultimate question remains: would they actually do it? As with any geopolitical choice, there is a list of reasons to engage and a list of reasons not to — and here, the divides the members share could become real barriers to organizing under a collective-defense framework. China and India just spent years in a bitter border dispute they have only recently resolved. Putin cannot visit South Africa without fear of arrest, because the country is party to the International Criminal Court, which has called for his detention. Egypt and the UAE both maintain strong defense ties with the United States, and Egypt is one of the IMF's largest debtor nations. Several members have defense relationships with NATO countries despite broad opposition within the bloc to NATO itself. South Africa's energy troubles, Brazil's political volatility, China's economic downturn, the sanctions crushing Russia and Iran, and pre-existing rivalries — Gulf states against Iran, Egypt against Ethiopia, China against Russia — all add to the potential for friction. The group has struggled to reach even basic procedural agreements, and its four founders are split on enlargement, with China and Russia generally in favor and Brazil and India generally against. Its core nations also reckon with fundamental divides over democracy versus authoritarianism, and over whether the United States is a friend, an enemy, or something between. ## The Question of Purpose It is hard to ignore the bloc's drift toward a more sharply anti-US, anti-EU, anti-democratic posture, with the addition of authoritarian, West-averse members in Iran and Ethiopia, balanced only by relatively neutral additions in the UAE and Egypt rather than countervailing viewpoints. The choice between waiting for the West's eventual decline and taking proactive steps to accelerate it is one the bloc will increasingly be forced to confront. Yet the value of forming a collective-defense organization might be unchanged regardless of the answer. For nations that actively want to bring about the West's decline so they can take its place, gathering into an explicit counterweight to NATO would advance that goal. Even those content to watch the process unfold would be securing their membership in the world-leading organization that follows. There is an argument that BRICS risks saying the quiet part out loud — inviting the United States, Europe, and East Asia into a formalized two-party competition and prompting those adversaries to reverse or slow what BRICS sees as a decline. But the bloc is already saying that quiet part out loud. Organizing militarily would say it louder, not differently; the West has already received the message. That leaves the decisive question: concrete purpose. Waiting for the downfall of the West is not nothing, but it is a decades-long, partly theoretical ambition. Contrast NATO, born of very real fear of the Soviet Union at the Cold War's outset and sustained afterward largely by fear of Russian aggression — fear that has since materialized repeatedly in the twenty-first century. BRICS has no equivalent. If members agree the West is in decline, and reasonably expect that neither the US nor Europe would rather end the world by fire than settle for second place a few decades hence, then what, exactly, is there to fight? India has its rivalry with Pakistan, but that has been contained for well over half a century. Ethiopia worries about Somalia, but the combined power of BRICS is overkill there. Russia has its invasion of Ukraine — yet not even the most generously worded treaty could interpret Russia's choice to invade Ukraine as an attack on Russia. ## Nuclear-Capable Window Dressing Look at the actual interests of the BRICS nations and the threats they face, and collective defense simply is not the right answer. For some, collective offense is not inconceivable — but that is a difficult thing to commit to paper without driving most of the bloc away and explicitly setting Earth on the path to a third world war. Barring that, most members have little to gain from a military alliance. Russia's interests lie in Eastern Europe, in brinksmanship and land grabs of its own making. China's expansionism in the South China Sea and its designs on Taiwan are acts instigated by China, however the CCP might wish to reframe them, and its policies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have far more to do with economic outreach than war. Brazil and South Africa face no meaningful external threats to their sovereignty. The UAE has far too much money to waste it on war, and Iran is too mired in its own troubles to help anyone else. India works to become a bridge between East and West; Egypt to bridge Israel, the US, and the Arab world; and Ethiopia simply does whatever its leader Abiy Ahmed decides on a given day. The point is not that a mutual-defense treaty has zero value. Ask each member the binary question — would you like these other nations to help ensure you are not attacked, yes or no — and the answer is obviously yes. But there is a vast difference between preferring the convenience of a defense treaty and having a specific reason to chase one. Right now, there is no such reason. Will BRICS one day agree to a treaty of collective defense? Maybe, maybe not. If it does, it will not be a concrete agreement to destroy the West, and even its basic value as a guarantee of response to conventional attack may not be as reliable on paper as NATO's, or that of other multilateral pacts around the world. Bringing the members under a nuclear umbrella, offering assurances that should deter any attacker, building a geopolitical counterweight to NATO — there are sound arguments for all of it. But should such an alliance materialize, it is best understood as nuclear-capable window dressing for an organization whose real power is concentrated elsewhere. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is BRICS, and how large has it grown? BRICS is an intergovernmental organization founded over fifteen years ago by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa added about a year and a half later. It now comprises nine nations, conducts business in eight official languages, spans thirty percent of the world's land surface, and holds forty-five percent of the global population. On the first of January 2024, it welcomed Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Ethiopia, while Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan are among those under active consideration for membership. ### Which BRICS members have the strongest militaries, and what do they bring? China, India, and Russia are the heavyweights. China fields over two million active personnel — the world's largest force — nearly five thousand main battle tanks, a navy soon to carry three aircraft carriers, and an estimated 200-plus J-20 stealth fighters. Russia, the world's fifth-largest military, brings hundreds of modern fighters, strategic bombers, and a war-hardened land force despite heavy Ukraine losses. India adds the second-largest active force at nearly 1.5 million troops, two aircraft carriers, and roughly five thousand more main battle tanks. ### Why would geography be a fatal obstacle to a BRICS military alliance? Six of the nine members — Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Brazil, and South Africa — share no land border with any other member. South Africa's nearest fellow member sits almost five thousand kilometers away; Brazil's is nearly eight thousand. Even the India-China-Russia land corridor is blocked by the high Himalayas and vast Siberian distances. Without land bridges, the bloc would depend on strategic airlift and blue-water sealift it largely lacks: China has fewer than thirty tankers and seventy airlifters, Russia owns only twenty-odd aerial-refueling tankers, and most navies cannot carry troops intercontinentally. ### What genuine military advantages would a BRICS alliance possess? The bloc's real strengths are manufacturing depth, manpower, and nuclear deterrence. Russia is shifting to a war economy and can produce munitions at massive scale; India and China rank among the world's five largest manufacturing economies with a combined population of 2.8 billion. Aerospace firms including Sukhoi, Hindustan Aeronautics, Embraer, and Chengdu and Shenyang give the bloc serious aviation capacity. Most importantly, Russia, China, and India could extend a nuclear umbrella over the six non-nuclear members, providing deterrence regardless of conventional shortfalls. ### Why is a BRICS military alliance considered unlikely despite the bloc's size? The decisive obstacle is the absence of a shared external threat that collective defense would actually solve. Unlike NATO, which was founded around a very real fear of Soviet aggression, BRICS faces no comparable enemy. Internal rivalries further complicate any treaty: China and India have only recently resolved years of border disputes, Putin faces an ICC arrest warrant in South Africa, Egypt and the UAE maintain strong US defense ties, and the bloc's four founders are split on enlargement and strategy. Most members' interests are better served by economic and diplomatic weight than by binding military commitments. ## Sources 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-66525474 2. https://www.reuters.com/world/spurred-by-shared-grievances-brics-gathers-pace-2024-10-24/ 3. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-brics-group-and-why-it-expanding 4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-putin-brics-summit-china-ukraine-war-us-nato-sanctions-perverse-methods/ 5. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/brics-summit-emerging-middle-powers-g7-g20?lang=en 6. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/21/brics-russia-china-kazan-summit-west-dollar/ 7. https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/brics-summit-2023-seeking-alternate-world-order 8. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/turkey-applies-to-join-china-and-russia-in-brics-economic-bloc-kremlin-says 9. https://www.dw.com/en/a-new-world-order-brics-nations-offer-alternative-to-west/a-65124269 10. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240905-nato-member-turkey-balancing-act-brics-bid-russia-china 11. https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2024/07/09/the-new-new-development-bank-a-decade-plus-in-the-making/ 12. https://www.un.org/en/ga/sixth/73/new_development_bank.shtml 13. https://www.france24.com/en/economy/20230824-how-the-brics-nations-failed-to-rebuild-the-global-financial-order 14. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/the-brics-is-not-a-strategic-threat-to-the-united-states/ 15. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/11/china-russia-alliance-cooperation-brics-sco-economy-military-war-ukraine-putin-xi/ 16. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/india-china-russia-to-jointly-build-massive-nuclear-power-plant-on-moon-to-establish-a-future-human-lunar-colony/articleshow/113182566.cms?from=mdr 17. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-has-what-glance 18. https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/worldwide <!-- youtube:xe7r8MFEBJM -->