BRICS is Dead.

May 18, 2026

In a remarkable about-face, multipolar BRICS cheerleader Pepe Escobar, is now claiming “BRICS is dead.”

Hold my beer.

In an interview with Sulaiman Ahmed on May 14, Escobar claimed that Putin was the glue — the agglutinator — that held the whole BRICS together. This is the most interesting confession in the whole interview. Escobar admits that what looked like a coherent bloc was actually one man’s bilateral diplomacy:

“Putin was the only one who had to get Modi and Xi on the same room on the same table and tell them both, ‘okay, now you, we sit here, the three of us, and you’re going to talk your issues to each other face to face.’ So the agglutinator was Putin.”

BRICS is effectively “blown up” and impossible to put back together in its current form.

While he spent years as one of the alliance’s biggest public advocates, he admits that he was “too romantic” about its potential to succeed.

BRICS wasn’t a class formation or even a stable institutional bloc. It was a glue-stick held by one aging Russian president. When the glue couldn’t override Modi’s hard tilt toward Washington and Tel Aviv, the whole package came apart.

The Iran war is the event that blew everything up: “This war changes everything. Everything.” He’s explicit that BRICS was working — or appeared to be — until the Iran war exposed that Modi was playing an insider game.

Modi’s visit to Israel in February, 2026, the first Indian PM ever to address the Knesset.

It was the pre-existing fissure the war then ripped open. “Even before the start of the war, that Modi visit to Israel blew up BRICS from the inside, big, big time.” India under Modi had already defected in substance; the war just made the defection public.

Escobar claims that in a private interview, Vivek Ramaswamy told him the Indian-American operation in U.S. politics has been, all along, a long con to redirect U.S. trade away from China and toward India — and that BRICS membership was instrumentally a means to that end, not an alternative to it.

“The entire infiltration has always been to get closer to the US. So you could never trust them as a partner. The partnership for in BRICS is only a means to try and get closer to the US.”

It’s devastating for the multipolarity thesis. It means one of the five founding BRICS members has been treating the bloc as a leverage instrument against another founding member (China) the entire time. My four-faction model predicts that there is no unified counter-hegemonic project, only state apparatuses pursuing factional interest under a shared rhetorical umbrella.

The State Capitalist’s umbrella orgs — BRICS, the SCO and the multipolar world project — are all anti-hegemon attempts to steer around sanctions and trade off the US dollar. That aspect of the project succeeded.

The agglutinator concept is transferable to each of the four factions: Every faction in the four-way model has one. Davos had Schwab (now gone, replaced by no one officially, but unofficially Mark Carney has filled the glue vacuum). Imperial Nationalists have Netanyahu as the synthesizer figure binding U.S. neocons, Christian Zionists, and the Israeli right. Silicon Valley has Peter Thiel who is funding all the Network State projects. State Capitalists had Putin as the agglutinator of the external BRICS face, with Xi as the internal CCP agglutinator.

The factional civil war (Capitalist Civil War) can be partly tracked by watching when the agglutinator's binding power fails. Schwab resigned without a permanent successor and Mark Carney has stepped into the functional vacuum with his middle-powers coalition, which is in itself the Davos faction's first explicit admission that its Great Reset universalist project has failed. Putin's binding power just visibly failed in the Iran war. Netanyahu is under domestic siege; his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners just submitted a bill to dissolve the Knesset. Thiel is the most intact of the four — which tells you something about which faction is currently best-positioned.

Escobar is narrating exactly what the four faction model predicts: that what looked like a transnational class formation (BRICS), was actually a temporary balance of power between state actors that defaulted back into bilateral state-to-state relations the moment any of them faced an existential test. What survives are bilateral relationships, territorial alignments, state actors: China-Pakistan, Iran-Pakistan, Russia-Iran, Russia-China — temporary, minilateral coalitions without any ideological umbrella to glue them together.

Trump Agrees: BRICS is dead.

It was originally Trump who stated “BRICS is dead,” before reporters February 13, 2025, at the White House, hours before his meeting with Modi.

“they will come back and say we beg you we beg you not to do this . BRICS is dead since I mentioned that BRICS died the minute I mentioned that but BRICS was put there for a bad purpose and uh most of those people don’t want they don’t even want to talk about it now they’re afraid to talk about it because I told them if if they want to play games with the dollar then they’re going to be hit with a 100% tariff the day they mentioned that they want to do it and they will come back and say we beg you we beg you not to do this BRICS is dead … “

At the recent BRICS foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi, May 14-15, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi strongly urged the bloc to issue a sweeping, formal condemnation of international law violations by Israel and the United States. Because BRICS operates strictly on absolute consensus, India's refusal meant a unified declaration was impossible. India could not bridge the gap, the summit concluded in a major diplomatic failure. Host India was forced to scrap the joint statement entirely and settle for releasing a basic Ministry of External Affairs Chair's Statement and Outcome Document.

To make matters worse, India’s pro-Israel posture wasn’t the only element tearing the meeting apart. The conflict in the Persian Gulf spilled directly into the room, creating an unbridgeable clash between new members Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Iran accused the UAE — “a member State that has its own special relations with Israel” — of trying to sabotage the text by demanding a separate condemnation of Iranian military strikes on GCC states.

The UAE representative, Minister of State, Khalifa bin Shaheen Al Marar, rejected Araghchi’s remarks, accusing him of attempting to justify “terrorist attacks” against the UAE and other Gulf states. Escobar recorded his BRICS is dead interview on May 14. The same day, in New Delhi, the bloc's foreign ministers were proving him right in real time.

Following the collapse of the New Delhi meeting, Brazil, predictably, took the Davos-aligned position of polite denial. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira told The Hindu that “BRICS is evolving with new members; differences will take time to resolve” — the diplomatic vocabulary of a faction that cannot yet admit the project is over.

BRICS was never a pro-multipolar project. It was an Anti-Washington/Israeli Consensus project. China’s vision of multipolarity, Russia’s vision, India’s vision, and Brazil’s vision were mutually incompatible from day one. What they shared was a common interest in escaping from dollar hegemony, sanctions enforcement, SWIFT capture, and Washington conditions.

Strip away the rhetorical scaffolding and the bloc was always RC+.

Russia and China — the only two members with the state capacity, military weight, and structural opposition to the Washington/Israeli Consensus to make the escape possible. Everyone else was either a hedger (India, the UAE, Indonesia), Davos-aligned ballast giving lip service to the Global South (Brazil under Lula, South Africa under the ANC), or a sanctioned regime grateful for the life raft (Iran, increasingly Egypt and Ethiopia as conditions worsen). The agglutinator wasn’t holding together a five-power bloc. He was holding together a China-Russia core surrounded by passengers.

The New and Improved BRICS™ may reinvent itself over an anti-Zionist stance, but any resurrected BRICS would be a smaller, harder, more ideologically defined bloc. If the litmus test is Zionism, then it would exclude India and the UAE outright, which means the "Global South" framing dies with the current version.

The agglutinator failed. The glue didn’t stick. BRICS is dead.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?