The Roundtable: Is the G7's Dominance Coming to an End?
Editor's Note: Welcome to our monthly roundtable discussion. Each month, our five student editors will come together to debate a major issue shaping our world. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Minwoo Jung: For decades, the script of global governance has been written by a small club of wealthy Western nations and Japan, the G7. This month, at a summit in Johannesburg, a rival club announced it was getting much bigger and much more ambitious. The BRICS bloc—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—invited six new countries to join, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and Egypt. Anthony, can you lay out the economic weight of this new group?
Anthony Min: The numbers are significant. With the new members, the expanded BRICS will represent something like 46% of the world's population and a larger share of global GDP, in purchasing power parity terms, than the G7. You have the world's biggest manufacturer in China, the biggest oil exporters in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and some of the biggest demographic powers in India and Brazil. That's a massive concentration of economic weight. Their stated goal of "de-dollarization"—trading more in local currencies—is a direct, though still distant, challenge to the foundation of American financial power.
Minwoo Jung: Exactly. This is the economic manifestation of the multipolar world we've been talking about for years. It's a formalization of the "rest" as a political and economic force. It gives a voice to the nations of the Global South who are tired of being lectured by the West and who feel that institutions like the IMF and World Bank are rigged against them.
Yehee Jung: But can a group this diverse actually agree on anything? It seems like its only unifying principle is a shared resentment of the current system. You have democracies like Brazil and South Africa in the same club as autocracies like China and Russia. You have India and China, two powers locked in a serious strategic rivalry. And now you’re adding Iran and Saudi Arabia, two countries that have been on opposite sides of a regional cold war for decades. From a systems perspective, it looks incredibly unstable. It feels more like a recipe for gridlock than a new world order.
Saerom Kim: Yehee’s point is the one I keep coming back to. It feels less like an alliance and more like a collection of rivals who just happen to share a common rival in the United States. From a cultural perspective, what do these countries have in common? Brazil's culture is vastly different from China's, which is vastly different from South Africa's. The G7, for all its faults, is a club of nations that share a set of core values around liberal democracy and free markets. What are the core values of the new BRICS?
Minwoo Jung: I think you're looking at it through a Western lens, Saerom. The core value is the rejection of the Western-led order. The value is "strategic autonomy." It’s a club for countries that don't want to be forced to choose sides in the US-China rivalry. It allows India to be in a bloc with China while also being part of the Quad with the US. It allows Saudi Arabia to hedge its bets between its traditional security partner in Washington and its biggest oil customer in Beijing. It's a club for the non-aligned.
Anthony Min: And it's a club built on a different premise. The G7 offers a partnership based on shared values. The BRICS, particularly under China's influence, offers a partnership based on commerce and non-interference in domestic affairs. For many countries, that's a much more attractive offer. It comes with infrastructure loans, not lectures on human rights.
Yonghyuk Choi: This reminds me of the LIV Golf situation, in a way. You have an established institution, the G7, that has operated by a certain set of rules for a long time. And now you have a new entity, flush with capital and driven by a different set of priorities, that is challenging the old order. The G7 may still be the most prestigious club, but the BRICS is suddenly the one with all the energy and a much longer waiting list to get in. That, by itself, is a significant shift in global power.
Final Thoughts
Yonghyuk Choi: In sports, a league of rivals often makes for the most compelling drama; in geopolitics, it might just make for a dysfunctional mess.
Anthony Min: Money talks, and the BRICS now represents a much larger share of the global economy; the G7 ignores that at its own peril.
Saerom Kim: A club defined only by what it's against will struggle to define what it's for.
Yehee Jung: The group's internal contradictions—democracies with autocracies, rivals with rivals—make it a deeply unstable system.
Minwoo Jung: This is the formal arrival of the multipolar world—it's messy, it's contradictory, and it's not going away.
What do you think? Is the rise of an expanded BRICS a threat to global stability or a necessary step toward a more balanced world? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
