The 2023 BRICS summit held in South Africa had a main and common focus: ending the dependence on the US dollar - in an effort to de-dollarize - which can be seen stemming after the US seized Russia’s currency reserves, leading other nations to realize that their own might be at a "geopolitical risk", Philip Pilkington argues in UnHerd.

Part of this move was an announcement this week by Dilma Rousseff, the head of the Shanghai-based BRICS bank, the New Development Bank, who said that it would be expanding lending to its members.

Unlike the IMF and the World Bank, however, lending in local currencies is a possibility, and the sort of conditionality that comes with loans from the IMF and the World Bank would not apply. Later on, Rousseff made a surprise announcement that the bank was considering adding 15 new members.

The NDB was not the only one with a similar surprise announcement. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, 22 countries have joined the queue in hopes of becoming a BRCIS member, but at the end of the summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the bloc is inviting six new members from January next year: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. 

The scenario, according to UnHerd, is that if all the aforementioned nations join BRICS, the bloc will move from comprising 32% of global GDP to 45% in terms of purchasing power parity which is miles ahead of the G7, which makes up just over 30%. 

Read next: The BRICS, countering Western centuries-long hegemony

A losing game for the US

For Iran, its addition to the group means it can join 'the cool group', away from being isolated from the world economy, especially taking into consideration that it's the world's eighth largest oil producer and the third largest proven for oil reserves - proving significant for economic and geopolitical development.

The same applies to Saudi Arabia and the UAE since the US used to depend on the Gulf, namely Saudi Arabia, to exert pressure over oil prices, but if they join the bloc, the latter case seems like a lost game for the US.

UnHerd further suggested that the West can try to pull India out of BRICS and integrate it into the G7 (or the G8), especially since the US is its top trading partner, followed by two Brics members China and Russia. 

This report comes amid Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel expressing at the summit that the bloc's New Development Bank should serve as the alternative to modern financial institutions that aim "to obtain resources from the countries of the South." 

"The New Development Bank created by BRICS can and should become an alternative to modern financial institutions that have been using outdated recipes for about a century to obtain resources from the countries of the South," he said. 

BRICS is attracting countries that aim to steer away from a system controlled by the collective West and adopt a model of international relations based on mutual partnership, South Africa's minister of public works and infrastructure told Sputnik on Wednesday.

Read next: BRICS attracting nations aiming for a non-Western dominated system

"[The] majority of the countries in the world are yearning for a platform where they could cooperate at a mutual level without being dominated by the so-called superpowers. And that's why many people are eager to join BRICS," Minister Sihle Zikalala said.