Having beaten a rapid retreat following the opening volley of “Liberation Day” in April, Donald Trump has now made another sally in his global trade war. On Sunday night, he threatened to impose higher rates on any country aligning itself with the “anti-American policies” of the Brics+ group. Posting on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump’s warning was timed to coincide with the Brics+ summit that was drawing to a close in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian President Lula shot back, declaring that the world does not need an “emperor” and that the US President was targeting sovereign nations. But what is it about the Brics countries that draws Trump’s ire, and how vulnerable are they to the threat of extra tariffs?

Formed in 2009, during the peak era of US global supremacy, the Brics group initially cast itself as a haven to help consolidate emerging powers, precisely because they were in no position to tangle with America. As US power has declined since, the group has grown more self-confident, styling its members as the “global majority”. Radical activists and Brics state media have puffed the group up into nothing less than a grand anti-imperialist front, destined to overturn centuries of Western hegemony and free the world’s peoples from US domination.

In truth, there is little basis for such lurid fantasies of Third-World revolt. It is worth remembering that the Brics label was hatched neither in Moscow nor Beijing, but instead as a marketing gimmick by the Goldman Sachs banker Jim O’Neill, who was looking to build new investment vehicles around emerging markets at the start of the century. While expanding Brics to include large economies such as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia will certainly inflate its overall share of the global economy, it will not strengthen the group’s geopolitical significance.

Scattered across continents and oceans, the diversity of the group’s members does not make up for their geographic diffusion, comprising a variety of regimes — ranging from democracies such as India and Brazil to autocracies such Russia and China — as well as internal contradictions between its core members. These tensions come in the form of sharing disputed borders (China and India) and economic rivalry (with Chinese exports eating away at Brazilian industry). The addition of regional foes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran will do nothing to settle this volatile mix. To cap it all off, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping both notably snubbed the Rio summit this month, sending delegates in their stead, and the gathering was muted on how strongly to denounce Israel’s war in Gaza.

The reason Trump has threatened the Brics+ countries with extra tariffs is not because he is worried about being swept away by the “global majority”. Rather, it is due to Brics+ efforts to set up global trading arrangements based on blockchain rather than the US dollar, thereby outflanking the financial basis of American hegemony. The status of the dollar lies at the crux of Trump’s trade war, with the tariffs constituting a knight’s move rather than a frontal assault. They are intended to grow American exports by deflating the value of the dollar while simultaneously keeping its role as the world’s dominant reserve currency.

Trump’s convoluted and seemingly haphazard strategy is unlikely to succeed in preserving the status of the dollar. But the Brics states are not ready to abandon the greenback in favor of a blockchain system devised by St Petersburg State University either. We have the prospect of a very stoppable force crashing into a very moveable object: what happens in such a confrontation?

For the moment, the world defaults to gold, with purchases of the precious metal pushing the euro into third place as a global currency asset. Instead of a clash between “the old stagnant bloc” of the West and the “emerging bloc of Brics countries” as each was styled by Bolivia’s Left-wing president Luis Arce in Rio, we are seeing something stranger and more historically novel. This is a world which is bipolar in geopolitical terms, with China and the US as contending superpowers, but increasingly multipolar in financial terms, as the status of the dollar is eroded but not replaced, and in which old currencies will be routed through new digital systems. This is a world rich in opportunity for mid-sized powers and smaller states – if they are willing to break with the decrepit institutions and ideologies of the 20th century.

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Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently: The National Interest: Politics after Globalization.

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