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• There will be at best just seven BRICS-member heads of state present, because neither Putin (subject to a 2022 International Criminal Court arrest warrant, for mass child-kidnapping in eastern Ukraine, that must be respected in Brazil) nor Xi Jinping will be present – this being the Chinese leader’s first missed summit – and nor will Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi attend (and don’t expect Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and maybe not even Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian), thus diminishing the gravity of the event;

• No expansion of the BRICS is expected this year, as the digestion of new member states and the assessment of new ‘partners’ (a Kazan innovation) continues, given how disruptive the geopolitical scene has become;

• To illustrate, invited full-member Saudi Arabia has not yet confirmed or denied its accession (which is predictable, given that Riyadh was Trump’s first overseas visit this year), thereby lowering the bloc’s prestige, and indeed nor have two nominated partners — Algeria and Turkey — indicated whether they will accept their invitations (both had expected full membership late last year, i.e., as Indonesia received and accepted in January);

• Internal geopolitical conflicts abound, partly witnessed in the lack of genuine solidarity with Iran during the recent Israeli-American bombings, what with Tehran being the only BRICS capital to forcefully oppose the genocidaires in material terms (apart from South Africa – but then only rhetorically – in The Hague), while all the other nine BRICS have very lucrative economic relations (and most have military, energy and logistics ties);

• Also in relation to military conflict, the most populous BRICS founder, India, clashed with neighbor Pakistan in May, in the process revealing strong Chinese military support for Islamabad, sufficiently sophisticated to shoot down several of Delhi’s French-made bombers, while on the Indian side, a Russian missile defense system fended off Chinese-made drones, missiles and jets;

• Internal power struggles within the African Union are serious, leading Egypt and Ethiopia to sabotage the latest meeting of BRICS foreign ministers (in April in Rio) due to their opposition to South Africa becoming one of two potential African permanent members of the UN Security Council (a process most likely to resume only after Trump leaves office);

• The loyalty of some BRICS elites to the U.S. has been evident, especially in the cases of India and also at the notorious meeting South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa had in the White House in May (when he sought to defuse Elon Musk’s absurd ‘white genocide’ charges), but also in the internal power relations shaped by Brazil’s Western-oriented ruling class, not to mention long-standing U.S.-subimperial allies Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia;

• Economically, there remains a serious risk that Trump’s trade wars will result in much greater Chinese ‘dumping’ (sales below costs-of-production under conditions of ‘overaccumulated capital’) of cheap manufactured goods into other BRICS economies, accelerating their deindustrialisation (e.g. already resulting in South Africa imposing tariffs against Chinese steel, tyres and other imports);

• There will be no progress on de-dollarisation, given Washington’s threats to impose extreme tariffs if BRICS were to move in this direction (made by Trump no fewer than seven times from December-February), while the ‘BRICS Pay’ local-currency correlation strategy developed by Russia is difficult to implement fully due to South-South trade imbalances, and China’s strong exchange controls prevent another route to facilitating a long-overdue dollar alternative; and

• As for new multipolar institutions, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) has five new members (chosen illogically, with very low voting quotas, ranging from the UAE to Bangladesh and most recently Algeria), but one of the five original members, Russia, remains subject to financial sanctions following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine – remaining in force even under (pro-Putin) NDB President Dilma Rousseff over the last two years – due to the bank’s bowing to New York credit rating agencies, and worse, the vast majority of NDB new loans are still denominated in US dollars, and yet worse still, as a much-needed alternative to the International Monetary Fund, there is still no BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, despite the majority of member countries (Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Iran) being rated ‘junk’ (or unrated), and hence desperate for foreign currency injections (and no BRICS credit-ratings agency yet, notwithstanding annual promises to launch an alternative to the New York oligopoly).