The Multipolar Illusion: Why the "Rise of the Global South" Is More Complicated Than Anyone Wants to Admit

I’ve followed the BRICS story for a while now, and the longer I watch, the more it seems everybody is arguing about different things.

One camp says it’s the end of America. The other says it’s a joke, a talking shop with a nice logo. Hardly anyone asks the boring, obvious question: what do these countries actually want? I don’t mean what the summit statement says, because those get written by committee and sanded down until nobody objects. I don’t mean what we project onto them either, whether that’s hope or fear. I mean what a finance minister in one of these capitals wants when the cameras are off and she’s staring at a spreadsheet.

So let’s start with what’s real.

The dollar is fine for now. If someone tells you it’s about to collapse, check what they’re selling, because it’s usually a newsletter, a gold coin or a bunker. But it is slowly getting diluted, and that happens in small, dull ways. India pays for Russian oil in rupees. Brazil and China settle soybean deals in yuan. Central banks buy a bit more gold and hold a bit less US debt. You’ll never see any of it as a headline. Nobody holds a press conference to announce a slightly different settlement arrangement. But it piles up, and the pile is what matters.

People keep waiting for a big moment, the day the world wakes up and drops the dollar. That day isn’t coming. It’s more like erosion. You don’t notice a riverbank changing shape week to week, and then one year you look and the whole bend has moved.

The reason it’s happening is sanctions. When Russia’s reserves got frozen, finance ministries everywhere took note. You don’t need to like Moscow to see what the move meant. Your dollars are yours until Washington decides otherwise. Imagine you run the economy of a country that holds a few hundred billion in reserves, and you read that news. You don’t have to think Washington is evil. You just have to think it might someday disagree with you about something. If you’re in Riyadh, Delhi or Brasília, you don’t make a speech about that. You quietly build a back door.

That’s all this is. Insurance. And people only buy insurance once they’ve stopped fully trusting the company.

I’d add that insurance is a boring word for something that’s actually a big shift. For decades the assumption was that holding dollars and Treasuries was the safe, default, don’t-think-about-it choice. Now a lot of governments are thinking about it. Even if they only move a small slice, the habit of asking “what if” is new, and it doesn’t go away.

Now the other side, because I can’t stand the cheerleaders either.

If you think BRICS is a NATO-style bloc with more resentment, I’d gently suggest you look at who’s in it. India and China have troops clashing on their border. Brazil wants a good relationship with the West, while Russia is at war with the West. South Africa is trying to hold a coalition together when some of its members can barely stand each other. Try to imagine a joint military plan coming out of that room. Try to imagine them agreeing on a common currency, or even on who gets to run the thing.

What they share is being tired of getting lectured. That’s a real feeling, and I don’t dismiss it. But it’s a group chat, and group chats don’t run world orders. Everybody’s in it, everybody’s got opinions, and the moment something expensive has to be decided, half the members go quiet.

So the “rise of the Global South” is about half true. These countries have a lot more money, more people and more leverage than they did twenty years ago, and they won’t take orders forever. Ask any Western diplomat who’s had a polite no from a country that would once have said yes. That part is real and it’s not going away.

But there’s no single South. There’s no shared ideology and no ready-made alternative system sitting in a drawer. The Washington Consensus, whatever you think of it, was an actual package of ideas that governments could adopt. Nothing like that has ever come out of BRICS. They’ve got a name, a summit schedule and a shared irritation.

What we’re getting instead is messier. More countries have more options. The old choice, pick Washington or pick Beijing, is quietly falling apart, and plenty of governments now try to do business with both. A country might buy its weapons from one, sell its commodities to the other, borrow from a third and keep its savings in a fourth. Textbooks call that multipolarity. I think fragmentation is the better word.

And fragmentation is harder to manage than either of the old setups. When there’s one superpower, or two, you know who to call. Somebody can deliver the votes. Somebody can pick up the phone at two in the morning and stop a crisis from spiralling. In a fragmented world that person doesn’t exist, or there are twelve of them and they’re not speaking to each other. That should worry everyone, the hedgers included. Maybe the hedgers most of all.

A world without blocs sounds like freedom, and in some ways it is. But it also means no clear rules, no enforcement, and nobody to step in when things start falling apart.

The old order was unfair and hypocritical. It was run by America and its friends for America and its friends, and it let us break the rules whenever we felt like it. But it was an order. People knew roughly how the game worked. Now we get to find out whether an unfair order beats no order at all. I think the answer will be ugly, and the countries hedging hardest will learn that having options and having security are two different things. Options are what you have when things are going well. Security is what you need when they aren’t.

My honest take, then. The Global South is hedging more than rising. The dollar is being watered down, not killed. And the multipolar world is arriving as a slow, uneven drift where everyone has a bit more room to move and nobody has any idea what’s next.

The big powers will mostly be fine. They’ve got the leverage to absorb a bad stretch. The ones who get hurt are the small countries in the middle, which have no leverage to hedge and no safe side to pick, because both sides keep changing the rules on them. They’re the ones who can’t afford to guess wrong, and they’re the ones who’ll have the least say in how this ends.

The old story was that America runs the world. The new story is supposed to be that nobody does. We’re not there yet. We’re stuck in between, and the in-between is where things break.