The world has changed in a very fundamental way. For most of the last century the world has been run on the lines of Great Power Geopolitics: them and us; the enlightened and the barbaric; the rich and the poor.

During the Cold War this was framed as Capitalists vs Communists. Since the collapse of the socialist experiment thirty years ago it is now framed as liberal democracy vs authoritarian. You either belong to one camp, led by the US/EU, or the other, now characterised by China/Russia. The DragonBear been criticised for “failing” to act in this same hegemonistic manner. That is seen as a weakness. The Wall Street Journal went as far as calling the BRICS Bloc “a house of cards” for this reason.

“The current war in Iran suggests that US concerns about BRICS are overblown. The group has shown itself to be utterly ineffectual, unable to come up with a unified response to an international crisis,” the Wall Street Journal argued. “The idea of any kind of unity within the bloc is laughable.”

That is how the US and EU would do it. That is not how the world works anymore. What has changed in just the last five years or so is the challenge to what Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin complain is a “unipolar hegemony” led by the US which has given way to the Global South’s ideal of a multipolar world. That was unexpected.

Russia and China may look embattled by the belligerent Global North, but Xi and Putin have already won their battle to destroy the unipolar world – with a lot of help from US President Donald Trump’s own destructive trade policies – and are busy building a new world order that excludes western institutions as much as possible. The BRICS+, the G20 (now actually the G64 after all of Africa joined) and the more amorphous Global Emerging Markets Institutions (GEMIs) – a patchwork world of semi-formal trade, security and cultural allegiances – are taking over. Collectively the Global South is now the richer part of the world.

This apparently contradictory set of relations is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the bizarre alliance between Russia, China and India in the BRICS confab. China and India have been virtually at war for decades on their shared border, yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi showed up at the SCO summit last year to hobnob with Xi and Putin in a “reset” of Sino-Indian relations. Likewise, despite being one of the most liberal members of the BRICS bloc, economic relations between India and Russia have deepened significantly in the last few years with the expanded trade in oil, commodities and arms to the point where New Delhi has defied Washington’s demands to cut trade ties with Russia and pursue its own “sovereign independence” – code for the same idea of putting national interests ahead of trying to become a member of the Global North’s bloc.

Today the US looks much more like a member of the Global South than the Global North as he rides roughshod over shared values and liberal norms, not to mention international law. The irony is the Trump administration is following the same policy as the BRICS with his transactional world view – America First is all about putting US interests above everything else and screw your partners.

And the decay of the values based system has been going on for a while. The latest Freedom in the World 2026 report finds that global freedom declined for the twentieth consecutive year in 2025, with more countries experiencing deterioration in political rights and civil liberties than improvements, Statista reports.

Really the only ones still even pretending to follow the old school values agenda is Europe. And with a great deal of arrogance: former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell went as far as describing Europe as a “garden” and the emerging markets as a “jungle”, which went down like a lead balloon in the Middle East in particularly.

But even there it's largely rhetoric. The UK just eased oil sanctions on Russia so it can import more fuel ahead of a looming supply crunch as inventories are about to run dry. And this weekend, the EU suggested that it may freeze the oil price cap sanctions on oil for the same reason. But that has been rejected by Washington as outlined in its National Security Strategy (NSS) released in December. Trump's recent actions are overtly imperial and he is actively dismantling the rules-based international order.

The central difference between their two world views is that the leading countries in the old system in the Global North were supposed to be united by “shared values” they have in common. In the multipolar world, the driving principle is of “national interest”, but the relations are built on where these interests overlap with your partners.

This boils down to Xi and Putin’s strict principle of “non-interference” in domestic affairs of your allies, as they expounded in detail in their 8,000 word essay last year. The values-based system is exactly the opposite: interference in everyone else’s internal affairs and a regime of sanctions and war to impose “punishments” on those countries that don’t comply. It was exactly this hypocritical dual system of “do as we say not as we do” that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lambasted in his “new rules of the game” speech delivered in February 2021, the prelude to the invasion of Ukraine.

A nuance to this aggressive, what the Global South see as, neo-colonialism is that it is not enough to be a democracy to be friends with the Global North; you have to be a “like-minded” democracy. The US has regularly worked to overthrow legitimate democracies if they are not seen as US-friendly. In my patch the ousting Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a prime example: he won what was Ukraine’s first open and fair (within Ukrainian limits of course) election in 2010, very narrowly defeating Yulia Tymoshenko, who stepped aside and conceded defeat in a remarkable result for a FSU country. Then the US conspired to eject him and replace the government with a pro-US team headed by former President Petro Poroshenko.

Yet despite all this, commentators routinely dismiss the emerging BRICS bloc because of its “lack of unity.” Russia is rubbished as being a Chinese “raw materials vassal” and Putin lacks agency due to his dependence on China’s support in his clash with the west.

International commentators have scoffed at Russia and China’s muted reaction to helping their so-called allies in places like Venezuela and Iran after both came under attack by the US. They highlight Beijing and Moscow's helplessness to help their friends. If someone attacked one of our friends, like Ukraine, then the West would come to its collective aid.

But this is to understand the fundamental change that has come about. The BRICS bloc is not a bloc in the sense that the Global North is united by things like Nato or its dominance of institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

The Global South has a completely different mentality. As IntelliNews previously described, the Washington Consensus underpins the Global North thinking, which puts individual happiness and prosperity at the heart of its ideology. The Global South is led by the Moscow consensus, which emphasizes the well-being of the states over its citizens’ freedoms. That also means that Moscow and Beijing won’t go to war to save Venezuela or Cuba, but they will do everything they can to support their friends without overtly committing military assistance.

This has been made abundantly clear in both the Ukrainian and Iranian conflicts. China has become a major supplier to both Moscow and Tehran in these conflicts but won’t send munitions or troops to either.

This “asymmetrical support” is crucial and mirrors the asymmetrical nature of the war being fought in both countries. The advent of drones has changed everything, turning the military power pyramid on its head: it used to be enough to have a powerful navy and state-of-the-art smart bombs; now it’s the country that can mass produce low-cost drones in theirmns that have the upper hand.

On that score, Trump said that Ukraine has no cards, but Bankova has been busy making them in the form of the 7mn drones it will manufacture this year. The long-range drones have been flying sorties against Russia’s oil refineries since last year, but more recently the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has introduced medium-range missiles that are reportedly causing hell with Russia’s logistics.

The mood has changed there as Trump increasingly finds himself painted into a corner. Last year, Zelenskiy offered to do a mega $50bn drone deal, which Trump dismissed out of hand: “We don’t need any help.” This weekend, Zelenskiy said Bankova is now actively in talks with the Pentagon on testing and building drones in the US. After three months of campaigning in Iran it seems the realities of the asymmetric war is now finally penetrating into the Pentagon’s thinking.

Trump is now the one with no cards. He is a businessman, not a statesman. As Brett Erickson, Managing Principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors, pointed out, he has never been in this position before. In business if Trump couldn’t close a deal he simply declared bankruptcy – six times – and walked away. Declaring bankruptcy in a war is not an option. If you don’t win (aka close the deal) then you lose. And given the Iranians have dug their heels in and in another asymmetrical dimension of this war. Iran holds insurmountable "escalation dominance". Tehran can inflict dipropionate amounts of pain on the global economy compared to the pain the US military can inflict on Iran. Trump now has no way out of this war except in a strategic defeat.

“As a result, Donald Trump always had the leverage. He was a trust fund baby,” says Erickson. “The reality facing Donald Trump is one that he has never had to navigate before. Iran does not care that he is wealthy. It's irrelevant. Trump can't simply walk away because Iran would retain control of the Strait of Hormuz and it would destroy Trump's legacy. There is no emergency "bankruptcy-equivalent" escape valve here… The unfortunate reality is that President Trump holds no cards. He has no meaningful leverage. His only option is making concessions at the negotiating table.”

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