Two of the founding members of Brics, Russia and China, are not sending their respective leaders Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to today’s Rio de Janeiro summit. To the Guardian, this is a “puzzling” move, perhaps explained by the ICC war crime charges that Putin faces or the founders’ doubts about the alliance’s open door policy. In 2024 alone, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates joined the alliance, bringing the total to 11 countries. Yet a more plausible interpretation is that Putin and Xi have read the writing on the wall and are adjusting to the emergence of a new, nation-centric world order.

Despite the Cold War ending in 1989, that period’s basic geopolitical structure — built around various cooperative blocs — survived into the 2000s and beyond. After the fall of the Wall, ex-Warsaw Pact states who had dreamt of regaining sovereignty and a national identity were, instead, integrated into new Euro-Atlantic bureaucracies, which engaged in mission creep and overreach beyond their intended mandates.

The inherent instabilities of that centralised, one-size-fits-all Cold War order were laid bare by such events as the 2008 Eurozone crisis, the 2014–15 European migration crisis, Brexit, Covid, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Yet it only finally ended with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, 2025, and his administration’s signal to the EU and Nato that the era of the US security umbrella was over.

The absence of Putin and Xi at this weekend’s Brics summit suggests that a similar thing is happening among non-Western nations. Indeed, in the future, all countries will be more independent, cooperating when it is useful and working autonomously when it is not. Likely no single country, not even China, will take a global leadership role with a band of vassals under one acronym or another.

Britain, for example, has spent recent years adjusting to life outside the comfort of the EU. While the EU is yet to close a trade deal with the US just days away from receiving a blanket 50% tariff on exports, the UK has signed a deal avoiding the worst of Trump’s protectionism. Germany, the lynchpin of the EU, has also been exploring nationalistic policies like rearmament and generous subsidies for heavy industry.

With Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping choosing not to attend the Brics summit, the slow death of multilateral organisations has reached the anti-Westerners. Realpolitik has returned, and leaders are realising that nation states, not transnational organisations, are best attuned to deal with a more volatile world.

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Johan Wennström is a Research Fellow at the Swedish Defence University, currently writing a book about Sweden’s stay-behind network during the Cold War.

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