I’m old enough to remember when any discussion about BRICS was relegated to the nerdiest foreign affairs outlets. Few thought the economic alliance could grow beyond its founding member nations because the players were all too hideous in a western-dominated global society. They may have had some of the most powerful nations in the world joining together to challenge western dominance, but just because they had Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, we had the United States of America.
I fondly remember foreign affairs analysts claiming it would be decades before these “backwards” or “broken” nations could compete against us. Their arguments often sounded like Tony Stark talking to Loki in Stark Towers in the first Avengers movie “I have an army,” Loki said. “We have a Hulk,” Stark replied.
The days of western bravado and dismissal of BRICS seem to be upon us, and it didn’t take decades. The architects of The Great Reset seem to be positioning BRICS to challenge American economic hegemony by both weakening western nations while propping up Russia and China. While both have economic challenges of their own, they’re plowing through it while we’re getting stuck in the dirt. The nature of their authoritarian governments gives them a stronger position to handle economic hardships. Meanwhile, many Americans are trying to time out when to hit up the Tesla Supercharger stations.
Two articles hit my radar this morning. Both bode ill for us as a rising BRICS alliance means another option may be available to the world soon. The U.S. dollar’s status as the world reserve currency exists because it exists. There have been no other options so nations have had to play ball or become North Korea. If that changes, and many nations are hoping it will, then the alternative will likely something out of BRICS. And that would spell doom for us and our $30+ trillion national debt.
Here’s the first article that’s worth a read from Great Game India:
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey May Join BRICS ‘Very Soon’, Forum Chair Anand Says
According to the president of the BRICS International Forum, Purnima Anand, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia might “very soon” join the club of major emerging economies, which also includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
According to Anand, this topic was discussed by China, Russia, and India at the 14th BRICS Summit, which virtually took place from June 23 to 24.
“All these countries have shown an interest in joining and are preparing to apply for membership. I think this is a good step, because expansion is always perceived positively; this will clearly increase the influence of BRICS in the world… I hope that the accession of countries to BRICS will happen very quickly, because now all representatives of the core of the association are interested in enlargement. So it will be very soon,” Purnima Anand stated.
According to reports, the BRICS International Forum President is sure that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey will all join the organization soon because they have already “begun the process.” She reportedly said that they wouldn’t all sign up at once though.
Anand’s comments are consistent with those made earlier about the potential growth of BRICS by Li Kexin, head of the Department of International Economic Affairs at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Li Kexin stated during a press conference following the 14th BRICS summit in Beijing that “there are several countries currently ‘at the door’ — for example, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Argentina.”
The BRICS nations concur that the bloc needs new members while maintaining its distinctive identity, he continued.
“I believe there is a shared understanding that we need to enlarge, get ‘new faces’,” Li said.
He highlighted, however, that the growth of the BRICS is “not to create a new bloc.”
Siyabonga Cyprian Cwele, the South African ambassador to China, who spoke beside Li, emphasized that BRICS is about partnership rather than “big muscle.”
The Global Times had quoted Sabino Vaca Narvaja, Argentina’s ambassador to China, as saying that “the BRICS cooperation mechanism is of great significance for the building of a new, more multipolar and balanced world.”
“We are interested in joining BRICS because it is a cooperative mechanism composed entirely of emerging economies. There are no strings attached and all cooperation is mutually beneficial,” Vaca said.
At their 14th meeting in Beijing, China, the BRICS group of countries decided to work together to improve and change global governance while preserving international peace and security. South Africa will take up the rotational chairmanship of BRICS in 2019 from China, who currently holds the position.
Iran, Algeria, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Malaysia, and Thailand were among the 13 other developing countries whose leaders were invited by Beijing to the conference.
Chinese President Xi Jinping urged the world to “reject hegemony, bullying, and division” in his opening remarks at the summit. Iran made its ambition to join BRICS known in advance of the meeting, citing its “unique geographical position and its capabilities in the fields of energy, transit, and trade” as well as its potential to serve as a “golden route to connect” the East and the West.
“If Iran and other powerful countries join the grouping, it can be even stronger and challenge western policies,” Iran’s state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) added.
Here’s the second article on the subject by Free West Media:
BRICS Expansion on the Cards
More and more emerging countries are considering joining the BRICS group, which is seen as the major emerging countries’ counterweight to the US-led West and the G7. Especially in times like these, this is also a clear signal to Washington.
The BRICS group of states, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, are working ever more closely together on an economic and political level. Together they represent 3,26 billion people and a gross domestic product of US$27,54 trillion. According to estimates, the economic output of these five countries will account for 50 percent of total global value added by 2030.
In view of the fact that “rules-based” Western countries are experiencing serious economic problems, this prognosis does not even seem that far-fetched.
In contrast to the G7 group, the representatives of the US-led collective West, the BRICS group sees itself as an open organization that does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. It is therefore not surprising that membership in this group of states also arouses the interest of diverse nations.
In particular, those states that have their own problems and conflicts with the United States seem to be most interested. Argentina and Iran, for example, announced their intention to become part of the group of states. And Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates have recently expressed interest in becoming members.
The list does not end there as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey also plan to join BRICS , the President of the International BRICS Forum Purnima Anand confirmed to Russian outlet Izvestia, adding that a discussion and a possible decision on some countries will be held at the next summit of the association, which will take place in 2023, the Russian news agency TASS reported.
These countries could participate in increased resource sharing and open up air, trade and financial routes “to the new global realities”.
Notably, BRICS countries are working on establishing a new common reserve currency, similar to the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights. This would enable economic cooperation without having to resort to the US dollar or the euro – and without being threatened with having their funds confiscated by Western financial institutions.
A major Western bank, ING, has meanwhile brought up the discussion of a basket of BRICS currencies, noting that “the increasing weaponization of the dollar” could see a move into gold.
Former Russian President and Prime Minister and current Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev commented on the expansion. “The best protection against the rotting euro will be the transition to new means of payment in trade with our reliable partners, including through the use of national currencies – the Russian ruble, Chinese yuan, Indian rupee, etc,” he wrote on Telegram. “The dollar, the euro and the pound sterling are clearly not enough for the modern world.”
BRICS nations have since opted for a payment system that would be an alternative to the US-dominated SWIFT system. The main benefits highlighted were redundancy in case there were disruptions to the SWIFT system.
China has initiated the development of their own payment system called CIPS: the Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System (CIPS), which provides a network that enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, and standardized system. India also has its alternative Structured Financial Messaging System (SFMS), as does Russia with its System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS).
As more countries join BRICS and indirectly related organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SOC), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and so on, it becomes more difficult for the United States to exert influence economically and to put financial pressure on nations to bend to its will.
The financial war declared on countries outside the realm of the dollar, showed many countries how vulnerable they actually are as a result of a close connection to the western financial systems. Over-reliance on China may also pose dangers for many, but what other options remain?
Why It Matters
The reason the Liberal World Order secretly backs BRICS is not because they want them necessarily to succeed. They want the United States to fail, and BRICS is the most viable option to take down America’s economy from outside while they move other chess pieces in the nation, most notably the Biden-Harris regime.
We are no longer in a position to let them grow without concern of them usurping us. As noted above, they are on pace to account for half of the world’s wealth before the end of the decade. And if a shooting war starts between any of the players, most notably between the United States and China-Russia alliance, then it’s very likely we will see the shift away from the U.S. dollar accelerate quickly.
As many know, the only thing keeping us from being crushed by our national debt is that most other nations are tied to the U.S. dollar. If that changes, then we will fall. BRICS is the outside existential threat that far too few are watching. Government, media, and the people seem to be ignoring it. We need to start addressing it as soon as possible. It may already be too late.
Article originally published at my Economic Collapse Substack.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
