Amid the chest-thumping rhetoric coming out of Washington, Moscow is quietly laying bricks—pun intended—toward a new financial order. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov recently confirmed that over 90% of transactions within the BRICS bloc are now conducted in national currencies. "This isn’t about replacing the dollar,” Ryabkov noted. “It’s about breaking free from its forced monopoly over global trade.” In other words: this isn’t ideology, it’s necessity.
But try telling that to Donald Trump.
The U.S. president, fresh off his return to the White House in January, wasted no time firing verbal salvos at BRICS following the group’s July 7 summit in Rio de Janeiro. Dismissing the gathering’s push for economic sovereignty, Trump declared he’d hit BRICS “where it hurts” with a blanket 10% tariff on all member countries. “They’re vanishing fast,” he told reporters. “I said, ‘Anyone in BRICS gets 10% tariffs.’ Next day? Empty chairs at their summit.”
Never mind that the absences of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were announced weeks earlier—they both joined virtually. That didn’t stop Trump from claiming victory. “Russia, China, India—they’re scared to show up because of Trump,” he crowed. And then came the promise: as long as he’s in charge, the dollar stays king. “If we have a smart president, the dollar holds. If it’s another dummy like before? It’s over.”
But here’s the rub: the numbers say otherwise.
Behind closed doors in Rio, BRICS finalized plans to expand BRICS Pay, a cross-border payment system designed to rival SWIFT. Already linked to 75 countries and running on the bloc’s national banking infrastructure, BRICS Pay is up and running in Beijing and Moscow. China has moved a third of its foreign trade to yuan settlements. India is fast-tracking its digital rupee, and Russia has slashed the dollar’s share in its exports from 43% to 6%—in just one year.
Parallel to the summit, more than 250 delegates from 36 countries met in Rio at the BRICS Media and Think Tank Forum, where talk focused on the Global South’s bid to decouple from the Western financial and information matrix. The message? This is no longer a rebellion. It’s a movement.
Back in Moscow, lawmakers weren’t buying Trump’s spin. Dmitry Novikov, deputy chair of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, called Trump’s rhetoric a “transparent attempt to pass off wishful thinking as fact.” Far from collapsing, Novikov argued, BRICS is maturing into a strategic coalition of seasoned global players. “They want a multipolar world. That’s what really bothers the U.S. establishment.”
And it shows. Washington’s fallback strategy—tariffs, threats, media barrages—feels more like reflex than roadmap. For a nation long accustomed to setting the rules, it’s becoming painfully clear that the rest of the world no longer plays by them.
The stakes go beyond economics. As pressure from Washington escalates, the push by BRICS nations to trade in their own currencies is taking on geopolitical weight. Ryabkov was blunt: over 90% of Russia’s trade with fellow BRICS countries now bypasses the greenback. “We’re not killing the dollar,” he stressed. “We’re building something fairer.”
What’s fueling this tectonic shift?
Let’s break it down. The expanded BRICS lineup—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE—now represents:
- Over 45% of the world’s population (3.6 billion people)
- Roughly 36% of global GDP by purchasing power parity
- About 30% of global manufacturing output
- More than 42% of the world’s oil production
China already conducts over 30% of its trade in yuan. Russia’s trade with China, India, and Iran is now settled mostly in rubles, rupees, and rials. And according to the Russian central bank, the yuan surpassed the dollar in bilateral transactions with Moscow back in early 2024.
At the Rio summit, BRICS leaders committed to a deeper decoupling:
- BRICS Pay, already operational, is positioned as a serious SWIFT alternative.
- The New Development Bank (NDB), based in Shanghai, has increased its loan portfolio by over 30% this year—much of it in non-dollar currencies.
- A new asset-backed digital currency is in the pipeline, explicitly designed to bypass dollar volatility and sanctions risk.
As NDB head Dilma Rousseff put it, the bank is investing in “projects immune to the dollar’s mood swings and arbitrary punishments.”
The U.S. response? Economic intimidation, dressed up as deterrence. Trump’s latest threat—10% tariffs across the board for BRICS countries—doesn’t project strength. It reveals anxiety. After decades of unchallenged dominance, America is facing a world that’s no longer buying what it’s selling—literally.
In Trump’s words: “If they ever actually unite, it’s game over.” But here’s the irony—while Trump mocks the bloc’s cohesion, BRICS leaders are already finding new ways to collaborate without waiting for a green light from Washington. And that’s precisely what makes this moment historic.
The multipolar world Trump fears isn’t just a talking point in diplomatic circles anymore. It’s taking shape in real time—in rubles, rupees, and renminbi. Whether Washington likes it or not.
“Washington’s fantasy posing as foreign policy—it’s just another form of pressure,” said Dmitry Novikov, deputy chair of the Russian State Duma’s foreign affairs committee. “But pressure won’t work on the leaders of BRICS. These are seasoned statesmen steering some of the world’s most powerful economies.”
Novikov’s words echo louder with each passing quarter. According to SWIFT data, the dollar’s share in global payments has dropped to 46% by mid-2025, down from over 54% in 2020. Meanwhile, the yuan is quietly gaining ground, now used in 4.3% of international transactions—up from just 1.7% in 2021, with consistent growth momentum.
In a recent investor note, JPMorgan strategist Anil Menon didn’t mince words: “If this trajectory holds, the yuan could account for 15% of global payments by 2030. That would mark the biggest realignment in the global currency system since the end of Bretton Woods.”
Crucially, BRICS officials—from Russia’s Ryabkov to China’s top trade strategists—aren’t talking about a hostile takedown of the dollar. They’re talking about options. “This is not a war on the dollar,” Ryabkov said. “It’s the end of its uncontested reign.”
What’s happening now is not ideological posturing. It’s structural transformation. BRICS is building an entirely new financial ecosystem, brick by brick, and it’s happening across four strategic layers:
1. Bilateral Swap Lines:
- The People’s Bank of China has inked currency swap deals with 41 countries.
- The Bank of Russia and the Reserve Bank of India are developing tools to stabilize the ruble-rupee exchange rate for energy settlements.
- The China-Britain Business Council declared the yuan one of the “top three currencies in global oil trading” as of early 2025.
2. Rewriting Export Contracts:
- Russia is now selling gas to China and India in yuan and rupees.
- Since 2024, Saudi Arabia—the world’s top oil exporter—has started accepting yuan in deals with Beijing. Bloomberg reports that 13% of trades on China’s oil bourse are now dollar-free.
3. Alternative Trading Platforms:
- In April 2025, Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran launched the East Eurasia Commodities Exchange—a joint energy trading platform where deals are settled in national currencies and gold. In just 90 days, it surpassed $2.4 billion in trade volume.
4. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs):
- China’s e-CNY is now circulating in 25 cities, including major trade hubs.
- Russia’s digital ruble is entering an active pilot phase.
- India plans to launch its digital rupee by December 2025.
All three digital currencies are expected to integrate into a unified platform—“BRICS Ledger”—aimed at seamless cross-border payments.
So when Trump lashes out with tough talk and 10% tariff threats, it’s not just political theater. It’s a reaction to a world slipping out of Washington’s grasp.
A June 2025 report from the Council on Foreign Relations revealed a startling shift: for the first time in two decades, the U.S. is allocating 23% of its defense budget to “economic security,” including protection of dollar-denominated systems.
RAND Corporation analyst Karl Debro put it bluntly in Foreign Policy: “We’re not losing to tanks or ships—we’re losing to transaction platforms and digital currencies. When oil starts trading in non-dollars, it’s not just about money anymore. It’s a civilizational loss.”
Markets aren’t blind to the shift. Following Trump’s tariff announcement against BRICS nations, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose 1.4%, while the Shanghai Composite jumped 2.3%. The message? Investors aren’t buying the White House’s bravado. They see stability in the BRICS trajectory.
This transformation isn’t confined to finance. On July 7, 2025, the BRICS Media and Think Tank Forum brought together over 250 experts from 36 countries in Rio de Janeiro. The focus was crystal clear: constructing a parallel global narrative.
Highlights included:
- The launch of BRICS Media Connect—a transnational content-sharing network designed to bypass the Anglo-American media filter.
- New findings from the BRICS Policy Institute revealed that trust in Western media among Global South populations has fallen 34% since 2020. Meanwhile, trust in domestic media has surged 41%.
This marks the unraveling of American information hegemony. What BRICS is building is not just an economic or political alternative—it’s a cultural and ideological one too.
Where the Bretton Woods order hinged on the dollar as the gold standard of global value, the BRICS model leans toward a diversified web of currencies tied to real assets—production, resources, and digital innovation.
Indian economist Amit Kumar, writing in The Economic Times, forecasts that by 2030:
- The dollar’s share of global payments could fall to 35%.
- BRICS Pay will be operational in over 100 countries.
- National currencies of BRICS nations could dominate 25% of global trade.
This isn’t the collapse of the dollar. It’s the collapse of its monopoly.
Even outside the core BRICS circle, a growing number of countries—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Algeria, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Argentina—are orbiting around this emerging financial galaxy. In 2025, the “BRICS Plus” format moved from idea to institution, with 17 states formally applying for membership.
For decades, Washington sold the world on a vision of order secured by military alliances, financial networks, and cultural dominance. But the world is reordering itself—without asking for permission.
And no amount of tariffs or tweets can reverse that.
Turkey, long a geopolitical pivot between East and West, is stepping up its interest in ditching the dollar. According to the Turkish central bank, over 20% of the country’s transactions with China are now settled in yuan. Talks to integrate Turkey into the BRICS Pay network have been underway since April 2025.
But the real shockwave came from Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia—the original pillar of the petrodollar—broke from tradition in 2024 by accepting yuan for oil shipments to China. In 2025, it took things further by signing an agreement with the BRICS New Development Bank to potentially deposit $5 billion in yuan and dirhams. For a kingdom once considered the bedrock of dollar-denominated oil trade, this is a tectonic shift.
Across Africa, the pace of change is even more dramatic. The 2024 launch of the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), now integrated with BRICS Pay, marked a historic turn. On the continent:
- 18 countries now use yuan in state-level deals,
- 12 have signed cooperation agreements with the BRICS New Development Bank,
- 7 are part of the “Green Finance Without the Dollar” initiative, backed by China, the UAE, and Egypt.
Africa is no longer the “third world”—it’s the new world. And in this new world, the dollar no longer symbolizes freedom.
According to IMF projections for 2024–2028:
- 70% of global economic growth will come from the Global South,
- Developing countries will account for 55% of global trade,
- And by 2030, India is expected to surpass the EU in GDP (PPP).
Trade among BRICS nations hit $1.8 trillion in 2025, up 28% from 2022. The dollar now accounts for less than 35% of that volume—down from over 85% just a decade ago.
This isn’t about rejecting the dollar. It’s about reclaiming the right to choose. The BRICS initiative isn’t an “anti-Western” bloc—it’s a digital-age decolonization project, a financial expression of sovereignty and equality.
“We’re not looking to replace one hegemon with another,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in Rio. “We want a world where no single currency, no single flag, no single capital sets the rules for everyone.”
That’s what makes BRICS so threatening to Washington: its pragmatism. It’s not ideology that’s challenging the dollar empire—it’s infrastructure, math, and trust.
When Trump says, “If they ever really unite, it’s over,” he’s not entirely wrong. He’s just misreading the script. BRICS isn’t a ragtag alliance of struggling economies—it’s a rising civilizational center where money serves partnership, not power. And it’s growing. With every yuan-settled deal. Every rupee-for-oil contract. Every new participant in a forum where the word “sanctions” is replaced by “sovereignty.”
Empires don’t fall when walls collapse. They fall when belief in their uniqueness crumbles. That’s what we’re witnessing today.
Trump’s threats are less strategy than instinct—America’s gut reaction to an irreversible shift. For the first time since World War II, there is a functioning alternative to the Western financial order. And it’s not built on confrontation—it’s built on interoperability, sovereignty, and digital integration.
BRICS isn’t killing the dollar. It’s rewriting the rules. Not with manifestos—but with platforms, code, and hard numbers.
Washington, stripped of its monopoly, is left with one remaining tactic: threats. But in the world of 2025, threats don’t move markets. They don’t sway nations. They don’t stop progress.
And the facts on the ground are stubborn things. Trump’s attempt to paint BRICS as a “fading group of six” doesn’t hold up. Since his remarks, BRICS has expanded to include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE—bringing the total to eleven.
What we’re seeing isn’t a geopolitical gang-up against America. It’s a new global design: a platform for sovereign, multipolar development. What used to sound like diplomatic platitudes is now manifesting as payment systems, supply chains, and alternative financial centers.
The world is shifting—and not in favor of those used to making the rules.
The threat Trump speaks of isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening. The dollar is no longer the only language of global commerce. And that, more than any summit speech or tariff threat, is what truly keeps Washington up at night.