South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said during a visit to Riyadh this weekend that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was interested in joining the BRICS coalition, a trade and security organization led by Russia and China.
The BRICS coalition consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and engages largely in trade negotiations, though it has also established agreements on security topics such as counterterrorism. The coalition has held despite growing tensions between members in the past decade, particularly between India and China, whose militaries engaged in battle over their mutual border in 2020.
The BRICS alliance also held despite Brazil electing a self-proclaimed conservative president, Jair Bolsonaro, dramatically shifting the focus of domestic politics from what it was when far-left socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva helped found the coalition in 2009. Bolsonaro has largely maintained friendly relations with China despite campaigning in 2018 on anti-communism and has remained neutral in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, actively condemning sanctions on Moscow.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shake hands during a press statement after their bilateral meeting at Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, on November 13, 2019. (SERGIO LIMA/AFP via Getty Images)
Saudi Arabia’s interest in joining BRICS is not sudden — reports in July suggested that Saudi officials were beginning to entertain the possibility — but Riyadh actively seeking closer ties to nations like Russia and China will likely concern the White House in light of a growing diplomatic fiasco in the aftermath of the OPEC+ oil cartel announcing it would reduce production by two million barrels a day. The administration of leftist American President Joe Biden immediately denounced Saudi Arabia, the leader of the cartel, as seeking to aid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by raising oil prices — an allegation Saudi Arabia vehemently denied, backed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Ramaphosa spent the weekend in Riyadh, signing 17 memoranda of understanding on trade and diplomacy, totaling a reported $15 billion in worth.
“The Crown Prince (prime minister Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud) did express Saudi Arabia’s desire to be part of Brics and they are not the only country,” said Ramaphosa after a meeting with the crown prince, according to South Africa’s the Times.
Ramaphosa refused to indicate if he would support Saudi Arabia joining the diplomatic coalition and emphasized that it would have to be a decision taken by all five parties.
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech in virtual format at the opening ceremony of the BRICS Business Forum, June 22, 2022. (Ju Peng/Xinhua via Getty Images)
“The BRICS nations are going to be meeting in a summit next year under the chairship of South Africa. And the matter is going to be under consideration,” Ramaphosa said. “And already a number of countries or nations have been making approaches to the other member countries, and we’ve given them the same answer to say it’ll be discussed by the BRICS partners themselves, five of them, and thereafter a decision will be made.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Grand Kremlin Palace, September 30, 2022, in Moscow, Russia. (Contributor/Getty Images)
The BRICS (then BRIC) coalition has only been expanded once to include South Africa. Chatter following the last BRICS summit suggested that the parties were interested in growing the group, whose primary function is to serve as a counterweight to American interests internationally. In June, the Russian Foreign Ministry revealed that the Islamist dictatorship of Iran and the socialist administration of President Alberto Fernández in Argentina had applied for membership.
“While the White House was thinking about what else to turn off in the world, ban or spoil, Argentina and Iran applied to join the BRICS,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at the time, griping about U.S.-led sanctions in response to the eight-year-old Ukraine invasion.
Both Fernández and Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi attended the last BRICS summit in China this June.
Iran’s presence in the coalition could potential complicate any entry for Saudi Arabia. The two countries – the most prominent Sunni and Shiite Muslim governments in the world – are longtime geopolitical rivals and currently engaged in a proxy war in Yemen. The Iranians regularly question the Saudi government’s stewardship of the two holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina, while Saudi Arabia treats Iran as a regional menace and often advocates for sanctions on the Iranian regime to limit its influence.
A month after the BRICS summit this year, the head of the BRICS International Forum, Purnima Anand, said that Saudi Arabia had approached the group to request membership, alongside Turkey and Egypt.
“All these countries have shown their interest in joining and are preparing to apply for membership,” Anand said in remarks to Russian media. “I believe this is a good step because expansion is always looked upon favorably; it will definitely bolster BRICS’ global influence.”
Saudi Arabia’s interest in a coalition that actively threatens the United States’ financial influence follows a challenging week for Washington-Riyadh ties. The OPEC+ decision to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day prompted a flurry of insults from the Biden administration, claiming that Saudi Arabia, which leads the oil cartel, was “aligning with Russia.” White House spokesman John Kirby said that Biden was going to immediately “reevaluate” ties to Saudi Arabia in response to the production cut; Biden said later that day he would not address the issue before the American midterm elections in November.
The Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to the criticism with an uncommon, lengthy missive expressing “total rejection” of the Biden administration line.
“The Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would first like to express its total rejection of these statements that are not based on facts, and which are based on portraying the OPEC+ decision out of its purely economic context,” the statement read. “Any attempts to distort the facts about the Kingdom’s position regarding the crisis in Ukraine are unfortunate, and will not change the Kingdom’s principled position, including its vote to support UN resolutions regarding the Russian-Ukrainian crisis.”
On Friday, Zelensky announced that he had held a phone conversation with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and thanked Saudi Arabia for its support – directly challenging the White House’s attempt to present Riyadh as a Russian ally in the war.
“Spoke to Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman. Thanked for supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity, resolution at the UN General Assembly,” Zelensky wrote on Twitter.