While international media focuses on Brazil’s mass demonstrations against corruption, efforts behind the façade precipitate regime change, restoration of a pre-Lula order, and a struggle against the BRICS nations. The U.S. feels threatened by an era of multipolarity, which deeply implicates China, and other emerging economies.

Far from competing with US interests, the two meetings offer blueprints for more and better cooperation with Washington in a new world order.

The partnership of developing countries offers a benign counterweight to Western dominance in the world, and can help shape a “new normal” in international relations.

As the focus of the West was fixed in Greece and Iran, the 7th BRICS Summit began a massive shift from a dialogue to an economic partnership – one whose full impact will be witnessed in the coming years.

In October 2013, during a visit to Indonesia, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the launching of the New 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, just one month after announcing the New Silk Road Economic Belt, while on a visit to Kazakhstan. These two initiatives, followed in 2014 by the plan to put together the BRICS New Development Bank and China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that Fall, constitute a new paradigm for mankind.

The current international situation is rife with change, uncertainty and crisis in the Middle East, Asian Pacific, and Europe, largely due to shifting world power. Chen Xiangyang overviews changes and contradictions around the globe from a realist perspective on power relations.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently presided over a discussion on international security at the UN in New York. The principle of unity and multilateral cooperation, the basis of the original UN Charter, was the foreground to China’s continued calls for cooperation on investments, terrorism, and military trust mechanisms.

As the BRICS prepare to launch the New Development Bank, Fernando Menéndez explores the political and economic factors motivating its creation and what it might imply for Latin America.

With the launch of the New Development Bank, Curtis S. Chin provides four recommendations the BRICS should consider when creating the international financial institution.

The most recent BRICS summit was noteworthy for generating the first concrete collective initiatives in the group’s history. Whereas the BRICS past meetings and had yielded mostly joint declarations, the July 15 summit in Brazil saw them launch two high-profile financial initiatives. Perhaps even more important, they seem prepared to undertake other collective projects in the energy and nonproliferation realms.