On January 6, Indonesia formally entered BRICS as a full member. It was an important geopolitical shift that went largely unreported and little discussed in the mainstream western media.

BRICS is an international organization whose primary purpose is to balance U.S. hegemony in a new multipolar world. Its roots go back to 1996 and the emergence of the core group of Russia, India, and China (RIC). In 2009, along with Brazil, BRIC held its first summit. In 2010, South Africa joined, and BRICS was formed, making it, perhaps, the only major international body in which representatives of Africa and Latin America have an equal voice.

The group is neither an alliance nor a bloc, and it is not against the United States; many of its members have good relations with the U.S. But it does seek to end the American-led unipolar world and replace it with a world with many poles and many nations with equal voices.

Indonesia joining BRICS is significant both because another country joined BRICS and, specifically, because Indonesia joined BRICS.

Indonesia is the fourth largest country and the seventh largest economy in the world. Three of the four largest countries in the world are now members of BRICS, which now represents half the population of the world and 41.4% of GDP.

At its fifteenth annual summit in 2023, Egypt, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Ethiopia joined BRICS. Now Indonesia has joined, and “more than 30 more states are showing interest in participating in” BRICS.

The continued expansion of BRICS is a loud expression of an increasingly confident and vocal global majority’s support for multipolarity and dissatisfaction with American hegemony. There is a growing feeling that the American-led unipolar world order has failed them. It has protected neither their economic development nor their sovereignty. They have too often been the victims of neocolonialism and coups.

As Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute, told me, “Indonesia joining adds to the push for a more equitable world order, but is also a signal that states across the Global South…are concerned about the serious shortcomings in the current global system, in which the United States remains the most powerful actor.” In its statement, Indonesia said that joining BRICS “shows Indonesia’s increasingly active role in global issues and commitment to strengthening multilateral cooperation to create a global structure that is more inclusive and fair.”

The United States seems to have caught glimpses of the inevitability of the emerging multipolar world that the BRICS members have pointed to. In 2023, then-CIA Director William Burns grudgingly acknowledged that “the United States…is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.” Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not—that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.”

But it is not just that Indonesia is another country to joint BRICS. It is significant that it is Indonesia that joined BRICS.

Indonesia is not only the world’s fourth largest country, it is the largest country in Southeast Asia. After Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE expanded BRICS into the Middle East, Southeast Asia remained one of the few regions in the world that BRICS was not represented. Indonesia has now made BRICS a truly global organization. And Malaysia and Thailand are preparing to follow.

But the significance goes beyond the geographical to the political and the cultural. The addition of Indonesia challenges the American narrative of democracies versus autocracies and explodes the leading U.S. criticism of BRICS: that it is a gathering of dictators. With the addition of Indonesia, BRICS is now home to three of the four largest democracies in the world, and Indonesia joins India, Brazil, and South Africa as one of four democratic members of the ten nation BRICS.

Indonesia is also the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

So, Indonesia changes the regional, political, and cultural face of BRICS, making it more global and more democratic.

Like many members of BRICS, Indonesia is hostile to the U.S. unipolar world but is not hostile to the United States. Indonesia enjoys good relations with the U.S. and sees its membership in BRICS as the “embodiment of Indonesia’s independent and active foreign policy.”

But Indonesia’s willingness to join BRICS changes things. In 2024, Indonesia’s trade with BRICS nations was $150 billion. Indonesia is now considering importing oil from Russia, saying that “an opportunity to acquire oil from Russia emerged after we joined BRICS.” Upon being offered membership, Indonesia expressed “appreciation to…Russia for their support and leadership in facilitating Indonesia’s entry into BRICS.” And Indonesia has gone from placing tariffs on Chinese imports and banning Chinese online retailers to joining the Chinese-Russian led BRICS.

One of the goals of BRICS that the United States is most concerned with is the emancipation from the hegemony of the U.S. dollar that has been an instrument in allowing the U.S. to coerce ideological, economic, and political adjustment form other countries and that has allowed it to be the only country in the world that can effectively sanction its opponents. U.S. President Donald Trump has recently threatened the BRICS counties that “they will face 100% Tariffs” if they challenge the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.

Another significance of Indonesian membership in BRICS is that it has a history of supporting that goal. Joko Widodo, the previous president of Indonesia, once explained an Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ decision to reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar and “reinforce financial resilience…through the use of local currency” with the warning, “Be very careful. We must remember the sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russia.”

Though the mainstream western media gave little coverage, and less discussion, to Indonesia’s entry into BRICS, it is a major event that expands BRICS’ size, its inclusive regional coverage, its representation of democratic nations and the power of the global majority’s challenge to the U.S.-led unipolar world.