World leaders pose for a gaggle picture on the seventeenth annual BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Sunday, July 6, 2025.
Silvia Izquierdo/AP
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Silvia Izquierdo/AP
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Brazil’s president says the BRICS group of main rising economies has simply concluded its most essential summit but.
However what was billed as a historic present of energy and unity resulted in stress after President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs. “Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy,” he wrote on Fact Social — with out clarifying which insurance policies he meant.
That drew swift pushback from Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who hosted the summit and referred to as Trump’s feedback reckless.
“We don’t want an emperor, we are sovereign countries,” Lula stated throughout his closing remarks on Monday, including: “It’s not right for a president of a country the size of the United States to threaten the world online.”
The annual BRICS summit—gathering founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, plus new members together with Indonesia, Ethiopia and Iran—aimed to current a unified World South various to the West.
However in an obvious try to keep away from scary Washington, the group issued a low-key closing assertion that prevented naming Trump or immediately criticizing the U.S. That effort backfired, says Oliver Stuenkel, a world relations professor at Brazil’s FGV College.
“They probably believed they could fly under Trump’s radar if they didn’t mention the U.S.,” he stated. “But that clearly failed.”
BRICS founding member South Africa additionally jumped into the Trump fray. President Cyril Ramaphosa instructed journalists on the summit that “the powerful should not seek vengeance against those working for good in the world.” China condemned the usage of tariffs as coercive diplomacy.
Trump escalated tensions additional by publicly supporting Lula’s political rival, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who’s at the moment going through trial over his makes an attempt to overturn the 2022 election outcomes. Lula declined to remark.
Whereas sharp phrases have been directed at rising U.S. tariffs and the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the group dialed down criticism of its personal members. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, confronted no rebuke over the battle in Ukraine. The group’s 31-page declaration made solely a single reference to the battle in Ukraine, condemning “in the strongest terms” latest Ukrainian assaults on Russia.
Iran was framed not for its nuclear program, however as a sufferer of Israeli airstrikes. In contrast, Israel was talked about greater than a dozen occasions, blamed for the worsening humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza and strikes in Syria and Lebanon.
The summit was additionally notable for key absences. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, anticipated to attend earlier than final month’s Israeli and U.S. airstrikes, as a substitute despatched Overseas Minister Abbas Araghchi. President Putin, who faces an Worldwide Prison Court docket arrest warrant over Ukraine, joined remotely. China’s President Xi Jinping was represented by Premier Li Qiang.
The group’s rising variety is each a energy and a pressure: whereas new members widen its attain, consensus is changing into more durable to forge — a truth mirrored in a watered-down rebuke of U.S. airstrikes on Iran.
Regardless of the variations, Lula stood agency on BRICS long-term imaginative and prescient.
“This is not a club of the privileged,” he stated. “It’s a group of nations trying to organize the world in a different way—focused on people and development, not conflict.”
As Brazil arms over the group’s rotating presidency, Lula is urging a renewed give attention to local weather and improvement. The summit’s conclusion marked a take a look at for the bloc’s future—one the place balancing international ambition with inner variations, and avoiding Western backlash, stays a fragile balancing act.
