BRICS expanded on January 1, 2024 to add five new full members — Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia (de facto participating), Iran, and Ethiopia — alongside the original five of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. With Indonesia formally joining in early 2025 and a partner-state tier added at the 2024 Kazan summit, the expanded BRICS+ in 2026 covers roughly 46% of the world’s population and 36% of global GDP at purchasing power parity. Four of the world’s ten largest oil producers now sit inside the bloc, and two of the world’s three largest sovereign wealth fund pools — Abu Dhabi and Riyadh — are at the table. That is the answer to the first question every reader asks. The harder question, and the one this explainer is built around, is what those numbers actually do in the real economy, and why a Cairo importer, a Dubai trader, a Riyadh banker, and a Tehran refiner should each care for very different reasons.

This article is written for the Middle East Insider reader who wants to understand BRICS+ as a working system in 2026, not as a slogan. We will move from the basic membership map to the plumbing — payment rails, currency swap lines, central bank digital currency interoperability — and then back out to the strategic picture: how Riyadh is fence-sitting between Washington and Beijing, how Indian refiners are settling Russian crude in a yuan-and-dirham blend through the UAE, why the Saudi central bank quietly joined Project mBridge in June 2024, and what all of this means for the price of bread, the cost of a remittance from Dubai to Cairo, and the value of the dirham, riyal, and Egyptian pound over the coming decade.

## What BRICS+ Is in 2026

BRICS began in 2009 as a four-country coordination group — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — with South Africa added in 2010. For its first decade and a half it was a talking shop with one real institution, the Shanghai-based New Development Bank, which had lent about $33 billion by the end of 2023. The 2023 Johannesburg summit changed the model. Six countries were invited to join from January 1, 2024: Argentina (which withdrew before accession under the new Milei government), Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia accepted the invitation but spent 2024 in a deliberate ambiguity — “considering” rather than “acceding” — and by the 2024 Kazan summit had begun participating in working groups and statements while never formally depositing instruments of accession. By 2026 this Saudi position is well understood: it is a working member of BRICS+ for trade, payments, and energy-policy purposes, but it has not signed away any optionality with Washington. The other 2024 entrants — Egypt, the UAE, Iran, and Ethiopia — are full members.

The Kazan summit of October 2024 introduced a new tier, BRICS partner countries, designed to absorb the 30+ states that had formally applied. The first partner cohort, confirmed in early 2025, included Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. By the time you read this in 2026, the de facto BRICS+ system therefore has 11 full or near-full members and roughly a dozen partner states, with a queue of further applicants from Pakistan to Venezuela. The Middle East and North Africa region alone accounts for four full members (Egypt, UAE, Iran, Saudi Arabia in practice) and two partner states (Algeria and Turkey). No other macro-region of the world has that density of BRICS+ representation. Read carefully: the Middle East is now structurally over-represented inside the largest non-Western coordination bloc on the planet. That single fact is the spine of every other story in this article.

## The Eleven Members, One by One

**Brazil.** Founding member, agricultural and mineral superpower, and the chair of BRICS in 2025. Brazil’s interest in expansion is straightforward: more buyers for soy, beef, iron ore, and coffee, and more counterweight to United States pressure on Latin American policy. President Lula has been the most public advocate of de-dollarisation rhetoric but the most cautious in practice; Brazilian exporters still price in dollars for most contracts. Brazil’s leverage inside BRICS+ comes from its role as the agricultural breadbasket the Gulf needs.

**Russia.** Founding member and, since 2022, the bloc’s most existential beneficiary. Cut off from SWIFT for designated banks and from the dollar and euro reserve assets frozen in Western jurisdictions, Russia needs BRICS+ to function. Roughly 95% of Russia–China trade in 2025 settled in rubles and yuan according to the Russian central bank; a substantial share of Russia–India trade in 2024-2025 settled in a triangular arrangement involving UAE dirhams, with Dubai banks acting as intermediaries. Russia chaired BRICS in 2024 and used Kazan to push the BRICS Pay project and a proposed BRICS Clear settlement system. Neither is yet operational at scale, but both are real, funded, and being piloted.

**India.** Founding member, the bloc’s most strategically autonomous voice, and the country that quietly does most of the work of de-dollarisation while loudly refusing to be drawn into anti-Western blocs. Indian refiners — Reliance, Indian Oil, Nayara — became the largest buyers of seaborne Russian crude after 2022. By 2025 a significant portion of those cargoes settled not in dollars but in a yuan-and-dirham blend, with UAE banks providing the dirham leg and Chinese banks the yuan leg. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been linked with the UAE’s domestic payments network, with Sri Lanka’s, with Singapore’s PayNow, and is in advanced negotiations with Saudi mada and Egypt’s Meeza. UPI’s cross-border footprint is, in 2026, the most successful real-world example of payment rail interoperability anywhere outside the SWIFT–Visa–Mastercard complex.

**China.** Founding member and the bloc’s centre of gravity. China’s interest is the renminbi’s slow internationalisation, secure access to Gulf hydrocarbons, and the construction of payment and clearing rails — CIPS, the digital yuan e-CNY, the mBridge project — that allow it to keep transacting if a 2022-style sanctions episode were ever turned on Beijing. China is the largest single trade partner of every BRICS+ member from the Middle East. In 2025 China imported roughly 1.7 million barrels per day of Saudi crude, around 1.1 million bpd from Iran (via various ship-to-ship and re-flagged arrangements), close to 1 million bpd from the UAE, and growing volumes of Egyptian LNG. The renminbi’s share of Saudi oil settlement, essentially zero in 2022, is estimated at 15-20% by mid-2026 — still a minority but no longer rounding to zero.

**South Africa.** Founding member by virtue of the 2010 invitation and the bloc’s smallest economy. South Africa’s strategic role is as the African gateway and as host of the 2023 expansion summit. Its economy of roughly $400 billion is now smaller than Saudi Arabia’s, Iran’s, and Egypt’s, but its political weight inside BRICS — particularly as the bridge to the African Union, which itself joined the G20 as a full member in 2023 — remains significant.

**Egypt.** Joined January 1, 2024. Cairo’s motivation is a hybrid of financing access, debt diversification, and a genuine strategic hedge. By 2023 Egypt was in an acute foreign-currency crunch, with foreign debt above $160 billion and inflation north of 35%. The February 2024 Ras El-Hekma deal — Abu Dhabi’s $35 billion investment in the Mediterranean coastal site — was negotiated in parallel with BRICS accession and is best understood as one continuous diplomatic move. Egypt now has access in principle to New Development Bank financing in local currency, can settle bilateral trade with India and China in rupees, yuan, and pounds, and gains political cover in its negotiations with the IMF and the European Union. The downside, which Egyptian officials acknowledge privately, is that none of this replaces the dollar in the short term: roughly 80% of Egypt’s external invoicing was still dollar-denominated in 2025.

**United Arab Emirates.** Joined January 1, 2024 with the least drama and the most preparation. The UAE has been positioning itself as a neutral financial hub since the 2022 sanctions on Russia; Dubai banks rapidly built capability to clear ruble, yuan, rupee, and dirham flows, often through structured trade-finance vehicles in DIFC and ADGM. The UAE central bank was a founding participant in Project mBridge, the multi-CBDC platform developed with the BIS Innovation Hub, Hong Kong, Thailand, and China, alongside Saudi Arabia (which joined in June 2024). The UAE’s BRICS membership is therefore less a political pivot and more the public surfacing of a financial-plumbing strategy that had been built quietly for two years. The dirham, pegged to the dollar since 1997, is not going anywhere — but the volume of non-dollar flows passing through dirham accounts in Dubai grew an estimated 70% between 2022 and 2025.

**Saudi Arabia.** The most consequential and the most ambiguous member. Riyadh accepted the invitation but has not formally completed accession; in BRICS official communiques through 2025 it appears in the participating-countries listings rather than the new-members listings. In practice, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF participates in BRICS-aligned co-investment vehicles, SAMA (the central bank) joined Project mBridge in June 2024, and Saudi delegations attend ministerial meetings as members. The fence-sitting is the strategy: Riyadh preserves its U.S. security relationship — F-35 conversations, civil nuclear cooperation, the still-pending normalisation framework with Israel — while reinforcing energy and infrastructure ties with Beijing and Moscow. The Vision 2030 architects in Riyadh do not see BRICS as anti-American; they see it as optionality. Optionality, in a multipolar world, is the most valuable thing a mid-sized state can have.

**Iran.** Joined January 1, 2024. For Tehran, BRICS membership was the single most important diplomatic win of the 2020s — a public, multilateral signal that the country is not isolated. The economic reality is more constrained: U.S. secondary sanctions still bite, most BRICS+ banks remain extremely cautious about Iran-linked clearing, and India and the UAE conduct Iran-related trade through carefully ring-fenced structures. But Iran now has a seat at the table when BRICS payment-rail and oil-settlement architectures are designed. Iranian crude, much of it sold to China at a discount, is increasingly settled in renminbi.

**Ethiopia.** Joined January 1, 2024. Addis Ababa’s accession is best read as African Union politics and as a hedge by Beijing, which built much of the Ethiopian railway and industrial-park network. For Middle East Insider readers the most relevant Ethiopia angle is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute with Egypt and Sudan; both Egypt and Ethiopia now sit inside the same bloc, which means BRICS+ becomes a venue — for better or worse — where Nile water disputes will be aired.

**Indonesia.** Joined in January 2025 as the eleventh full member. The world’s fourth most populous country and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia gives BRICS+ a Muslim-majority Pacific anchor and significant nickel, palm-oil, and coal weight. For Gulf investors, Indonesia is the single largest non-Indian destination for sovereign-wealth deployment outside China, and BRICS membership makes that deployment easier to structure.

## The Dollar Bypass: How It Actually Works

The phrase “de-dollarisation” gets thrown around carelessly. In 2026 the dollar’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves is still roughly 58%, down from 71% in 2000 but down only modestly from 60% in 2022. The dollar is not being replaced; it is being routed around at the margin, transaction by transaction, by a growing list of bilateral and multilateral arrangements. Here is what is actually happening, in plain English.

**1. Local-currency invoicing for bilateral trade.** When India buys Russian crude, the invoice is now frequently denominated in rubles, sometimes in dirhams, occasionally in yuan, and only sometimes in dollars. When China buys Saudi crude, an estimated 15-20% of barrels were invoiced in renminbi by mid-2026. When Egypt buys Chinese capital goods, a meaningful slice is invoiced in yuan and financed by Chinese policy banks. None of this requires a new global reserve currency. It only requires that two states agree on a non-dollar invoice and that their banks can clear it.

**2. Cross-border payment-rail interoperability.** This is the deepest layer. CIPS (China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) had roughly 1,500 participating institutions by end-2025, up from about 1,300 two years earlier; daily volumes crossed $80 billion in late 2025. India’s UPI is now linked with the UAE, Singapore, Sri Lanka, France (for tourist payments), and Mauritius, with active negotiations for Saudi mada and Egypt’s Meeza. Russia’s SPFS, designed as a SWIFT alternative, has roughly 600 participating institutions, the vast majority Russian or post-Soviet but with a slowly growing Iranian, Belarusian, and Chinese tail. None of these systems individually replaces SWIFT — but together, in combination, they provide enough redundancy that a sanctioned entity can keep transacting somewhere.

**3. Project mBridge and multi-CBDC clearing.** This is the part most readers have never heard of and the part that may matter most over a five-to-ten-year horizon. mBridge is a multi-central-bank-digital-currency platform originally piloted by the BIS Innovation Hub in Hong Kong with the central banks of China, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Saudi Arabia’s SAMA joined in June 2024. In 2024 the BIS publicly withdrew from the project to avoid the political optics of supporting an explicitly de-dollarisation platform, but the participating central banks have continued development independently. By late 2025, mBridge had cleared more than $1 billion in pilot transactions, most of them oil and commodity payments between Gulf and Asian counterparties. The technical architecture lets two central banks settle a payment in their own CBDCs in seconds, without going through a correspondent dollar account. If mBridge becomes production-grade — and it is on a trajectory to do so — a Saudi Aramco sale of crude to a Chinese refiner can be paid for in digital yuan, converted instantly to digital riyal at the central-bank level, with no commercial-bank correspondent dollar leg.

**4. Triangular settlement through neutral hubs.** This is the workhorse of BRICS+ trade in 2025-2026. An Indian refiner buys Russian crude. The transaction is structured as follows: Russia ships the cargo and invoices in rubles; the Indian buyer pays a dirham equivalent into a UAE-based escrow; a Dubai bank converts the dirham leg into rubles for the Russian seller and into yuan for a separate offsetting Chinese trade flow. Dubai banks take a fee, the dollar is never touched, and U.S. secondary-sanctions exposure is minimised. Variants of this structure are now standard for Iran-China trade as well, frequently using Hong Kong or Astana as the neutral leg.

**5. The proposed BRICS unit.** Discussed at every summit since 2023 and not yet built. The idea, sketched in Russian and Brazilian working papers, is a basket-weighted unit-of-account — not a currency — backed partly by gold and partly by member-state currencies. It would function as a pricing benchmark, not a means of payment. In 2026 there is no concrete launch date and significant disagreement about design. India in particular is sceptical; New Delhi prefers bilateral rupee invoicing to anything that would put it inside a Beijing-influenced basket. The realistic timeline for any kind of BRICS unit is the early 2030s at the earliest.

## Saudi Arabia’s Fence-Sitting Strategy

The most interesting member to watch is the one that has not technically finished joining. Saudi Arabia’s posture in 2025-2026 is a textbook case of strategic hedging by a mid-sized power in a transitioning world order. Riyadh’s calculus runs roughly as follows. The United States is still its security guarantor; American carrier groups, F-35s, and air-defence systems are not replaceable by Chinese or Russian alternatives on the timeline of Vision 2030. At the same time, China is the largest single buyer of Saudi crude and the largest construction and technology partner for NEOM, the Red Sea Project, and Qiddiya. Cutting either relationship would be catastrophic. So Riyadh maintains both, and BRICS membership-without-accession is the diplomatic vehicle for the China leg.

What does this look like in practice? Saudi Arabia signed a $7 billion currency-swap line with China in late 2023 and has used it for selected oil-settlement pilots. SAMA joined mBridge in June 2024 — quietly, with no major communique — and Saudi Aramco has, on at least a small share of its 2025 cargoes to Chinese state-owned refiners, accepted renminbi settlement. The Public Investment Fund has co-invested with Chinese partners in lithium, electric-vehicle manufacturing, and gaming. None of this displaces the dollar peg on the riyal, which remains the cornerstone of Saudi monetary policy. But it builds the optionality muscle.

For Middle East Insider readers the actionable takeaway is that the Saudi riyal is not at risk of de-pegging in the foreseeable future — SAMA has the reserves and the political will to defend the peg — but the share of Saudi external transactions denominated in non-dollar currencies will continue to grow at roughly the rate it has been growing, which is approximately three to five percentage points per year.

## What BRICS+ Means for Arab Citizens

Macro-architecture matters for ordinary people only insofar as it changes prices, jobs, and opportunities. Here is the translation layer.

**Remittances.** Roughly 30 million expatriates from South Asia work in the Gulf and send home approximately $130 billion a year. As UPI–UAE, UPI–Saudi (in negotiation), and similar linkages mature, the cost of remitting from a Dubai or Riyadh phone to an Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Sri Lankan account is falling — from a typical 4-5% all-in cost in 2022 to roughly 2-3% in 2026, with sub-1% achievable for UPI–UAE corridors. For a worker remitting $500 a month, that is $120-180 a year of savings.

**Imported food and consumer goods.** Egypt imports roughly 60% of its wheat and a large share of cooking oil, sugar, and pharmaceuticals. BRICS membership has given Cairo access to yuan and rupee invoicing options for some of these imports, which has marginally reduced the dollar squeeze. It has not, however, fixed the Egyptian pound’s underlying fundamentals — that requires fiscal reform, which BRICS does not substitute for.

**Education and labour mobility.** Indian and Chinese universities are increasingly accepting Egyptian, Saudi, Emirati, and Iranian students with simplified visa and recognition frameworks negotiated under BRICS working groups. Conversely, scholarship and exchange flows from the Gulf to BRICS partner states are increasing.

**Tech and digital infrastructure.** Chinese-built 5G in the Gulf, Indian-trained software talent flowing to Dubai and Riyadh, and Russian cybersecurity firms operating from Abu Dhabi and Doha are all BRICS+ phenomena. They are not headline news, but they are reshaping the technology stack the region runs on.

## Key Takeaways for Middle East Insider Readers

First, BRICS+ in 2026 is real but partial. It has rewired roughly 20-25% of intra-BRICS trade away from the dollar, built credible payment-rail alternatives, and created a multilateral venue where Gulf, Iranian, and African voices carry weight they did not carry a decade ago. It has not — and will not soon — replace the dollar as the global reserve currency. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Second, the Gulf is the bloc’s most consequential new region. Four of eleven members are Middle Eastern or North African, plus two partner states. The financial plumbing being built in Dubai and Riyadh — mBridge, CIPS connectivity, UPI integration, structured triangular trade — will outlast any individual political cycle.

Third, for citizens and businesses the practical impact is incremental but cumulative. Lower remittance costs, more invoicing flexibility, more scholarship and trade options, and a hedge against a single-currency-system shock. None of these are revolutionary on a quarterly basis; together over a decade they are transformative.

Fourth, Saudi Arabia’s fence-sitting is sustainable for now and probably for the rest of this decade. Riyadh will continue to participate without fully acceding, will continue to deepen mBridge and CIPS connectivity, and will continue to defend the dollar peg on the riyal. Watch for any future signal that mBridge has gone to production with significant Aramco volume — that would be the moment the architecture stops being a pilot and starts being a load-bearing piece of the global oil-payments system.

Fifth, the bloc’s biggest internal risk is not Western pressure but its own incoherence. India and China are strategic rivals. Egypt and Ethiopia have an unresolved water dispute. Saudi Arabia and Iran are in a brittle 2023-vintage detente. BRICS+ provides venues but does not provide solutions. The wager Middle East Insider makes for the second half of this decade is that economic plumbing will continue to be built faster than political disagreements can dismantle it — but the next major shock, whether a Hormuz incident, a Nile-dam crisis, or a Taiwan miscalculation, will test that thesis hard.

The short version, for the reader who only has thirty seconds: BRICS+ is the most important multilateral story in the Middle East that almost nobody is reading carefully. Read it carefully.

## A Decade of BRICS Membership: What Each Arab Member Has Actually Gained

It is worth pausing on the granular ledger of what membership has delivered for each new Arab and Iranian member through the first two and a half years of full participation. The headline diplomatic value is one column of that ledger; the operational financial and trade value is another.

For Egypt, the New Development Bank approved its first project loan to Cairo in 2024 — a $400 million facility for water and wastewater infrastructure in the Nile Delta — and a second tranche in 2025 for transport modernisation. By mid-2026 the cumulative NDB commitment to Egypt sits at roughly $1.3 billion, a meaningful number for a country whose external debt service can easily exceed $25 billion in a single year, and significant precisely because it is denominated partly in local currency. Egyptian companies have gained simplified market access to India’s pharmaceutical and engineering sectors through ministerial fast-track channels, and Egyptian wheat-buying agencies have begun small-scale yuan-denominated trial purchases of Russian and Kazakh grain.

For the UAE, the most consequential gain has been the network effect on Dubai’s positioning as a neutral financial centre. By 2026 more than 320 Russian-owned legal entities are registered in DIFC, ADGM, and the broader UAE free-zone system, alongside a fast-growing roster of Indian, Iranian, and Chinese-owned vehicles. Most of these entities are legitimate trade-finance and family-office structures, and the UAE central bank has built a robust compliance framework to manage secondary-sanctions exposure. The volume of triangular trade settled through Dubai banks is estimated to have grown from a few billion dollars annually pre-2022 to north of $80 billion in 2025. BRICS membership did not create that growth, but it formalised the diplomatic posture that underwrites it.

For Iran, the BRICS seat has translated into modest but real operational gains: the first commercial yuan-denominated crude transactions through CIPS in 2024, simplified visa and academic exchange with Russia and China, and inclusion in some BRICS+ working groups on technology transfer. The U.S. secondary-sanctions regime remains the dominant constraint on Iran’s economy, and BRICS has not loosened it. Iran’s trade with India and the UAE continues through carefully ring-fenced structures.

For Saudi Arabia in its observer-member posture, the gains are subtler and more strategic. Riyadh has used BRICS engagement to build a credible secondary-relationship muscle without provoking Washington. The Aramco-China renminbi pilot is the most concrete output. The Public Investment Fund’s co-investment vehicles with Chinese and Indian partners — particularly in lithium, electric vehicles, mining, and gaming — have accelerated. SAMA’s mBridge engagement is the deepest infrastructural commitment.

For the wider Arab world watching from outside the bloc, BRICS+ has become a credible alternative venue for discussion of trade, debt, and infrastructure. Algeria and Turkey, both partner states, are likely future candidates for full membership. Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman have all attended observer sessions. Jordan has applied. Pakistan continues to push for full membership. The BRICS+ regional pull is real and is reshaping how Arab governments think about non-Western diplomacy.

## How Western Capitals Are Reacting

Washington, Brussels, and London have, by 2026, largely abandoned any expectation that BRICS will disintegrate, and have shifted to a strategy of competing on infrastructure rather than denying access. The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), the G7 alternative to China’s Belt and Road, has approved roughly $40 billion in committed financing for projects in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia by mid-2026. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development have increased Middle East and North Africa portfolios materially. The European Union’s Global Gateway has scaled to roughly $150 billion of mobilised investment promises.

None of these match the speed and flexibility of Chinese policy-bank lending, but they have meaningfully changed the financing landscape Arab governments face. The practical takeaway is that the multipolar moment is producing more capital choice for Middle Eastern infrastructure, not less. A Cairo metro extension, a Riyadh renewable-energy facility, or a Dubai water-treatment plant can in 2026 plausibly be financed by AIIB, NDB, World Bank, EBRD, Islamic Development Bank, JBIC, China Eximbank, or a Gulf sovereign — each with different cost-of-capital, currency, conditionality, and timeline profiles.

## The Renminbi Internationalisation Track Record

The BRICS+ story is partly the renminbi internationalisation story. Renminbi’s share of global foreign-exchange transactions has risen from 2.7% in 2022 to roughly 4.7% by SWIFT data in early 2026; its share of global trade financing has crossed 5%. The PBOC has expanded swap lines with most BRICS+ central banks, including the SAMA $7 billion line. CIPS direct participants and indirect participants both grew rapidly through 2024-2025.

For Middle East Insider readers, the practical question is whether to hold renminbi exposure. The honest answer in 2026 is: small allocations make sense for businesses with material Chinese trade flows, but the renminbi is not yet a credible reserve-asset substitute for the dollar at scale. The capital-account remains controlled, the legal infrastructure for foreign holders remains thinner than for dollar assets, and a future political shock involving Taiwan, Hong Kong, or U.S.-China sanctions could rapidly impair renminbi convertibility. The renminbi is a transactional currency for an increasing share of trade. It is not yet a store of value at strategic scale.

## What to Watch Through 2027

Three calendar items to mark. First, the 2026 BRICS summit and its declared progress on mBridge production deployment and BRICS Pay rollout. Second, any movement on Saudi Arabia’s formal accession or continued observer posture; a formal Saudi accession would be a major signal of Riyadh’s hedge calculus. Third, the next round of BRICS partner-state admissions, particularly whether Algeria, Turkey, or any Gulf state moves to full membership.

Two geopolitical risk items. First, Hormuz: any major incident in the Strait of Hormuz that disrupts Gulf oil flows would test BRICS+ payment-rail resilience under stress. Second, Taiwan: a serious escalation in the Taiwan Strait would likely trigger Western sanctions against China at a scale comparable to the 2022 Russia sanctions, and would test how rapidly Gulf states would have to choose sides on financial-system architecture.

The 2026 picture is one of cautious, incremental, deeply consequential change. BRICS+ is rewiring the financial plumbing of the world’s largest non-Western trading bloc, and the Middle East is at the operational centre of that rewiring. The next two years will determine whether the rewiring matures into infrastructure that operates at scale, or remains a politically charged pilot. Either way, the Middle East is no longer on the periphery of the multipolar conversation. It is at the table, with seats.

## Reader Questions We Get Most Often

Middle East Insider readers send us questions about BRICS more often than any other geopolitical topic. Here are the ten we receive most often, with our 2026 answers.

**Will the dollar collapse because of BRICS?** No. The dollar’s share of global reserves is sticky and the depth of dollar-denominated capital markets is unrivalled. Marginal de-dollarisation is real; collapse is not on any credible forecast horizon.

**Should I move my savings into yuan or BRICS-currency-denominated assets?** Generally not, except as a small diversification slice. The renminbi capital account is controlled and the legal protections for foreign holders are thinner than for dollar assets. Gold remains the better diversifier against dollar exposure for most retail investors.

**Is the BRICS Pay system operational in 2026?** Partially. Pilot transactions are running across multiple corridors but mass commercial deployment has not happened. Realistic timeline for production-grade scale: 2027-2029.

**Will Saudi Arabia formally accede to BRICS?** Probably not in 2026 or 2027. The current observer posture is strategically optimal for Riyadh. Watch for any U.S.-Saudi diplomatic shock as the potential trigger.

**Does BRICS membership help Egypt’s currency crisis?** Marginally. It opens up some local-currency financing channels and gives Cairo political cover. It does not fix the underlying fiscal arithmetic.

**Can I use Indian UPI in Dubai or Saudi Arabia?** Yes in the UAE (UPI-UAE link is live for inbound payments to NPCI-linked Indian accounts) and in advanced negotiation in Saudi Arabia. Expansion to other GCC states is ongoing.

**Will BRICS replace the IMF and World Bank?** No. The New Development Bank is a useful additional source of funding but is much smaller than the IMF or World Bank, and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement has never been deployed at scale.

**What is mBridge again?** A multi-central-bank-digital-currency platform letting central banks settle cross-border payments directly in their own CBDCs without dollar correspondent banks. UAE, Saudi, China, Hong Kong, and Thailand are the active participants.

**How safe is Russian-linked trade for Gulf companies?** Specific deals require careful sanctions compliance. The UAE and other Gulf states have built sophisticated frameworks to manage secondary-sanctions risk, but individual transactions still need legal review.

**What is the single most important thing I should watch in 2026-2027?** Whether Saudi Arabia’s Aramco moves a meaningful share of crude sales to renminbi or other non-dollar settlement. That would be the structural turning point.

## Glossary of Key BRICS+ Terms

**BRICS+**: The expanded BRICS bloc as of 2024-2026, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, plus Egypt, UAE, Iran, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and (de facto) Saudi Arabia.

**NDB (New Development Bank)**: The BRICS multilateral development bank headquartered in Shanghai, with regional offices in Johannesburg, São Paulo, Moscow, and (planned) Cairo.

**CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System)**: China’s RMB clearing system, an alternative to dollar-correspondent-banking for renminbi transactions.

**mBridge**: Multi-CBDC platform for direct central-bank-to-central-bank cross-border settlement.

**BRICS Pay**: Proposed BRICS-wide retail and commercial payments platform, in pilot phase.

**BRICS Clear**: Proposed BRICS securities settlement system, in early conceptual phase.

**Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)**: Chinese global infrastructure financing programme, often complementary to but distinct from BRICS+.

**PGII (Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment)**: G7 alternative to BRI announced in 2022.

**SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation)**: Separate Eurasian security and political organisation that overlaps with several BRICS+ members; Iran joined in 2023.

**Global South**: Diplomatic term for non-Western developing economies, broadly aligned with BRICS+ membership.