BRICS added six strategic new members. From Ted Snider at libertarianinstitute.org:
The five members of BRICS promised that their fifteenth annual summit, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, would be an important one for BRICS’ development and that it would mark a significant moment in the changing international architecture. The political West predicted that the summit would disappoint and forecasted that differences would dominate and unity would not hold. They expected Brazil and India to be roadblocks to further expansion.
They were wrong.
Though optimists would not have been surprised by an announcement that a roadmap for expansion had been agreed upon, there is no one who was not surprised by the announcement that six new countries had been invited to join BRICS. With the addition of Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, the international organization made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa more than doubled its size and became a truly international organization.
