BRICS is fake - by Noah Smith

BRICS is held together by pretty much one thing - a distaste for the west. Beyond that, these countries have very little in common. Xi Jinping wants to run the show, but none of the others want to be a vassal state. Furthermore, India and China are at each others throats, Russia is making life difficult for the rest, and Brazil is advocating for democracy. It’s an idealogical mess and filled with competing interests.

This is a big contrast with the G7 where they share many cultural and economic goals, such as pluralism, liberal democracy, and representative government.

Totally. The BRICS weren't even conceived as a political grouping to begin with, they were a (somewhat lazy) concept coming out of finance to categorise the large emerging market economies together - after a few years they just decided they might as well lean in to that categorisation and meet up from time to time. They have almost nothing in common except for that.