On Aug. 2, Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to the BRICS bloc, said that the ragtag group’s upcoming leaders’ summit in Johannesburg would initiate “a tectonic change … in the global geopolitical architecture.”

While the summit that concluded on Aug. 24 fell decidedly short of that, it did cement the BRICS grouping as the most important driver of the Global South’s agenda, surpassing the Group of 20 as the premier economic forum for developing nations.

The summit’s most surprising and consequential outcome was the announcement that the bloc, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, had agreed to invite six new members to join from next year: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

BRICS+, as the expanded grouping will be called, will make up a meaningfully larger share of global gross domestic product than the Group of Seven club of advanced industrial democracies.

This expansion is a diplomatic win for China, which has long sought to grow the BRICS as a vehicle to advance its national interests and to counterbalance Western influence. Nearly 40 countries are said to have expressed an interest in joining the bloc over the past 18 months, underscoring the desire of many in the Global South to find alternatives to the Western-led global order they feel has left them behind.

If there is one thing that BRICS+ members have in common, it is that they all seek a more multipolar international system that better serves the interests of the Global South and gives them agency to pursue their own interests amid intensifying U.S.-China competition, a raging war in Ukraine and an accelerating energy transition.

None of this means that BRICS+ will be a cohesive China-led competitor to the G7. Unlike the G7, a club of rich liberal democracies with largely shared values and interests, BRICS+ nations do not share common political or economic systems, let alone a common agenda.

None of its members are as comfortable with Chinese leadership as G7 countries are with the U.S. doing a degree of heavy lifting that is commensurate with its relative power and wealth. Even the current BRICS have diverging interests on key economic questions.

China and India are leading commodity importers, favoring low prices for necessary imports. Russia and Brazil are major commodity exporters, profiting from higher global prices for energy, metals, minerals and food.

India and Brazil are complex democracies, while autocrats rule in China and Russia. Given the chronic tensions at their shared border, India is more likely to exchange gunfire with China than to ally with it.

Few members of BRICS+ want to decouple from the West. With the exception of Iran and Russia, all members want strong and durable commercial ties with both the West and China. Most fear Beijing’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy at least as much as Washington’s push for Western democratic, free market values.

The new members from the Middle East and northeast Africa can be expected to use their BRICS+ membership to grow their geopolitical influence and diversify their international partnerships, trade and investments rather than cooperate on an explicitly anti-Western agenda.

For Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the aim will be to expand their international partnerships, not to antagonize the U.S. Egypt’s leaders hope BRICS+ can offer a much-needed economic lifeline that comes without the political strings that Washington and Europe sometimes attach to their offers of help.

Iran wants new stature and new funding options to ease the pressures it feels from Western sanctions. For Ethiopia, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, the goal is closer economic integration with Beijing, which already far outstrips Washington as a source of new investment on the continent.

But a lack of shared vision and the reluctance of most members to become too dependent on China will not stop BRICS+ from shifting the balance of power in the global economy. In particular, BRICS+ will push for greater influence in multilateral organizations like the U.N., the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and for less reliance on the U.S. dollar.

The expanded group will endow the Global South with more agenda-setting power on issues like climate and finance. It will also facilitate more effective hedging and balancing by its new members.

BRICS+ will remain an economic forum rather than an anti-Western security bloc, and it does not threaten to divide the world into competing, Cold War-style blocs. But it will allow some of the Global South’s most important countries to amplify their voices on crucial questions, making it harder for Western powers to ignore their growing clout.