Communist China, maneuvering to replace America as the global leader, is pressing the idea that the economic alliance it dominates should expand.

It wants the alliance known as Brics — short for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — to eventually overcome the Bretton-Woods institutions that have dominated the world’s economy since the end of World War II.

The concept of Brics was first coined by a Goldman Sachs economist, James O’Neill. It has become institutionalized and now seeks to represent emerging economies. The new members that Communist China wants to add include Iran and Saudi Arabia. The aim is to create a bloc with enough economic clout to overtake the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 

It won’t be easy. While two of Beijing’s allies, Russia and South Africa, favor the expansion, other members, notably India, are increasingly estranged from the Communist regime in China. They also fear that adding new members would dilute their say in the alliance. 

India, fearing a power imbalance favoring Communist China, is “cautious” about any expansion, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Majari Chatterjee Miller, tells the Sun. “Once the door is opened to expansion, then the issue of admitting other members, such as Pakistan, could come up, which India would be very wary about.” 

In addition to the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia, countries that have expressed interest in joining Brics include Argentina, Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, and Indonesia. The possibility of expanding the bloc is scheduled to be discussed in a series of meetings prior to the Brics annual summit in August at South Africa, the current chairman of the group. 

Russia clearly hopes an expansion of the bloc would undermine America. “While the White House was thinking about what else to turn off in the world, ban, or spoil, Argentina and Iran applied to join the Brics,” the spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, said last year. 

Officials of the Brics alliance are trying to coax the expansion in a more egalitarian manner. The bloc needs to make sure that there is a more “equitable, inclusive, transparent, global architecture,” a Brics sherpa, as its coordinators are known, Anil Sookal, said.

Yet, because not a lot of mortar binds Brics members beyond common opposition to America, the bloc may turn into a mere “geopolitical fad,” a professor of international relations at the Gulf University for Kuwait, Mohammed Nuruzzaman, wrote.

The director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ryan Berg, tells the Sun that Brics’s attempt to “play an outsize role in geopolitics” has not been successful up until now. “Brics has yet to find a strong footing, and to offer a convincing ‘reason for being’ to many on the outside,” Mr. Berg says. 

According to a South Africa-based policy organization, the Institute for Security Studies, Brics members hold 42 percent of the world population but less than 15 percent of the voting rights in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Internal cracks are increasingly evident. In 2014 the group founded the New Development Bank to counter the influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Yet, soon after last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, the New Development Bank suspended new lending to Moscow. 

In addition, according to Ms. Miller, the future of Brics “will be interesting,” as India is now integrated in anti-Beijing organizations like the Quad, which includes Japan, Australia, and America. “The question that will arise in the future is whether India can offer itself as a bridge between a non-Western institution like the Brics and West-led governance structures,” Ms. Miller says. 

Next month, Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva will visit his Brics colleague, Communist China’s president, Xi Jinping, with his own Brics agenda. Among the topics of discussion for the bilateral meeting, Mr. da Silva will suggest that a former Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, be named the next president of Brics. Ms. Rousseff, a member of Mr. da Silva’s left-wing Workers’ Party, was impeached on corruption charges in 2016.