For most of the last eighty years, the story of world power ran through Washington, Brussels and the sea lanes the United States Navy has quietly guarded since 1945. That story is not over, but it is no longer the only one being written. Across the vast interior of Asia, from the Baltic to the South China Sea, a loose but increasingly deliberate coalition of states is building the plumbing of an alternative order.
Call it the Eurasian bloc, a shorthand for the deepening alignment between China, Russia, India, Iran, the Central Asian republics and a widening circle of partners who trade through the BRICS forum and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. None of its architects call it an alliance. All of them are building one anyway.
What the Eurasian Bloc Actually Is
There is no treaty that formally creates a Eurasian bloc, and its own members are careful to say so. BRICS members explicitly reject the word bloc, and the SCO describes itself as a security and cooperation platform rather than a pact. Yet function tends to outrun language. Together, BRICS members and their newly recognized partner states now account for close to half of the planet's population, while countries formally aligned with the Western order make up roughly fifteen percent, according to research from RBC Wealth Management.
The SCO alone covers about sixty five percent of the Eurasian landmass and forty two percent of the world's people, with a combined economy that Britannica and independent trackers put at close to a quarter of global output measured at purchasing power. What is emerging is not a single government or a shared currency. It is a set of overlapping institutions, energy contracts, payment corridors and security understandings that increasingly let its members trade, borrow and settle disputes without routing through Western capitals.
BRICS Plus and the Economics of the Global South
The clearest evidence of integration is commercial. According to a UN Trade and Development study, trade among BRICS members grew more than thirteen fold since 2003, reaching 1.17 trillion dollars in exports by 2024 and expanding at an annual average of 13.3 percent, well ahead of global trade growth of 5.7 percent over the same period. Brazil, Russia and Indonesia now send over thirty percent of their exports to fellow bloc members, while Iran, Ethiopia,
Russia and India draw more than forty percent of their imports from within the group. China remains the undisputed engine, contributing roughly 3.59 trillion of the bloc's 5.61 trillion dollars in total 2024 exports, a share close to sixty four percent, based on figures from the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
The pace has only accelerated into 2026. Trade between India and China hit a record 155 billion dollars in 2025, with Chinese imports from India surging more than forty percent year on year in early 2026, a shift that Beijing's foreign minister Wang Yi has publicly welcomed as both countries prepare to chair BRICS in consecutive years. Indonesia's formal entry in January 2025 made it the bloc's tenth member and the first from Southeast Asia, extending BRICS influence into a region long treated as a Western trading partner by default.
The SCO as the Security and Logistics Spine
If BRICS supplies the trade flows, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation increasingly supplies the tracks those flows run on. Founded in 1996 as the Shanghai Five, the SCO has grown into a ten member body spanning China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Marking its twenty fifth anniversary in June 2026, officials described intra SCO trade as approaching a trillion dollars, up from roughly sixteen billion dollars when the organization was founded, according to reporting compiled by Friends of Socialist China.
For smaller members the dependence is striking: SCO trade accounts for roughly seventy five percent of Kyrgyzstan's total trade turnover, sixty seven percent of Tajikistan's and nearly half of Uzbekistan's. With Iran's accession, the bloc also came to control an estimated fifth of the world's proven oil reserves and close to half its natural gas, according to Britannica, giving it real leverage over global energy pricing rather than just symbolic weight.
At the Tianjin summit in September 2025, members approved the creation of an SCO Development Bank, with China pledging roughly two billion yuan in grants and ten billion yuan in loans through its interbank consortium over three years. Moscow and Beijing also signed a memorandum on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, a project expected to carry fifty billion cubic meters of gas annually once complete, further binding Russian energy supply to Chinese demand and away from the European market that once absorbed it.
Twenty five years after its founding, the SCO is no longer merely a regional organisation. It is one of the institutional foundations of the new Eurasian century.Assessment reported by Friends of Socialist China, June 2026
Trading Without the Dollar
Perhaps the most consequential shift is happening quietly, inside settlement systems rather than summit halls. Russia's exclusion from SWIFT after 2022 forced an accelerated retreat from dollar invoicing, and the numbers show how far that retreat has gone. President Vladimir Putin has said that rubles and yuan now cover roughly eighty to ninety five percent of commercial transactions between Russia and China, depending on the year cited, a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier when dollar invoicing was standard even between the two governments.
The SCO has formally adopted a roadmap for expanding local currency settlement, and a pilot blockchain based payment link known informally as BRICS Pay has begun connecting the digital currencies of member central banks, letting a Brazilian importer and a Chinese exporter clear a transaction without a correspondent bank in New York or London ever seeing it, according to trade analysis published by industry logistics coverage of the 2026 landscape.
This is not simply about avoiding sanctions, though that motive is real for Russia and Iran. It is about structural insurance. Every member of this emerging network has watched Washington weaponize dollar clearing and asset freezes against a rival, and each has concluded that permanent dependence on that system is itself a strategic vulnerability worth paying to reduce.
China and Russia at the Center
Underneath the multilateral architecture sits a simpler bilateral fact. China and Russia have built what analysts at the Observer Research Foundation describe as a decade of deepening economic convergence, with bilateral trade reaching 240 billion dollars in 2023, a jump of more than a quarter over the prior year. A thirty year, four hundred billion dollar gas supply agreement anchors the relationship, and Russia's formal linkage of its Eurasian Economic Union with China's Belt and Road Initiative in 2015 created a legal and logistical bridge between the two projects. That said, the partnership is not unconditional.
Chinese banks and technology firms have grown notably cautious about secondary sanctions, restricting exports of semiconductors, aviation components and dual use technology to Russian buyers since 2022, and requiring end user assurances that Russian goods will not reach the battlefield. Beijing wants Moscow's energy and its diplomatic company, not a direct confrontation with Western regulators on its own soil.
India's Careful Balancing Act
No member complicates the simple narrative of an anti Western axis more than India. New Delhi sits inside both BRICS and the SCO, holds the BRICS chair through 2026, and has simultaneously deepened defense and technology ties with Washington. Analysts increasingly describe India as the acceptable interface between the two systems, a country that can buy discounted Russian energy and fertilizer while still functioning as a trusted partner for Western firms wary of direct exposure to Chinese or Russian supply chains. That balancing act gives India outsized influence inside the bloc even as it withholds full ideological alignment, and it explains why Beijing has courted New Delhi so visibly, with foreign minister Wang Yi publicly urging both nations to support each other's BRICS presidencies through 2027.
Corridors, Pipelines and the New Silk Roads
Institutions matter less than the physical infrastructure that makes them real. China's Belt and Road Initiative continues to fund rail and port links across Central Asia, while the International North South Transport Corridor, a multimodal route connecting Russia, Iran and India via the Caspian Sea, offers an alternative to the Suez Canal chokepoint. India has already invested twenty four million dollars in Iran's Chabahar port, and Iran and Russia signed a transit roadmap in February 2025 to finish the long delayed Rasht Astana rail link, the final gap in that corridor. Once complete, these routes will let goods move between China, Russia, Iran and India while largely avoiding waters patrolled by Western navies and financial checkpoints controlled by Western regulators, according to research published in a 2026 review in the journal covering the SCO's expansion.
The Fault Lines Inside the Bloc
None of this integration erases the tensions that could still fracture it. India and China maintain an unresolved and periodically violent border dispute in the Himalayas. Russia's war in Ukraine continues to complicate Moscow's relationships even with sympathetic partners, and several BRICS members have publicly criticized the invasion despite their trade ties to Russia. China's own economic footprint in Central Asia has, in the words of Statista's research, been viewed by some as an attempt to quietly displace traditional Russian influence in what Moscow still regards as its own backyard.
Layered on top of these rivalries is the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which BRICS has condemned as unilateral and punitive, and which could cost India alone twenty five million dollars in steel export revenue in its first year, a reminder that even a bloc built to resist Western pressure remains deeply exposed to Western trade policy.
We are making wider use of national currencies for mutual settlements.Vladimir Putin, SCO Heads of State Council, July 2025
What This Means for the Rest of the World
The practical consequence for businesses, investors and policymakers outside this emerging bloc is a world that increasingly runs on two operating systems rather than one. Companies shipping sensitive technology now face expanded due diligence obligations under rules like the United States Foreign Direct Product Rule, which can hold a distributor liable if goods are re exported into Russia through a third country. Investment strategists at RBC Wealth Management now argue that portfolio construction itself needs to change, treating country and industry exposure through the lens of a fragmenting world rather than the cooperative globalization of the 1990s and 2000s.
For governments across the Global South, the practical upside is optionality. A country that once had to choose a single patron for financing, energy or security can increasingly shop between a Western system and an Eurasian one, playing each against the other much as India has learned to do.
A Multipolar World Taking Shape
What is forming across Eurasia is not a mirror image of NATO or the European Union, and its own architects insist it never will be. It has no shared currency, no unified military command and no single capital. What it has instead is a growing set of habits: settling trade in rubles and yuan rather than dollars, financing pipelines and railways through its own development banks rather than the World Bank, and building payment systems that Washington cannot see into, let alone freeze. Individually, each of these habits looks incremental.
Together, compounding at the rates UNCTAD and the SCO's own data describe, they add up to something closer to an alternative operating system for global commerce, one that a growing share of humanity is quietly opting into.
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