The Iran war and the upcoming US mid-term elections in November may have kept US President Donald Trump occupied. But not too long ago, Trump targeted BRICS — the intergovernmental organisation named after its founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — with tariff threats for its “un-American” policies.

As India gears up to host Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, alongside Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian among others, here for the two-day BRICS summit (September 12-13), the West’s ties with the key members of the bloc have been deteriorating.

While Iran and Russia have been removed from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) — a secure global messaging network used by financial institutions to transmit information and payment instructions safely — and are engaged in military conflict, the US has been locked in a bitter trade war with China for years and is now forcing countries to limit dependency on Chinese products.

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New Delhi, too, has been on the receiving end of the weaponisation of the Western financial system when the US imposed steep tariffs last year amid disagreements in trade deal negotiations. India’s sovereign decision to purchase Russian oil, albeit during the ongoing Ukraine war, also turned it into a target. However, these are only the most prominent impacts of over-reliance on the Western economic order. 

Strict patent monopolies 

The worst impact of Western dominance on international intellectual property (IP) was felt during the Covid-19 pandemic when developed nations denied giving a waiver for vaccines. India and South Africa in October 2020 sought a waiver for all WTO members of certain provisions of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement in relation to the “prevention, containment or treatment” of Covid-19. In a shock to the developing world, the demand for a waiver was turned down by developed countries at the peak of the pandemic.

“The unsuccessful attempt by India, South Africa and sixty other developing countries to secure the Covid TRIPS Waiver highlights the grave danger inherent in the existing patent regime which accords primacy to patents over patients,” former trade negotiator and international trade expert Abhijit Das told . 

As per the proponents of the waiver, the objective was to avoid barriers to timely access to affordable medical products, including vaccines and medicines or to the scaling up of research, development, manufacturing and supply of essential medical products. TRIPS is an international agreement administered by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that sets minimum standards for protecting IP and came into effect in January 1995.

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The patent regime, which expands both the scope and duration of patentability, increases the monopolistic control of technology by patent holders and imposes dynamic costs, “particularly on developing countries that tend to be technology consumers”, Ha-Joon Chang, Research Professor at the Department of Economics of SOAS University of London and José Miguel Ahumada, assistant professor at the University of Chile, said in a research report titled “A new international economic order for the twenty-first century: an agenda for industrial and trade policies from the Global South”.

Ever-expanding sanctions regime

As steep US tariffs laid bare the risks of overdependence on the US market for sanctions, former Reserve Bank of India governor Urjit R Patel called the US, in his working paper titled “Asphyxiation by Sanctions: Harm, Fear and Smog” released last year, the “hegemonic sanctioner”. Patel said that India should view the emerging international financial architecture around BRICS and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a “risk mitigant” and a rational response to the ever-expanding sanctions regime.

Patel’s paper said that out of 1,325 global sanctions since 1949, 486 have been imposed by the US, which currently administers over 30 sanctions programmes — making it responsible for “three times as many sanctions as any other country or international body”. Moreover, US-led sanctions have surged in recent decades, partly owing to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the paper said.

The US has “pioneered secondary sanctions on an industrial scale”, often in coordination with allies such as the G7 grouping and the EU, forming a “posse”. These extraterritorial sanctions are enforced to impede economic and commercial activity by third countries that would not otherwise violate a primary sanctioner’s rules, he said.

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Outlining how shifting US policies repeatedly hindered India’s investment plans, Patel said that India’s plan to develop Chabahar Port had initially started in 2003, but US sanctions targeting Iran imposed a “hard break” on progress. The project was revived between 2015 and 2017 after the US eased sanctions under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. 

In a setback to Indian investments, shortly after India signed a long-term 10-year agreement with Iran to operate and develop Chabahar Port in 2024, the US State Department again issued a public warning that any entity engaging in business deals with Iran opens itself up to potential sanction risks, Patel said. 

Double standards in Western economic policies

While the US has been explicit in imposing tariffs to slash imports from developing nations while introducing subsidy schemes, under laws like the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, the European Union has implemented a range of environment-linked trade regimes which act as a barrier to India’s export growth. BRICS nations, in particular, have “condemned and rejected” the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and similar restrictive trade measures, saying they undermine their transition to a cleaner economy.

Ahumada and Chang also argued that the Global North’s industrial policies are endogenously financed and implemented with little regard for international trade rules, enabled by their structural power, and further reinforced by strong control over key technologies through patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and related mechanisms. 

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“Western economies actively deploy massive industrial subsidies, tariffs, and tech controls to bolster their own strategic sectors while bypassing multilateral WTO rules when convenient. Initiatives like Northern ‘green tariffs’ impose trade penalties on goods from developing countries that lack the capital to immediately transition to low-carbon production, effectively externalising the cost of climate adaptation onto the Global South,” the researchers said. 

Indian trade experts have warned that trade-climate linkage through regulations such as CBAM is less about protecting the environment and more about promoting the commercial interests of the developed world. 

A study released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2021 had also estimated that the EU’s controversial carbon tax would reduce global carbon emissions by merely 0.1%, but would substantially impede exports of the developing countries.