BRICS, at the conclusion of its summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, announced an expansion with the addition of six new member states — Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. This is a big deal. It is the first expansion of the grouping since 2010, when South Africa joined, and the biggest step since the 2015 founding of its New Development Bank.
The expansion will bring in deep-pocketed and energy-rich Gulf states, will enhance Africa and Latin America's representation, and showcase the great diversity of the member states’ domestic political systems. It also embeds regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran into what is starting to look like a broader multilateral institution, which could help cement the two's growing thaw.
It was likely that the summit would result in certain concrete criteria being defined for admitting new members. But announcing the actual admission of specific new members was a surprise.
The expansion— and the still-long waiting list of close to 20 states — is a demand signal for alternative structures for solving common challenges and furthering interests of Global South states, which are not being satisfied in the current global order.
Almost all Global South states in BRICS — old and new — are certainly not anti-American (many of them are close U.S. partners and two have American troops stationed on their soil), but they want to evolve alternative geoeconomic structures that can fill the deep gaps and deficiencies in the current US-led order.
The key for BRICS now is to translate expanded membership into enhanced efficacy of its institutions. Typically as a club expands, delivery challenges grow. There is no question that BRICS still has much hard work to do to create a robust organization on the ground. But this is a grouping on the move.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, by pointing to the diversity of interests of its members in a recent press conference, seemed to dismiss BRICS' significance. If so, that is a mistake. As the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has noted, the admission of Iran, for example, is a sign that the U.S. is no longer able to act as a gatekeeper controlling the entry of states it doesn’t like into major global groupings — yet another sign that the era of unipolarity is coming, or has already come, to an end.
Washington should respond to the message from Johannesburg by repairing its currently deficient, sometimes counterproductive, policy approach to the Global South. By doing so, it will recover its own eroding credibility and influence and help in the faster resolution of major global challenges facing the planet.
Sarang Shidore is Director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute, and member of the adjunct faculty at George Washington University. He has published in Foreign Affairs and The New York times, among others. Sarang was previously a senior research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and senior global analyst at the geopolitical risk firm Stratfor Inc.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attends a meeting with South Africa's Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 23, 2023. Russian Foreign Ministry/Handout via REUTERS
Top photo credit: Hebron, Palestine, November 7 2010. Israeli IDF soldiers check Palestinian woman at military check point by the Abraham mosque in old town of Hebron (Shutterstock/dom zara)
For the first time, a U.S. president has dispensed with even the pretense of supporting a two-state solution.
President Trump’s latest remarks — proposing the forced displacement of Palestinians to Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab nations — should not just be noted as another inflammatory statement. They are the final nail in the coffin of a policy Washington has long claimed to uphold. His words make clear the two-state solution is dead, and Palestinian displacement isn’t a byproduct of American policy — it’s the goal.
President Trump’s comments came as he welcomed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the first foreign visitor to the U.S. in his second term. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and national security advisor Mike Waltz characterized Trump’s remarks as an example of his "creativity" and willingness to break from past approaches.
At the press conference held with the Prime Minister, the President was asked, “You just said that you think all the Palestinians should be relocated to other countries. Does that mean that you do not support the two-state solution?” To which the President responded, “It doesn't mean anything about a two-state or a one-state or any other state. It means that we want to have — we want to give people a chance at life. They have never had a chance at life because the Gaza Strip has been a hellhole for people living there. It's been horrible. Hamas has made it so bad, so bad, so dangerous, so unfair to people… And I have to stress, this is not for Israel, this is for everybody in the Middle East -- Arabs, Muslims -- this is for everybody.”
His avoidance of answering the question speaks volumes.
The comments on the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza have rightly sparked shock and outrage for their blatant endorsement of ethnic cleansing, even as they are now being walked back and reframed as a mere humanitarian proposal.
What’s been lost in the coverage of Trump’s remarks is the deeper shift it signals: his proposal to occupy Gaza — whether permanently or not remains unclear — and relocate two million people to Egypt and Jordan isn’t just logistically impossible; it’s a declaration that Palestinian displacement is the goal, not the consequence, of U.S. policy.
The insanity of “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” remains in the way policymakers and pundits still pound the table, insisting that a two-state solution remains the official U.S. position — even as every action taken by successive administrations undermines that very possibility. Decades of unconditional military aid, diplomatic cover for settlement expansion, and willful disregard for Palestinian sovereignty have made clear that "two states" was never an actual policy — only a talking point meant to delay accountability.
If nothing else, President Trump’s bluntness should force an overdue reckoning. If the two-state solution is dead — and by all practical measures, it is, then what comes next? The only path forward is the one that dares to address the reality on the ground: a one-state solution, an end to occupation, and equal rights and freedom for Palestinians. Anything else is just more of the same — and we already know how that ends.
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Top photo credit: U.S. Soldiers conduct area reconnaissance in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility in Syria, Feb. 18, 2021. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Jensen Guillory)
Statements from unnamed DoD officials suggest that President Donald Trump is planning to withdraw U.S. troops from Northeast Syria.
ISIS is largely degraded and regional states have pledged to carry on the fight, Bashar al-Assad’s regime is gone, diplomatic outreach to the new leadership in Damascus is underway, and Iran’s proxy forces have taken a severe beating while losing unfettered access to the Mediterranean via Syria. There’s little reason why U.S. troops should remain in Syria.
Critics of withdrawal argue that it could destabilize Syria’s fragile peace and benefit ISIS, especially since thousands of potential ISIS fighters remain in camps administered by the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF). These are real concerns and any withdrawal should be orderly and coordinated, encouraging diplomacy between Washington’s Kurdish partners (SDF), Turkey, and Damascus —but it should proceed.
Diplomacy between the SDF, Damascus, and Ankara could even be hindered if the SDF believe that U.S. troops will remain indefinitely. Arguing for an indefinite U.S. troop presence in Syria both overstates U.S. influence and ties troops to uncontrollable conditions.
It also offers an opportunity to make diplomatic inroads into the new de facto government in Damascus. Syrians have taken back their country and Washington should respond with diplomacy and sanctions relief rather than indefinite troop deployments. A responsible and timely withdrawal from Syria aligns with U.S. national interests and should be part of a broader effort to reduce the U.S. military presence in regions lacking both international and domestic legal justification.
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Top photo credit: Photos published by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Jan 11, 2025 shows oen of two North Korean military personnel reportedly captured by Ukraine forces in the Kursk region. (Ukraine Military handout via EYEPRESS)
We still don’t know for sure if there are North Korean troops fighting in Russia against Ukrainian forces. Perhaps we never will. But Ukraine’s case for their presence was not made stronger by the sudden announcement on January 30 that they were gone.
Reports of North Korean troops joining Russia in the fight to expel Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region of Russia emerged in October. The U.S. State Department called their presence “a major escalation by Russia.” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called it a "significant escalation."
It was significant enough that it reportedly tipped the scales in favor of the Biden administration granting permission to Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles deeper into Russian territory.
Such an extraordinary change in U.S. policy should justify the requirement for extraordinary proof. But, beyond the statements of American, Ukrainian, and South Korean officials, there is still no verifiable proof that North Korean troops were ever actually fighting in Russia.
The case requires the establishment of motive. The U.S. says that the recruitment of North Korean troops shows Russia’s lack of manpower and desperation. "This is an indication that [Putin] may be [in even] more trouble than most people realize," then- Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin said in October.
Reports suggested that the North Koreans supplemented troops in Kursk so Putin did not have to draw from the front lines in the Donbas. But others say Russia was able to bring in Russian troops from less intense areas of the fighting. “According to Ukrainian soldiers from different parts of the front, the Russian troops reinforcing Kursk were mainly pulled from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia,” Yurri Clavilier, a land analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the BBC in November.
That story said 50,000 Russian troops were amassed in the Kursk region, but did not mention Koreans among them.
But U.S. intelligence says that it was North Korea that offered their troops to fight in Kursk, perhaps, as some have suggested, to acquire battlefield experience. They also say that Putin “quickly embraced the idea.”
The Pentagon and NATO claimed to have knowledge that the North Korean troops were highly trained soldiers drawn from an elite unit called the Storm Corps, and claimed to know their battlefield movements. They also said the North Koreans were disguised as Russians — but they have not provided physical proof that they were ever there.
The reported number of North Korean troops in the Kursk region before they reportedly left late last month has been steadily inflated, finally ballooning to 12,000. But aside from photos of captured soldiers the Ukrainian government has claimed are proof, witnesses appear scarce. On November 25, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Ukrainian officials say 10,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to the Kursk region,” then added that “no soldiers who talked to the Journal had encountered them in battle.”
A week later, the BBC was still reporting that “despite weeks of reports suggesting that as many as 10,000 North Korean troops have been sent to Kursk to join the Russian counter-offensive, the soldiers we’ve been in contact with have yet to encounter them.”
On January 11, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine had captured two North Korean soldiers in Kursk on Jan. 9 and brought them to Kiev where they were being questioned. No North Korean soldiers had been caught before, Zelensky explained, because “Russian forces and other North Korean military personnel usually execute their wounded to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war.”
Zelensky posted a photo of each of the captured North Koreans, with one claiming, through interpreters, that he had been a member of the DPRK army since 2021, and the other testifying in writing (since his jaw was injured) that he had been in a sniper-reconnaissance unit since 2016. A brief video of the interrogation was released by Ukraine's Presidential Press Service, but the faces are blurred, the location blacked out, and the authenticity of the video has not been verified.
Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, suggests the Western media should request that Kiyiv “produce these supposed North Korean prisoners for journalists to interview. If they do, then the issue is proved. If not, it will be a strong indication that these prisoners do not in fact exist.”
Then, just days after the announcement of the capture, Ukrainian and American officials announced that the North Korean forces were gone.
It was reported in the Western and Ukraine media as an embarrassment to both North Korea and Russia. The North Koreans, in essence, had to be pulled off the front lines because they had sustained such heavy casualties. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrsky said that the number of North Korean soldiers had been reduced by half. Kim Jong Un, the BBC reported, had incurred “an extraordinarily high cost” for helping Russian President Vladimir Putin push Ukrainian forces out of Kursk, and the Russians had supposedly squandered the elite soldiers with a lack of coordination and by “sending them forth in waves across fields studded with land mines to be mowed down by heavy Ukrainian fire.”
There are inconsistencies in the story of their reported exit, too.
On January 30, the New York Times reported that according to Ukrainian and American officials, North Korean troops “have not been seen at the front for about two weeks.” The next day, CNN reported that, according to Colonel Oleksandr Kindratenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces, they have “not been observed for about three weeks.”
But on January 22, BBC cited General Syrsky as saying just that week that “North Korean soldiers were posing a significant problem for Ukrainian fighters on the front line.” Syrsky said that “11,000-12,000 highly motivated and well-prepared soldiers [were] conducting offensive actions.” That week began on January 19. But North Korean troops were said not to have been seen since two to three weeks before January 30: that would be January 9-16. Ukraine says the North Korean troops had not been seen since 3-10 days before that.
And cutting it awfully close, Zelensky claimed that the two North Korean soldiers were captured on January 9. But by January 31, CNN was already able to publish that the Ukrainian military’s Special Operations Forces had said that no North Korean soldiers had been seen “for about three weeks.”
American officials have kept that ambiguity open with the evidence-free claim that “the decision to pull the North Korean troops off the front line may not be a permanent one. It is possible that the North Koreans could return after receiving additional training or after the Russians come up with new ways of deploying them to avoid such heavy casualties.”
So, that rabbit — if it is a rabbit — can be pulled out of the hat again if needed. If North Korean troops really were in Kursk, and they really were wasted and decimated, then their presence didn’t justify the escalatory risk of granting permission to Ukraine to fire U.S. supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory. If they really weren’t, then the whole affair was a sleight of hand to justify that decision.
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