Last week’s announcement that Brics—an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—will induct six new members has renewed chatter about China eclipsing the West. The new members—Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia and Argentina—supposedly give Brics the heft to rival the industrialized democracies in the Group of Seven and reshape global geopolitics.

In reality, expansion will make the already incoherent group less coherent. Nothing binds the 11 nations except their self-identification as non-Western and their failure to become prosperous liberal democracies. China, the group’s putative leader, is in a protracted standoff with India, its most populous nation and second-largest economy. Adding more countries of varied interests makes it more likely that the group will remain “a formless sack of potatoes,” in the words of the Indian strategic thinker C. Raja Mohan.

The case for taking an expanded Brics seriously relies on crude tabulations of collective economic heft. The 11 Brics nations account for 46% of the world’s population and 37% of global gross domestic product (in purchasing power parity terms). This exceeds the G-7’s 30% share of GDP, though at market exchange rates the G-7 remains larger. Brics also now includes six of the world’s 10 largest oil producers and five of its top 10 oil consumers. It contains 75% of the world’s manganese reserves, 72% of rare earths and 50% of graphite.

Read the full article on The Wall Street Journal.