Alongside of other threats that president-elect Donald Trump is making, he also threatened to impose 100% tariffs on a bloc of nine nations if they tried to replace the US dollar with a rival currency. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Chia, South Africa) group was trying to move away from the US dollar and Trump is putting an end to it. Trump has been thinking about implementing tariffs if he won the election and has threatened them since. The BRICS group has thought of making a different currency to reduce the US dollars dominance in global trade. He also made threats towards Mexico and Canada, having to do with their borders. These could be negotiation tactics and strategies. He wants to grow the US economy, protect jobs, and raise tax revenue for the US.
Trump has started to take control of the US because he won the 2024 presidential election. He was in office in 2016, lost, then won again. He is getting prepared for his next term in office and is really getting a head start. I am not sure if he is really going to impose these tariffs, but some of them may just be a scare tactic type of strategy for US benefit. The BRICS group wants the United States to be less powerful overall, so creating a different currency would be a way to do so. Trump doesn’t want this to happen so that is why he made the threat against them.
It will be unlikely that the BRICS group will be able to make a different currency to counterbalance the power of the US currency. They might try other ways to counterbalance western power because it is one of their main goals as an alliance. The United States president-elect has already acted on this and threatened them if they followed up with their idea. He has also done this with Canada and Mexico and will continue to do it to others if it is needed to keep US security and maintain a stable economy.
Trump is beginning his foreign affairs in response to the BRICS group and other countries. The BRICS group is an alliance to gain their own power. This is an example of the balance of power theory, where a couple states come together to perceive an imbalance in the international system. The world is in a unipolar power system because the United States is the biggest global power. Some may not believe that there should not only be one source of power, especially that its the United States.