Readers of a certain age may recall the time in the 1950s and 1960s when the so-called Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was the rage on the international scene, igniting one’s imagination as the struggles against imperialism, colonization, racism, and nuclear arms did.

Indeed, to be non-aligned with either of the two major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective blocs, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact, during the first two decades of the Cold War seemed the “cool” thing to do, reflecting diplomatic creativity, a certain radical chic, and the face of a glorious future when the nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would determine the international outcomes.

The narrative would sound very familiar to contemporary audiences: the elites that ruled the old rich and powerful European powers that had won World War II were apparently passé, trying to perpetuate an old global status quo that supposedly benefited their economic and military interests and not those of 55 percent of the world population that had only a small slice of its GDP and that resided in what became to be known as the “developing countries.”

The developing world—later to be known as the Third World or the South—would choose a foreign policy middle course between the Western and Eastern blocs and press these advancing industrialized economies (later referred to interchangeably as the First World and the North) to provide them with more access to the world’s economic resources that the pro-status-quo powers control and more representation at the center of international power they dominate, like the United Nations.

It all seemed to make a lot of sense from a moral perspective, the world’s underclass demanding democratization of the international system and the distribution of the resources of the global economy.

These also happen to be the slogans promoted these days by the members of the so-called Global South as represented by the members of the BRICS (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) grouping and those who seek to join it, who represent 47 percent of the world’s population and 37 percent of its GDP calculated by purchasing power parity.

If the NAM’s target for criticism were initially the First World consisting of the United States, Western Europe, and their allies, and the Second World of the Soviet Union, the BRICS challenges the Western industrialized countries, as represented by the Group of 7 (G7) consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States and the international order they control through various institutions.

And, indeed, since the first summit the BRICS held in 2009, the grouping has drawn international attention, not unlike the NAM in its early years. If some forecast now that the BRICS could one day rival the G7 and erode the preeminent global power of the United States and the West, predictions that were made in 1950s and 1960s envisioned the triumph of the developing nations, which would soon not only dominate the UN but also use their control of primary resources, like energy, to squeeze concessions from the industrialized nations.

The first conference of the heads of state of the NAM in Belgrade in 1956, following the historic Bandung Conference a year earlier, brought together the larger-than-life world figures—the leaders of newly independent states including Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesia’s Sukarno—representing the post-World War II struggle against Western imperialism.

Notwithstanding their grand rhetoric that celebrated democracy and human rights and their goal of expanding freedom, aspiring to collective security in global terms, and terminating the domination of one country over another, most of the leaders of these nations were ruled by authoritarian regimes that repressed ethnic and religious minorities, sought to advance their interests through military might and territorial expansion, and embraced a centralized economic system along the lines of the Soviet Union and Communist China.

In fact, contrary to their expressed goal of non-alignment between the two global superpowers, the NAM ended up advancing a mostly anti-Western agenda, with the United States accused of pursuing old-new forms of imperialism and colonialism through its Cold War military strategy as well as its trade and investment policies and being blasted for its support of racist South Africa and expansionist Israel.

In a way, as they gradually became a majority at the UN General Assembly, the NAM members were able to attack and pass resolutions criticizing the “imperialist” U.S. while disregarding the fact that the Soviet Union had remained the world’s last true empire—where European Russians ruled over Kazakhs and Azeris, not to mention Georgians and Latvians. Meanwhile, another NAM darling, China, repressed its Tibetan and Muslim minorities. The United States was ostracized for its military intervention in Vietnam; the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia didn’t get much attention. So much for “non-alignment.”

The bottom line: with the exception of its anti-American, anti-Apartheid, and anti-Israeli positions, the NAM lacked a coherent agenda. It consisted of nations like Communist and secular Cuba and feudal and theocratic Saudi Arabia, poor Yemen and wealthy Kuwait, Indonesia’s military regime and India’s semi-democracy—many of which shared nothing in common and, like in the case of India and Pakistan, were long-time adversaries.

Interestingly enough, the same Communist China that these days is hoping to employ to expand BRICS (which has eleven members now) and transform it into a major body that would weaken American and Western domination of the global economy and international system while strengthening China’s influence had similar expectations from the NAM.

Hence, in the early 1950s, then-Chinese premier Chou En-Lai advocated that the non-aligned states could be employed to improve China’s diplomatic position, and stated that China’s goal was “winning over” the international middle-of-the-road forces, creating a neutral belt of states as the “zone of peace” during the Cold War.

Like the NAM, the BRICS, as columnist Japan Ganesh puts it, is a mishmash “of democracies (India), autocracies (China), secular states (Brazil), quite the opposite (Saudi Arabia), the rich (the United Arab Emirates), the poor (Ethiopia), former empires (Russia), and former colonies (Algeria).”

Who in all seriousness expects such a constellation of states “to ever cohere into something that deserves the name ‘bloc,’” asks Ganesh, who notes that after fifteen official summits, BRICS have yet to come up with an identifiable program to replace the Washington Consensus and neoliberalism. Ironically, if one country did benefit from the pro-free trade policies entrenched in the Washington Consensus, it was China.

Fans of BRICS should recall the gradual slide of the NAM (which actually continues to exist today as an organization) into global irrelevancy, as some of its members like Cuba and Egypt, turned into Soviet protectorates, exchanged lethal fire with each other (Iraq and Kuwait; India and Pakistan), and discovered that playing one superpower against the other has done very little to improve their international status and economic conditions.

In a way, after the collapse of the apartheid regime (thanks to U.S. pressure), the Arab-Israeli peace process, the success of new economic powers in East Asia (thanks to their embrace of American capitalism, a route eventually taken by Communist China), and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NAM has become an anachronism.

Similarly, anti-American rhetoric isn’t going to turn BRICS into an effective international bloc. Growing tensions between China and India, the continuing war in Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear military program, and disagreements over trade and investment policies are only some of the issues that are bound to make it difficult to employ BRICS to pursue any form of collective action.

Like in the case of the NAM, America’s success in countering China’s BRICS designs depends on its ability to promote and project to the world a winning political and economic model, offer developing countries access to its markets while reforming the international economic organizations it leads as well the UN Security Council in a way that would respond to the needs of countries like India, South Africa, and Brazil.

Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor with The National Interest, is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia and a former research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has taught at American University in Washington, DC, and at the University of Maryland, College Park. A columnist and blogger with Haaretz (Israel) and Washington correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore, he is a former United Nations bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post.