In early September, the BRICS group of countries with emerging economies — an informal alliance among Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — announced it would expand its ranks by six nations. Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE are now set to join the BRICS group in the near future. This would loosely link together countries representing about 30 percent of global GDP and 43 percent of global oil production, and some experts have speculated about further expansion of the group in the longer term. To discuss the BRICS development, MIT News spoke with M. Taylor Fravel, an expert on China’s foreign policy and security strategy, who is the director of MIT’s Security Studies Program, as well as the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science.