Interestingly, Jim O’Neill’s BRIC acronym appears to have been a separate route to almost the same destination. His 2001 Goldman Sachs paper grouped Brazil, Russia, India and China because of their growing economic weight and argued that global economic governance, particularly the G7, would eventually have to accommodate them. There is no credible evidence that O’Neill chose BRIC because he was borrowing from Primakov’s RIC triangle. In fact, O’Neill has subsequently said quite clearly that he never intended his acronym to become a political club. So in a rather nice historical accident, geopolitics produced RIC, markets produced BRIC—and diplomacy eventually married the two.The triangle was made into a square by adding Brazil, and later into a pentagon by bringing in South Africa—and as more members kept getting added to it, its asymmetry kept growing too.It soon acquired summits, a bank and six new members (for a total of 11), but what it still has not acquired is a common purpose.This is where BRICS becomes a double whammy of strategic semantics. Two expressions now enjoy extraordinary popularity: the so-called ‘Global South’ and ‘Middle Power’. Nobody can quite agree what either means, but almost everybody wants to belong to one, lead it, write a strategy and, of course, organise an international conference.Take the ‘Global South’, for instance. China, the world’s second-largest economy, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a nuclear power, the world’s manufacturing colossus and a major creditor to developing countries, insists that its ‘heart’ and ‘root’ remain in the Global South. How?At this point, the Global South is less a coherent grouping than a strategic mood. It is perhaps the only geopolitical club whose most famous members meet without agreeing to anything in principle.But the same elasticity is useful. It creates extra legroom for very different, often conflicting, national interests to be packaged into the appearance of solidarity. Foreign Affairs’ Comfort Ero has warned against treating the Global South as a coherent coalition; recent scholarship similarly calls it a “booming meta category” in which geography, income, and political alignment stubbornly refuse to match.The same conceptual looseness and cacophony haunt ‘middle powers’: middle of what—GDP, military capability, diplomatic reach, or ambition? India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa can all be called middle powers, but so can Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, Canada and South Korea under entirely different strategic circumstances.What BRICS+ does is put both ambiguities in one room. Does it help? No.