The framing of 'China abandoned them' might be reading betrayal into what is actually a designed exit. China's foreign policy toolkit — BRI loans, military hardware, diplomatic cover — functions more like a franchise model than an alliance. You extract value during the relationship, and you don't absorb the franchise's losses when it fails. Venezuela and Iran weren't allies in any traditional sense; they were leverage points. Cheap military equipment keeps them in orbit without creating a defense obligation China would have to honor.

The part worth separating out is BRICS itself. The bloc was never a military or ideological project — it was, at its core, an attempt to build dollar-alternative payment infrastructure. That motivation doesn't disappear because the political theater around it collapsed. The countries driving BRICS settlement rails (India, UAE, China) have different and often competing interests, but they all share a long-term incentive to reduce dollar dependency. That project can survive the Venezuela and Iran chapters precisely because it was never about defending those countries — it was about routing around the Swift system.

The real question might be less about whether BRICS is dead and more about what China actually loses here. If the mercantilist model holds — extract resources, collect political alignment, exit when costly — then there's no reputational cost that matters to Beijing. The next set of partners will still take the loans and the hardware, because the alternative (dollar-denominated debt and Western conditionality) looks worse. Does the pattern break if a credible third option emerges, or does it just keep cycling?