The declaration said one thing
The summit in New Delhi produced a familiar text. It was a joint declaration. On 13 September, the leaders of the BRICS nations concluded their meeting with a document that called for the established world order to be remade, with greater power and influence for the countries of the Global South. The official communique, crafted by diplomats and aides over many days, presented the image of a unified group with a shared vision for international affairs. It was a vision of a multipolar world. The statement spoke of shared goals.
The reality was different. Behind the closed doors of the summit venue, leaders were split over the two great conflicts shaping global security. They did not agree on Ukraine. They could not find a common position on the war in Iran. These divisions, reported as leaders gathered for the summit’s final day, reveal a bloc that is far from a coherent alliance. It is a collection of powerful and ambitious states whose individual interests prevent the very unity they publicly proclaim. The fractures are deep.
This gap between rhetoric and reality is visible in the declaration itself. Faced with intractable disagreement on the war in Iran, the group settled for issuing a call for ‘restraint in the Middle East’. Such language is the classic work of diplomacy when consensus is impossible. It is a carefully constructed phrase that allows every member to claim they have addressed the issue, while committing no one to a specific action or even a specific point of view. It papers over the cracks. It does not fix them. This is the diplomacy of avoidance, not the bold action of a new power centre seeking to reshape global governance.
The summit’s main function was perhaps not the grand declaration at all. Instead, it served as a useful platform for a series of bilateral meetings. The gathering in New Delhi gave leaders the chance for one to one diplomacy, providing quiet opportunities to try and ease regional tensions away from the main stage. The real business was done in private. The group itself remains a forum for its powerful members, not a unified force. The fundamental contradictions were not resolved. They were simply set aside for another year.
An alliance of rivals
BRICS is not a military alliance. It is not NATO. There is no mutual defence clause binding its members together in a pact of collective security. The bloc is better understood as a club of convenience, a loose alignment of powers united by what they oppose rather than what they agree on. Their interests diverge wildly. Some are democracies, others are autocracies. Their economies compete. Their strategic goals frequently place them on opposite sides of regional contests, a reality that makes true cohesion impossible. This is an assembly of rivals.
The most significant fault line runs directly between its two largest members. Consider India and China. They are strategic competitors. For years, their soldiers have faced each other across a disputed and militarised border high in the Himalayas, a confrontation that has periodically turned violent. This is not ancient history. This is a live conflict. This fundamental antagonism extends far beyond the mountains, playing out in a contest for economic influence across Asia and the Indian Ocean, and in diplomatic manoeuvring in international forums. Beijing’s economic power and New Delhi’s growing assertiveness create a permanent state of friction that cannot be erased by a joint declaration calling for a new global order. The rivalry is structural.
Then there is the status of Russia. Moscow was a founder. It is no longer an equal partner. The war in Ukraine has left the country diplomatically isolated from the West and under severe economic sanctions, forcing it into a position of increasing dependence on China. This subservience changes the balance of power inside the group. Russia needs Chinese markets for its oil and gas, and it needs Chinese diplomatic cover at the United Nations, a situation that reduces Vladimir Putin’s government to the status of a junior partner to Xi Jinping. Other members navigate this awkwardly. India, for instance, maintains its own longstanding security partnership with Moscow while simultaneously deepening its strategic ties with the United States through groupings like the Quad. These are not the actions of a coherent, unified bloc. They are the contradictory policies of individual nations pursuing their own security in a complicated world.
What holds the club together
And yet, the club endures. It grows. There must be a reason. The reason is resentment. This is the glue. It is a shared and deeply felt grievance against the global order that was constructed by the United States and its allies after 1945, an order which they believe perpetuates Western dominance and denies them their rightful place. They look at the commanding heights of the global financial system, institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and see bodies where leadership is an American or European prerequisite and where voting power does not reflect the economic reality of the twenty first century. This feeling unites democracies like Brazil and India with autocracies like Russia and China, creating common cause among nations that otherwise have very little in common. They want a different system.
This is not just rhetoric. It has led to action. The most concrete manifestation of this ambition is the New Development Bank. The bank was founded in 2014. It is their alternative. Headquartered in Shanghai, the NDB was designed from the ground up to be a counterweight to the Bretton Woods institutions, providing finance for infrastructure projects across the developing world without the political conditions often attached to Western loans. Its structure was a direct political statement. The founding members all have equal voting rights, a deliberate contrast to the weighted voting systems of the IMF and World Bank that favour the United States. The bank represents a tangible attempt to build a parallel financial architecture, a world where capital flows are not entirely dependent on decisions made in Washington DC.
The NDB is a real bank. It has approved billions of pounds in loans for projects from water treatment in China to transport networks in India. But it has not, and cannot, displace the old order. Its authorised capital of £80 billion is a small fraction of the resources available to the World Bank. Most of its lending is still done in US dollars, tying it to the very financial plumbing it seeks to bypass. The bank’s decision to freeze all new transactions in Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the limits of its independence. It was a choice forced upon it by the threat of American sanctions. The members of BRICS may want a new world. They are a long way from building it. The contradictions remain.
Expansion makes it harder
The old club is gone. A bigger one took its place. The recent expansion, which saw the group swell from five members to eleven, was supposed to signal a new era of Global South solidarity. It has instead imported a fresh set of intractable conflicts directly into the heart of the organisation, making the search for consensus almost impossible. The logic seemed simple. Beijing and Moscow pushed hard for more members, believing a larger coalition would present a more formidable challenge to the United States and its allies. More flags meant more weight. They were wrong. More flags just meant more arguments.
Consider the two newest members from the Middle East. Iran and Saudi Arabia. They sit at the same table. For decades, Tehran and Riyadh have been locked in a bitter struggle for regional dominance, a rivalry that has fuelled proxy wars from Yemen to Syria and deepened sectarian fault lines across the Islamic world. A fragile, Chinese brokered diplomatic normalisation exists between them, but it has not resolved the fundamental strategic conflict. It has merely paused it. Inviting both nations into a club that operates by consensus was a deliberate gamble. It was a gamble that has not paid off. It forces the bloc to either ignore the defining conflict of the modern Middle East or be paralysed by it, rendering joint statements on regional security utterly meaningless.
The problem extends beyond the Persian Gulf. The new intake includes Egypt and Ethiopia, two regional powers that have come close to war over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. It includes Argentina, a country with a deeply volatile economy and a political class that swings violently between pro Western and anti American sentiment. Each new member brings its own historical grievances, its own border disputes, and its own non negotiable national interests. These are not small issues. They are fundamental. The result is a diplomatic forum that is now vastly more representative of the world’s population but far less capable of agreeing on a common course of action for anything of substance.
This expansion has fundamentally changed the character of BRICS. It has diluted the influence of the original founders, particularly Brazil and India, which are increasingly wary of being pulled into distant conflicts that do not serve their interests. The quest for greater numbers has created a larger, more unwieldy, and more internally divided organisation. It is a club that cannot agree on the rules. A bigger tent has been pitched. The cost was any semblance of coherence. The contradictions have multiplied.
How the West sees it
In Washington, there is no panic. Brussels is not alarmed. The annual BRICS summit is an event to be monitored, not an emergency to be managed. Western policymakers see the New Delhi declaration for what it is. A statement of intent. They do not see it as a statement of capacity. For the United States and the European Union, the bloc is not a coherent strategic actor in the mould of NATO or the old Warsaw Pact. It is a loose, fractious diplomatic forum whose most powerful members have deeply conflicting interests. Officials in the US State Department and the European External Action Service spend far more time managing their distinct relationships with Beijing or New Delhi than they do formulating a response to BRICS as a collective. The group is the sum of its parts. And its parts do not fit together.
The Western strategic response is therefore tailored. It is bilateral. America’s policy towards the individual members of BRICS demonstrates this reality with absolute clarity. The United States is engaged in a profound, systemic competition with the People’s Republic of China, which it views as its primary global challenger. At the same time, Washington is actively building a deep strategic partnership with India, a country it considers a vital democratic counterweight to Chinese power in the Indo Pacific. It treats Brazil as a major regional partner, if a sometimes awkward one. It seeks to isolate Russia through a campaign of economic sanctions and military support for Ukraine. Each policy is different. Each is pursued independently. This approach is possible, and indeed necessary, because the members of BRICS themselves do not have a unified policy towards the West.
From this perspective, the bloc’s recent expansion is a gift to Western strategists. It has not created a more formidable opponent. It has created a more dysfunctional committee. The act of bringing Iran and Saudi Arabia into the same consensus based organisation is seen in Western foreign ministries as a guarantee of paralysis on any serious Middle Eastern security question. The same logic applies to Egypt and Ethiopia. These are not allies. They are rivals. Western diplomats observe that the search for a multipolar world, the supposed common cause of BRICS, means entirely different things in different member capitals. For some, like Russia or Iran, it means dismantling the current US led order. For others, like India and Brazil, it simply means securing a more influential position within that existing order. This fundamental contradiction is not lost on observers in London or Paris. They see a club that cannot agree on its own purpose. They will continue to deal with its members one by one.
The real tests are not at summits
The summit is over. The New Delhi declaration, with its now familiar call for a greater role for the Global South, has been filed away. These documents are the easy part of diplomacy. They cost little. The hard part comes later, when events force choices that cannot be fudged with ambiguous language agreed in a committee room. The fundamental contradictions that defined the bloc before the leaders gathered in India on 13 September remain entirely unresolved. They were simply set aside for the photographs.
A future crisis will not wait for consensus. It will not be a theoretical problem discussed in a plenary session but a fast moving threat demanding an urgent, sovereign response from national capitals. A sudden financial shock, perhaps originating in an unexpected corner of the global economy, will force each BRICS member to protect its own currency and its own banking system first. National interest will prevail. A new war in a region of strategic importance would not produce a unified BRICS position, it would reveal just how profoundly the security interests of members like India, China, and Russia diverge. They do not see threats the same way. They have different goals. The bloc provides a stage for expressing discontent, but it offers no real mechanism for forging a common security policy when its members are, on a fundamental level, strategic rivals.
The real tests are not found in communiqués. The joint declaration from New Delhi urged restraint in the Middle East, yet the bloc now contains both Iran and Saudi Arabia, two powers engaged in a generational struggle for regional dominance. It contains Egypt and Ethiopia, countries that have been on the brink of conflict over the waters of the Nile. These are not partners. They are antagonists who have been collected into a single diplomatic forum. Their presence guarantees that on any substantive security matter, from the Persian Gulf to the Horn of Africa, the bloc’s default position will be inaction. That inaction is born of the need for unanimity. The group cannot act. It can only talk. The hope that economic institutions like the New Development Bank can overcome these deep geopolitical fissures has yet to face a severe test. The next global panic will be that test. The divisions over Ukraine and Iran are not an aberration. They are the norm. The bloc is not a solution to its members’ disagreements. It is merely a new venue in which to have them.
Sources. Al Jazeera: World leaders gather in New Delhi for final day of BRICS summit. France 24: BRICS summit: What came out of the New Delhi meeting.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
