A different world is meeting in Delhi
The air in New Delhi is heavy with more than just late monsoon heat. It is thick with geopolitics. Vladimir Putin landed in the city on Friday. He is not alone. China’s Xi Jinping is also attending the two day BRICS summit. So is Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Their host is the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi. This is not a routine diplomatic calendar entry, a simple convergence of economic partners for handshakes and a carefully worded final communiqué. It is something else entirely. It is the conscious gathering of an alternative world order.
This is a bloc defined by what it is not. Its members are not Western allies. The meeting on 11 September 2026 feels less like a forum for trade and development and more like the inaugural session of a counterweight to a global system its participants feel has been dominated by the United States for too long. The formal agenda may speak of economic challenges. The real business is political. The unspoken business is power. The conversations will be dominated by conflict, specifically the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which provide the dark background for this assembly of leaders.
The symbolism is potent. It cannot be ignored. The sight of the Russian president being welcomed with full state honours in the capital of the world's largest democracy is a calculated message directed at capitals from Washington to Brussels. Sanctions have not isolated him. Not here. For years the BRICS group, originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, was seen by many in the West as little more than an acronym invented by a Goldman Sachs economist. It was a talking shop. A place for emerging economies to compare notes.
That view is now impossible to sustain. Look who is at the table. This is a political project now. The presence of Putin and Pezeshkian, leaders of two nations under severe Western sanctions, alongside Xi Jinping, America’s primary strategic competitor, changes the very nature of the organisation. It has moved far beyond its origins. A different world is meeting in Delhi. A world with its own ideas about power, about alliances, and about the century ahead. The West is not invited.
Putin is not alone
Vladimir Putin stepped onto the tarmac in New Delhi on Friday. His journey matters. For a leader whose international travel is severely restricted by Western condemnation over the war in Ukraine, this is a significant diplomatic sortie, a deliberate projection of relevance on the global stage. He is not a pariah here. This is the entire point of the visit. The Kremlin's strategic imperative is to demonstrate, in the most visible way possible, that the American and European led effort to isolate the Russian Federation has failed to convince the rest of the world. Moscow has other partners. It has powerful friends. The sight of the Russian president shaking hands with the Indian prime minister is designed to show that for major global south powers, the war in Ukraine is not their conflict and Russia remains a state to be engaged with, not shunned.
This is politics as theatre. Nothing is accidental. Every photograph, every televised handshake, every joint statement from the summit is a message meticulously crafted for an audience far beyond the conference halls of the Indian capital. The primary audience is in the West. The secondary one is the Russian people. Putin needs to show that his country is not alone and that he remains a respected figure among the leaders of nations representing billions of people. The war in Ukraine continues. So does Russian diplomacy. For Moscow, a summit like this is invaluable because it provides a forum to normalise its position and build economic and political relationships that exist completely outside the architecture of Western sanctions and diplomatic pressure. These connections are a lifeline. They are a long term strategy. They blunt the West's primary weapon.
The reception in New Delhi is a victory for the Kremlin. It is a carefully stage managed event. But its success depends entirely on the willingness of others to play their part, most notably the host, Narendra Modi. Putin’s ability to project this image of normalcy is granted by his partners. Their welcome is his evidence. China’s Xi Jinping and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian are there too, each with their own profound disagreements with Washington, making this less a meeting of friends and more a pragmatic convergence of states who see advantage in a world less dominated by a single power. This gathering gives the Russian leader a platform. It is a chance to coordinate. He can speak with leaders who may not be allies in a formal sense, but who share a deep and abiding scepticism of American foreign policy and its financial instruments. This is the core of the new BRICS.
India walks a fine line
New Delhi is the stage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the director. He is attempting the world’s most difficult balancing act. He wants India to be a leading power, not a follower in another nation’s script. This policy has a name. Strategic autonomy. In practice, it means hosting Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian one week, and conducting naval drills with the American navy the next. It means buying discounted Russian oil to fuel the economy while also being a core member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a group created with American backing specifically to counter Chinese influence in the Indo Pacific.
The risks are immense. They are obvious. Washington watches these handshakes in Delhi with deep unease. The Quad partnership is not a treaty alliance, but it is a serious security commitment built on shared concerns about Beijing’s expansionism. For India to provide a platform for Xi, and for Russia’s leader while the war in Ukraine continues, tests the patience of its partners in Tokyo, Canberra and especially Washington. Trust is the currency of these relationships. Such overt displays of friendship with American antagonists can look like a betrayal of shared democratic values, even if Delhi insists it is merely a pragmatic pursuit of its own interests. The act of hosting is a statement. The question is what it says to India's other friends.
But the potential rewards are why Modi takes the gamble. India does not want to be a client state. It does not want to be a junior partner in a new Cold War. By refusing to align, New Delhi maximises its own leverage over all sides. It can negotiate arms deals with Russia, technology transfers with America and trade agreements with China, playing each against the other to extract the best terms for its 1.4 billion people. This summit allows Modi to project India as the natural leader of the Global South, a bridge between East and West, and a great power in its own right that cannot be ignored or coerced. It is an assertion of sovereignty on the global stage. It is a bold claim.
This balancing act is now India's defining foreign policy. It requires constant, careful calibration. A misstep could isolate Delhi, leaving it with the worst of both worlds, trusted by neither the West nor the new anti American bloc coalescing within BRICS. A success would confirm India's arrival as a genuinely independent pole in a multipolar world, able to shape events rather than simply react to them. For now, the tightrope is holding. The summit proceeds. But everyone in New Delhi, from the prime minister's office to the foreign embassies, knows just how far the fall could be.
The bloc is bigger now
The bloc is bigger now. It is also different. The group’s 2024 expansion has fundamentally altered its character, moving it far beyond its original mandate as a forum for large, rising economies. Iran’s inclusion is the most telling change. The formal accession of the Islamic Republic has done more than any other single act to recalibrate the group's purpose from a club focused on economic cooperation to an explicitly political coalition. Its accession formalises a shift that has been underway for years. The presence of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in Delhi is not a courtesy call. It is a declaration of intent. The old BRICS was a club you could join if your economy was growing fast enough. The new BRICS is a coalition increasingly defined by a shared grievance against the United States and the Western led global order.
Tehran does not bring economic heft. Its economy, battered by decades of American sanctions, is a fraction of the size of China's or India's. It brings something else entirely. It brings a political project. Iran offers a forty year masterclass in how to resist American pressure, how to create alternative financial channels to circumvent sanctions and how to build asymmetrical alliances to counter a superpower. This is knowledge that is suddenly very valuable to Moscow, which finds itself under a Western sanctions regime of unprecedented scale since its invasion of Ukraine. It is also valuable to Beijing, which sees economic coercion as a primary tool in Washington's future arsenal for the contest in the Pacific. The conversations in the Delhi summit’s back rooms will not just be about trade figures or development goals. They will be about how to build a sanctions proof world.
This new identity makes sense of the guest list. It explains everything. Vladimir Putin is here precisely because this is a forum where the war in Ukraine does not make him a pariah. Xi Jinping is here because he sees this group as the primary vehicle for realising his vision of a multipolar world free from American financial and diplomatic dominance. Masoud Pezeshkian is here because Iran’s entire modern history is a struggle against that same dominance. The expansion provides critical mass, turning the group from an interesting collection of powerful states into a credible, alternative bloc. It represents a pole of opposition. The summit’s focus on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East is no accident. These are the arenas where the contest with the West is being fought most acutely. BRICS is no longer just commenting on these conflicts. It now contains some of the principal actors.
Beijing sees its chance
For Moscow, this is about survival. For Beijing, it is about something else entirely. Xi Jinping has a much longer game in mind. He sees the world not in terms of months or years, but in decades of strategic competition with the United States. In this contest, the expanded BRICS is not a convenient forum for diplomatic statements but the primary institutional vehicle for dismantling the post Cold War order and building a new one where Washington no longer holds a monopoly on power. This is the grand strategy. The summit is one move. The aim is to create a world with many poles of influence, where China commands one of them.
The approach is not direct military confrontation. It is more patient. It is about construction. Beijing's strategy centres on building a complete, parallel financial and diplomatic architecture, one that can eventually operate independently of the American led system. The New Development Bank, the BRICS' answer to the World Bank, is the most obvious example of this project, offering infrastructure loans without the political conditions often attached by Western institutions like the International Monetary Fund. The ultimate goal is to erode the dominance of the US dollar, the currency that grants Washington immense global power to enforce sanctions and control the arteries of finance. It is a slow, methodical hollowing out of American advantage. China offers a different deal. It is purely transactional.
The bloc's expansion is the critical catalyst. More members mean a bigger market. It means more votes in international bodies. The inclusion of states like Iran, which have spent decades operating outside the American financial system, brings invaluable expertise in sanctions busting and alternative trade routes. Russia’s war in Ukraine has also accelerated Beijing’s plans, turning a powerful and sometimes difficult partner into a junior ally almost entirely dependent on Chinese economic goodwill. The current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East provide a perfect backdrop, consuming American attention and resources while allowing China to present itself to the Global South as a voice for peace. This is the narrative. Beijing repeats it endlessly.
This is why Xi Jinping is in Delhi. He is not just there to meet Modi and Putin. He is there to consolidate a coalition. A multipolar world, from Beijing’s perspective, is not a chaotic free for all but a managed system of great power spheres of influence where China is the undisputed leader of its own. It is a world where trade disputes are not settled using the dollar, where technology standards are not set in Silicon Valley, and where criticisms of human rights records in Xinjiang are dismissed as illegitimate interference from a rival bloc. Every conversation about currency swaps, every new member admitted and every joint statement is a small step towards building that reality. The work is patient. It is deliberate. For Xi Jinping, it is essential.
Sources. Al Jazeera: Putin lands in India for BRICs summit, shadowed by Iran and Ukraine wars. France 24: Putin and Xi in India for BRICS summit as Ukraine, Middle East wars loom.
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.
