Dr. Kumari Mansi, Faculty, Amity Center for BRICS Studies, Amity University Haryana
As leaders from eleven countries gather in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit, the question dominating commentary is whether the bloc can finally produce a unified position on the war in Iran. President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran are all in the Indian capital; so, reportedly, are the world’s finance and foreign ministries watching to see whether BRICS can speak with “one voice” on the Middle East. It is the wrong question, asked for the wrong reasons, and it misunderstands what BRICS is for?
BRICS is not failing to be a geopolitical bloc. It was never built to be one. The founding rational of BRICS was economic. The raison d’être of BRICS (now BRICS Plus, post-2024 expansion) is to provide a coordination platform for financial and developmental interests among states with divergent worldviews, alliance commitments, security postures, and threat perceptions. Judging it by its capacity to resolve the Iran war, or to issue a declaration that satisfies Tehran without alienating Abu Dhabi or vice-versa, is like judging a trade association by its ability to broker a ceasefire. The disappointment being expressed says more about the expectations imposed on BRICS from outside than about any design flaw within it.
An Investment Thesis, Not an Alliance
It is worth revisiting what BRICS actually stands for. It originated not as a political project but as an investment thesis. The term was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill to describe four fast-growing emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, and China whose demographic heft and expanding markets were expected to reshape the global economy. The first formal Summit of Heads of State was held in 2009. South Africa joined in 2010, which gave it a more explicit Global South outlook. The summit’s agenda since the first leaders’ summit, have centred on structural reforms of international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank quota systems, not on collective security.
The institutional achievement of BRICS include the establishment of New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA). The NDB and CRA are financial instruments, not defence pacts. For BRICS members there is no treaty obligation likened to Article 5 of NATO, no joint military command, and no shared intelligence architecture. What exists is a summit calendar, a rotating chairmanship, and working groups on trade, energy, and technology. It doesn’t even have a secretariat or any permanent office. It is an informal grouping of emerging economies.
The 2023 expansion at Johannesburg further deepened this economic logic rather than replacing it with a political one. The enlarged grouping now accounts for roughly 40 percent of global GDP on a purchasing-power basis, close to half the world’s population, and a substantial share of global oil and rare-earth production. That is a case for BRICS as an economic weight class, one increasingly capable of shaping trade settlement norms, development finance, and supply-chain coordination. It is not, by itself, a case for BRICS as a foreign-policy actor capable of adjudicating a shooting war between two of its own members.
Why This Summit Was Always Going to Struggle on Iran
The structural reason BRICS cannot produce a strong position on the Middle East is not diplomatic incompetence on India’s part. It is arithmetic. Iran and the UAE, both members since 2024, have spent the past several months as active combatants on opposite sides of the same war – Emirati territory has been struck by Iranian missiles, and the UAE responded in August by suspending trade and financial transactions with Tehran outright. Saudi Arabia’s own position in the bloc remains unresolved. Asking this configuration of states to converge on language condemning “aggression” or naming a guilty party is asking BRICS to function as a security alliance takes decades and shared threat perception to build — neither of which BRICS was designed to have.
This was already visible in May, when BRICS deputy foreign ministers and foreign ministers meeting in New Delhi failed to agree on a joint declaration after Iran’s foreign minister demanded explicit condemnation of US and Israeli strikes and the UAE pushed back. As the chair, India proposed a softened language (like replacing “Israel” with “occupying power) but it received pushback. Most of the other members found India’s position to be too accommodating toward Israel. The result was a Chair’s Statement rather than a consensus text. This outcome must be taken as a reflection of the bloc’s internal composition, not a failure of Indian stewardship.
What India Is Actually Managing
None of this means that India’s presidency has been passive. Rather it means India has correctly read what BRICS can and cannot deliver and has channelized its energy accordingly. The 2026 Summit theme as set by India– “Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”– is a deliberate pivot towards digital public infrastructure, climate finance, AI governance cooperation, and the phased rollout of BRICS Pay, the cross-border settlement platform integrating India’s UPI with other BRICS country’s domestic payment system like China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and , Brazil’s Pix, and Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS). These are precisely the areas in which a diverse and economically significant grouping can produce durable outcomes without requiring its members to align on matters of war and peace.
This is also why India has resisted pressure to use its chairmanship to force BRICS into a common security position. India’s own stakes in the Iran war are not abstract: by some estimates close to half of India’s crude oil and the overwhelming majority of its LPG imports originate in the Middle East, and the disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has already pushed global benchmark prices above $100 a barrel this year, with real consequences for Indian households and industry. New Delhi has every incentive to want the war to end. It has almost no institutional mechanism, through BRICS, to end it because BRICS was never given the tools of a mediating power. What India has done instead is manage its own relationships bilaterally: maintaining energy and defence engagement with Russia, sustaining a growing security partnership with Israel, hosting Iran’s president for talks on trade and connectivity, and doing so without asking BRICS’s other ten members to certify any of it.
The Cost of Misreading the Bloc
Treating BRICS as a geopolitical alliance in waiting produces two kinds of error. The first is analytical: every foreign ministers’ meeting that fails to produce a joint statement gets read as evidence of the bloc’s decline, when it is better read as evidence that the bloc is functioning exactly as its design allows; a forum where Iran and the UAE can continue trading development-bank commitments and technology cooperation even while their governments are at war, because the institution never asked them to agree on the war in the first place. A security alliance could not survive such contradiction. An economic grouping can and it does as BRICS exemplifies.
The second error is strategic, and it matters more for outside observers, including those in Europe and Washington. Reading BRICS as an emerging anti-Western axis and then treating every summit as a referendum on whether that axis will “hold”, overstates the coherence of what is, in practice, a formally informal grouping among states with sharply divergent security postures. India has been explicit on this point: it has consistently resisted the maximalist positions put forward by Russia and China and has publicly opposed proposals for a de-dollarization/BRICS currency, and has framed its own participation as “non-West,” not “anti-West.” This is a point to be noted that a bloc that cannot agree on how to describe a war between two of its members is not a bloc positioning itself against anyone.
A more productive way to look at it, both for New Delhi and for BRICS’s global audience, is one rooted in the grouping’s evolution: BRICS is fundamentally an economic platform whose strength lies in development finance, trade coordination, and technological cooperation among its member states. These states may continue to differ sometimes profoundly on broader geopolitical issues. Expecting the bloc to resolve the Iran war/middle-east crisis this weekend imposes a standard BRICS was never designed to meet. Diverting attention from the more substantive areas such as infrastructure, energy, and finance, where BRICS can deliver meaningful and lasting outcomes should be the focus.
[ Opinions expressed personal. ]
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