If Luxembourg Fails, Portugal Can Act

 

Diário de Notícias Opinion/Lisbon edition

Victor Ângelo

International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General.

Published on: October 9, 2026

When EU Foreign Ministers meet in Luxembourg on October 12, one year will have passed since the ceasefire in Gaza. Peace, however, remains absent. The United Nations continues to record attacks on civilians and restrictions on humanitarian aid, and it is projected that around 1.4 million people—two-thirds of Gaza's population—will face acute food insecurity by the end of the year. In the West Bank, the UN and other observers document settler violence and the expansion of Israeli settlements, which the International Court of Justice deemed illegal in 2004 and again in 2024.

The Israeli government is now accelerating the E1 project, an urban corridor intended to link the vast settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to East Jerusalem. The UN, EU countries, and other organizations consider that, once completed, it will sever the territorial continuity between the northern and southern West Bank and, in practice, render a contiguous Palestinian State unviable. That is why, for decades, Washington and European capitals opposed the plan.

On September 8, Portugal joined a declaration with France, Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Sweden, and—outside the Union—with the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Iceland, in which these States confirmed their intention to restrict trade with the settlements. The Twenty-Seven, however, still lack a common position: Germany, Czechia, and Italy are preventing a qualified majority from being reached. The EU-Israel Association Agreement remains unchanged, and the institutions that finance settlement expansion from Europe continue to operate without restrictions.

More than 500 former prime ministers, ministers, ambassadors, and senior European officials urged, in an appeal published in Libération on October 5, that the EU sanction financial institutions and service providers linked to E1 and ban trade with the settlements. They warn that collective inaction is hollowing out the two-state solution.

If the Foreign Affairs Council remains blocked once again, the States that take International Law seriously are not left without options. Spain showed one: it recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv in September 2025 and, since March 2026, the embassy has been led by a chargé d'affaires. Relations were not severed. The level of representation was merely reduced.

This is the step that Portugal could propose: reduce the level of its representation in Tel Aviv, as Madrid did, and do so in coordination with others. It is not necessary for everyone to do it. An initial group could bring together countries that have already adopted restrictive national measures, such as Spain, Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The invitation would remain open to the other signatories of the September 8 declaration and to others. If five or six States move forward, the gesture ceases to be national and becomes a European movement. For Portugal, which assumes a seat on the UN Security Council in 2027, this would be a way to show that the defense of the negotiated solution in New York has concrete consequences in Brussels. And it would be coherent with the step Lisbon has already taken by recognizing the State of Palestine.

There are four predictable objections. The first is that reducing diplomatic level diminishes access and influence. But the political channel remains open: the chargé d'affaires would continue to transmit messages, protect citizens, and speak with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Security cooperation and consular protection would not be suspended, and Israel would continue to be an interlocutor. The second is that the gesture would be purely symbolic. Isolated, its impact is indeed limited. It would be a political signal, not a lever, and would only gain strength if accompanied by financial sanctions and trade restrictions. The third is that it would further divide the Union. But the division already exists. What is at stake is whether the blockade by three States should paralyze all the others. The fourth is retaliation. But retaliation against an isolated State is easy; against five or six acting in conjunction, it is much more costly, and that is the rationale behind the group.

And Washington? The Trump administration has reiterated its opposition to the annexation of the West Bank, but, as far as is public, has not expressly condemned E1. There is, even so, common ground: Washington and Europe state that they want to prevent annexation and preserve stability. If European capitals present their decisions as a way to prevent the reality on the ground from rendering the two-state solution unviable, rather than as a rupture with Israel, they will be speaking of an objective they share with Washington. It is not necessary to agree on the instruments to agree on the outcome. It is up to EU governments to explain this firmly, before the fait accompli makes conversation useless.

None of this reflects antisemitism, nor hostility toward Israel and its citizens. Europe firmly condemns the terrorist massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and all forms of terrorism against Israel. What is proposed here responds to decisions by the Israeli government that are incompatible with an objective reiterated by the UN Security Council, the European Union, successive US administrations, and many others: preserving the conditions for a two-state solution.

On the 12th, ministers can limit themselves to repeating that the problem is serious or dare to go further. If there is no consensus, it will be up to the States that take international law seriously to show that, in Europe, there are already those who know how to act. Portugal can be one of them.

The King of Jordan and Portugal’s Test in the Security Council

 Diário de Notícias 
 Opinion 

Victor Ângelo
International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

Published on: 02 Oct 2026

Portuguese foreign policy has a habit of waiting. It waits for Washington, Brussels, Paris, or Berlin to decide what is to be praised, what is to be condemned, and what is to be passed over in silence. In September 2025, by recognizing the State of Palestine, Lisbon demonstrated that it can decide on its own. This now remains to be confirmed. King Abdullah II’s speech at the 81st United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 2026 provides the occasion.

Diplomacy prefers ambiguity. The King rejected it. For decades, the King stated, the international community has managed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than resolving it, treating every violation as temporary until the temporary became permanent, and the permanent was converted into policy. For him, Gaza and the West Bank are two fronts of a single Israeli strategy: making a Palestinian State unviable. In Gaza, the destruction aims to erase Palestinian life. In the West Bank, settlements, land appropriation, demolitions, and expulsions have become a political objective.

He recalled that the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative remains valid: normalization in exchange for peace and a Palestinian State. He denounced the use of humanitarian aid as an instrument of pressure, and warned that the weakening of multilateral institutions threatens the security of all. Inaction, he said, is a choice, because there are sanctions, asset freezes, and diplomatic isolation, which have already been applied in other cases. He pointed to Israel's "expansionist appetite" and cited Syria as a warning: repeated incursions and faits accomplis, including around vital water resources.

The essence of the speech is rooted in international law. The forced transfer of populations is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention and constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute. The acquisition of foreign territory by force violates the United Nations Charter. Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016) declared the settlements to have no legal validity. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that the Israeli presence in the occupied territories is illegal, and that States must refrain from supporting it. The Security Council enshrined the two-state solution in 2002.

Portugal does not possess the colonial past in the Middle East of the great powers. It has centuries of contact with Islam, in its language, tilework, and toponymy, alongside longstanding relations with the Islamic cultures of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia. It can serve as a bridge, provided it does so with States that respect international law. Moreover, Portugal has a direct interest: the stability of the Mediterranean has a decisive bearing on migration, energy, and the security of Europe's southern flank.

Jordan is a stable interlocutor, hosts a vast population of Palestinian refugees, and acts as the custodian of the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem. It is not a democracy, and nobody needs to pretend that it is. In foreign policy, however, it meets the criteria of the rule of law and multilateralism better than some habitual partners.

Consistency will be put to the test when Portugal takes its seat on the Security Council in 2027 and 2028. Two years of votes, declarations, and abstentions will be placed on record. It will fall to the Government to conduct foreign policy. The Council of State, the consultative body to the President of the Republic, must be called upon to offer its opinion on the broad outlines of Portuguese participation in the most sensitive matters. In the Assembly of the Republic, the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Portuguese Communities will scrutinize the positions adopted, ensuring that the mandate on the Security Council is not reduced to an uncritical alignment with other governments.

For now, I propose three gestures, in ascending order of demand.

The first is to invite King Abdullah II for an official visit in the coming months. The last visit to Lisbon by the Jordanian monarchy was in March 2009. The invitation is the prerogative of the President of the Republic, in consultation with the Government. Made now, upon entering the Security Council, it signals to the world whom Portugal wishes to speak with, and what it considers to be a priority. In May, Minister Paulo Rangel told his Jordanian counterpart that the two countries share a very similar political vision. An invitation to the King would lend this convergence the seal of the State.

The second is to propose that Jordan join the CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) as an associate observer, a status already held by Qatar. The decision rests with the Community, but the initiative can originate in Lisbon. A prominent Arab State would connect the CPLP to the Islamic world, within a Lusophone sphere that includes relevant Muslim communities, such as those in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

The third is to move the two-state solution from rhetoric to action. In Brussels, Portugal must advocate for effective conditionalities against those who render it unviable in reality. In European practice, the word sanction remains a taboo when the recipient is Israel: the Union affirms a principle on paper and tolerates its opposite on the ground, even when faced with a Head of Government sought by the International Criminal Court. In New York, Portugal must keep the issue on the agenda and vote according to the law, not according to a bloc reflex.

Jordan has limitations, regime interests, and dependencies, and no serious analysis ignores them. Yet, a speech that names the facts, invokes the precise legal instruments, and links Palestine to regional security provides Portugal with an anchor that Western ambiguity has ceased to offer.

If Portugal limits itself to being a predictable vote, aligned by reflex and silent out of convenience, the recognition of 2025 will remain an isolated episode. The King recalled that attention is a geopolitical resource, and that the world chooses where to focus it. Whoever is to sit on the Security Council for two years cannot pretend not to have heard the speech.

Russia and Democratic Europe

DN Opinion

The Russian siege and Europe's response

Victor Ângelo
International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

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Published on: 25 Sep 2026, Diário de Notícias, Lisboa, Portugal
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The recent Duma elections were well staged. They confirmed the internal control exercised by the regime, the decision to continue the illegal war against Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin's structural policy against Europe, which has gradually evolved from occasional provocations to a strategy of persistent and calculated pressure.

Moscow operates on several complementary fronts: sabotage, cyberattacks, electronic signal jamming, the instrumentalization of migrants, propaganda, military intimidation, and support for extremist and pro-Russian political forces. The purpose is not to immediately destroy Western capabilities—not for lack of will, but through strategic calculation. In reality, it is about testing and exposing the political frailties of democratic Europe, with actions surgically below the threshold of NATO's Article 5. The authorship of these actions is systematically denied, exploiting the inherent slowness of democracies in gathering evidence and making decisions. Putin is an expert at transforming political doubt into an instrument of equivocation and at fostering fractures among allied nations.

This pressure materializes on coordinated fronts that many insist on treating as isolated incidents. From Kaliningrad and other unidentified locations, satellite navigation disruptions are already a recurrent issue, affecting aviation and maritime navigation across a vast swath between Poland and Scandinavia. In terms of sabotage, the damage to submarine telecommunication cables in the Baltic Sea since 2024 is now compounded by the threat in the Arctic, where a Russian military unit has reportedly studied ways to disable the region's cables. On the land borders, the migratory instrument orchestrated via Belarus has adapted: in response to the physical barriers erected in Poland, the pressure has shifted towards Lithuania and Latvia through new tactics.

Often treated in isolation by certain political sectors and parts of public opinion, the war of aggression against Ukraine is not a parallel conflict: it is the most brutal manifestation of this very same strategy. There are those who still fail to grasp this connection, viewing support for Kyiv as a mere gesture of solidarity or an obligation that is difficult to justify—a tragic misreading. While on the rest of the continent Moscow operates in the grey zone to avoid collective retaliation, in Ukraine it resorts to direct military force to achieve the same end: to subjugate democracies and unilaterally redraw European security. Support for Ukraine must therefore be unequivocally integrated into the broader framework of defending democratic Europe. Ukraine is our first trench.

Europe's vulnerability, however, is predominantly political and internal. The Kremlin finds Trojan horses within the very heart of the European system: certain extremist parties and movements. Whether through submission, ideological convergence, or financing, or through anti-Americanism or xenophobic repudiation of European integration, these forces ultimately serve Moscow's objectives. By normalizing the Russian narrative, attacking NATO, hindering aid to Kyiv, and sowing scepticism towards European institutions, these extremes amplify the hybrid war.

The European response is dangerously asymmetrical. On the eastern and Nordic flank, the response to the threat is already State doctrine: Finland has integrated hybrid analysis into its comprehensive defence, Estonia is investing in digital resilience, and Warsaw and Vilnius are preparing for escalation scenarios. In Western and Southern Europe, the awakening has been delayed. Although there are shifts in perception and policy in Berlin, Paris, London, Rome, and even Brussels, the response remains too slow, bureaucratic, and fragmented.

This delay reveals a certain incomprehension of the autocratic vision of the regime led by Vladimir Putin. The risk encompasses all of Europe outside the Russian orbit, from the Ukrainian front and the Baltic region to the North Atlantic. Anyone in Lisbon or other European capitals who deems Russia to be distant and their country safe from hybrid attacks demonstrates an embarrassingly naive attitude. In a multidimensional war, traditional geography is no longer a shield. To underestimate this reach is to directly imperil Portuguese critical infrastructure—most notably the Atlantic submarine cables, ports, airports, and energy networks. It is to forget that these connections, if sabotaged, will affect not only our country but a significant part of the West.

This vulnerability is currently exacerbated by the uncertainty surrounding the American commitment. The political distance between Europe and the US continues to widen. They are two perspectives seemingly in the process of divorce. The announced review of the US posture in Europe, involving troop reductions and greater conventional responsibility for allies, has its justifications and will ultimately strengthen European autonomy, but it requires a realistic timetable. The Kremlin is well aware of Western deterrence's reliance on the credibility of its guarantor, and it exploits any hesitation to intensify the pressure.

Russia takes advantage of our difficulty in operating within this intermediate zone between peace and war. It no longer limits itself to testing our degree of tolerance; the signals it sends us should be a cause for concern. It will most likely not act against our part of Europe in the same way it has in Ukraine since 2014, with the occupation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, and since 2022, with the full-scale invasion. Putin recognizes that an attack on a NATO member could trigger the collective response provisioned in Article 5 and that clandestine actions, including false-flag operations, complicate the unequivocal attribution of responsibility. His political leadership prefers clandestine actions, typical of secret services, agencies in which Putin places a higher degree of trust than in the armed forces. The time has thus come for democratic Europe to abandon its old naivety, grow up, and take its rightful place at the table of international relations: Diplomacy and Defence.

The 81st UN General Assembly: my views

 DN Opinion

UN: Restoring trust and driving transformation

Victor Ângelo

International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

Published on: 18 Sep 2026, 02:10

The 81st United Nations General Assembly officially opened on 8 September. Its high-level segment, which gathers heads of state and government in New York between 22 and 28 September, takes place under the theme Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: a UN that delivers results for all. For an organization in crisis, albeit irreplaceable, the decisive test lies not in the vigour of its theme, but in the ability to translate current geopolitics into concrete decisions. At a time when the selection of António Guterres's successor is underway, the speeches should focus on three priorities, each measured by facts, not intentions: promoting peace, establishing multilateral governance of Artificial Intelligence, and placing human development back at the centre of international security.

The first priority is peace. The figures belie the narrative of normalization. In Gaza, the October 2025 ceasefire agreement provided for the entry of 600 aid lorries per day. We are very far from that figure. A substantial part of the little that does enter is commercial cargo rather than humanitarian aid channelled by the agencies. It is this gap between what was agreed and what is executed, not the existence of the ceasefire itself, that defines daily civilian suffering.

In South Sudan, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented, over a 17-day period in March, more than 160 civilians killed and approximately 99 water wells destroyed or poisoned. In Sudan—a distinct conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—the number of civilians killed since 2023 exceeds 59,000, with 14 million displaced and 33.7 million people in need of urgent assistance.

In the Russian aggression against Ukraine, in the Eastern Congo, in the Sahel, and in Myanmar, the patterns repeat themselves: high civilian mortality, mass displacement, and the denial of humanitarian access as an instrument of war.

The UN will not stop these wars from New York. But it can emerge from the high-level segment with a measurable commitment: to allocate a fixed percentage of the budget for special political missions and peacekeeping to the protection of civilians and the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. A peace process that fails to protect women and children from sexual violence, forced displacement, and starvation is not peace; it is hypocrisy.

The second priority stems from a remarkable convergence: within a few days in September, five voices that rarely agree expressed the same concern regarding Artificial Intelligence. On 12 September, Dario Amodei of Anthropic published the essay We Must Pace the Frontier—roughly 3,800 words—advocating a deliberate slowing of the pace of development in AI capabilities; Sam Altman of OpenAI endorsed the core of the appeal hours later, and Elon Musk did the same.

Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders—opposite extremes of the American political spectrum—joined former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon in a Declaration for Pro-Human AI. King Charles III gathered executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic yesterday, 17 September, to ask them to adhere to common principles. And Pope Leo XIV, in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released on 25 May, criticized the logic of the ongoing military, economic, and cognitive competition.

China has already responded institutionally: in July, it created WAICO (World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization), an intergovernmental AI cooperation organization that, as I have argued elsewhere, targets the Global South, but simultaneously functions as a Chinese instrument for defining technical standards and technological decoupling from the United States.

It is precisely because WAICO already exists, with its own architecture and interests, that the General Assembly cannot limit itself to "taking note": it must work to bring together the scattered forums—WAICO included—into a common multilateral framework, converting voluntary principles into verifiable commitments, with an independent review mechanism similar to what the American laboratories have just proposed among themselves.

The third priority should have dominated the headlines when the figures were revealed, but it was ignored: the UNDP Human Development Report, published in 2025, recorded the smallest increase in the Human Development Index (HDI) since 1990. The gap between low-HDI and very high-HDI countries widened for the fourth consecutive year, reversing a decades-long trend. The contrast is revealing: between 1990 and 2023, the Asia-Pacific region increased its HDI by more than 50%; the majority of low-HDI countries saw no equivalent growth. According to the then-UNDP Administrator, if the stagnation of recent years becomes "the new normal", the world could fall decades short of the development projected for 2030.

This is not abstract statistics. It is one of the fuels for the other crises. Persistent poverty feeds migration routes; territories without a functional state or economic prospects are where armed groups recruit most easily, leading to the expansion of banditry and terrorism.

Treating development, migration, and security as separate agendas is the mistake that produced this regression. The General Assembly must recognize that financing development means financing international security.

These three priorities share the same logic: peace without the effective protection of people is a precarious truce; Artificial Intelligence without binding multilateral governance is a race with neither rules nor a referee; and development is not a parallel agenda, but the foundation of common security. Trust is not restored with speeches at the New York podium. It is recovered when States show that solidarity exists.

Responding to a critique of my BRICS Summit text

My text about the BRICS Summit, available in this blog, was written the day before the meeting in New Delhi.

A preview is not a verdict smuggled in before the evidence. It is a thesis offered for the meeting to test. New Delhi was the test. 

The meeting happened. The record is public. It does not do the work you want it to do.Start with what you treat as refutation. Iran and the UAE held their highest-level contact since the war began. That is true, and it is not trivial. It is also not BRICS acting as a strategic unit. It is two members, sitting on opposite sides of a shooting war, using the host’s rooms to talk.

The same two members had already blocked a foreign ministers’ text in May.

The leaders’ declaration exists because Indian diplomats spent days sanding the language until nobody had to name the United States, Israel, Iran, or the strikes on Gulf territory. “Maximum restraint” and “deep concern,” with national positions recalled in a subordinate clause, is not the cure for tactical paralysis. It is paralysis transcribed into 140 paragraphs. Consensus by omission is still consensus. It is not capacity.

The same holds for the other bilaterals. Modi and Xi discussed border stability. Modi and Putin set a $100 billion trade target for 2030. Those meetings matter. They would have mattered in a hotel corridor without a BRICS logo on the backdrop. 

Present trade is in the region of $65 billion, and the Indian side has been explicit that most of that is Russian oil. A target weighted toward energy shipments is a bilateral energy relationship, not a new payments order. 

When the institution’s value is the corridor, the plenary is the spectacle.

You then enlarge the declaration into a programme. It covers tariffs, coercive measures, the Middle East, terrorism, AI, quantum, digital public infrastructure, a grain exchange, local-currency settlement, NDB lending in local currency, a startup fund under consideration. Listing topics is not the same as moving them. The approved text does not name Ukraine. It does not name the United States on tariffs. It condemns unilateral coercive measures in the abstract and then goes home. 

Whether any of the technical work proceeds is, as you say, a fair question. Calling a document that cannot mention the two largest wars involving its members a strategic coming of age is not.

On payments you accuse me of scoring a test nobody sat. Fine: nobody in New Delhi tabled the yuan as a global reserve currency. India and Brazil would not wear it, for the capital-control reason everyone in the room understands. The live project is interoperability — UPI, Pix, the digital renminbi — plus settlement in national currencies. That work is real, slow, and worth doing. It is also not what the political advertising of this grouping has been for years. The public claim has been an alternative to dollar dominance.

Measuring the summit against the claim its members make when they speak to their own audiences is not a trick. It is taking them at their word.The AIIB point is narrower, and here you land a hit. The bank has a shareholder list that includes Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia. London joined as a founder against Washington’s advice. That institution is not a BRICS vehicle, and folding it into the New Delhi story as if it were was a category error. I should not have done it. The error does not rescue the rest of the architecture argument. It simply means the AIIB should be debated as a China-led multilateral with Western capital in it, which is a different and more interesting fight than the one you want.

The NDB is the opposite of a gotcha. The bank halted new business in Russia because American secondary sanctions made the alternative too expensive to operate. You present this as proof that the institution is not Beijing’s political instrument. I presented it as proof that the instrument cannot do the job advertised for it: shelter a founding member from the system it was created to dilute. Both sentences can be true. Only one of them answers the question my column asked. If the “parallel” bank does what Washington requires when the choice is real, the parallelism is conditional. Fragility is the right word for that. Loyalty to Beijing is a separate accusation, and not the one that matters here.

Then the frame. Yes, the criticism of Bretton Woods is legitimate. Quota review has been stuck for a decade. The Fund’s leadership conventions are a Wester relic. An American blocking minority over major IMF decisions is a political fact. None of that converts every communiqué in New Delhi into a working substitute. You set up a closed circuit: reform is vetoed, therefore the alternative must be treated as architecture, and if the alternative is called thin, the critic has left the victims of the veto with “patience.” That is not an argument. It is a demand that disappointment with the IMF be honoured by inflating BRICS. 

States in that position have ordinary options: coalition-building inside the Fund, bilateral swap lines, payment links, commodity trade in local currency. They are already doing some of them. They do not become a new order by being stapled to a 45-page text that cannot say “Ukraine.”

As for the adjectives: they are judgments. The declaration’s silence on a war fought by a founding member is not “abyssal” because a columnist likes the word. It is the measurable gap between the group’s census — eleven members, a large share of population and output — and its ability to describe the world it inhabits. If that register reminds you of agitprop, the remedy is a counter-list: a named loan book that replaced sanctioned finance at scale, a settlement system that cleared Russian or Iranian trade without dollar reach, a Middle East paragraph that could survive contact with the members who were shooting at each other.

You have the talks, the target, and the text. Produce the rest.

Xi skipping the General Assembly is a minor exhibit and I will not lean on it. Leaders skip that General Assembly week. But Xi is a keyn speaker for multilateralism. He should be in New York to show its attachment to the top multilateral organisation. 

You might think that atttendance is a weak test of multilateral sincerity. The stronger test is whether a grouping built to contest the existing order can, when it meets, name the conflicts that divide it and fund the alternatives it announces. 

New Delhi named almost nothing and funded nothing new. That is not a prediction written in the future tense. It is in the minutes.

The human and the machine -- A.I.

 https://victorangelo1.substack.com/p/hyper-war-and-the-illusion-of-human?selectQuote=true

The BRICS New Delhi Summit

 A Dysfunctional Coalition in the Shadow of Beijing: The BRICS+

Victor Ângelo

International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

Published: 11 Sept 2026, 02:34

The BRICS+ Summit, taking place in New Delhi on the 12th and 13th of September, will essentially be yet another spectacle of geopolitical illusions. The grouping, which began as a platform of financial convenience initiated by Vladimir Putin (with its inaugural summit in 2009), has been successively instrumentalised. Initially, it served Russia as a means to project power and circumvent its isolation; today, it is additionally the principal vehicle for China's hegemonic ambition in the so-called Global South.

Moscow originally viewed the BRICS as a further instrument to force the narrative of a multipolar world in which Russia would maintain the status of an indispensable superpower. Particularly following the escalation of tensions in Eastern Europe, the bloc was envisaged as a diplomatic shield and a financial alternative capable of neutralising Western sanctions. However, harsh economic reality and prolonged isolation have dictated new rules: the Russia of today, increasingly reliant on the export of hydrocarbons at discounted prices to Asia and the importation of critical technology, has been reduced to the status of a subaltern partner to Beijing's colossal economic machine.

It is China that now wields the baton and sets the strategic compass of the grouping. Xi Jinping has grasped that, to challenge the Euro-Atlantic order consolidated since 1945, Chinese economic and military might was insufficient; it was imperative to constitute and lead a coalition that would serve as a counterbalance to the Western bloc.

The 2024 expansion, with the entry of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, along with the integration of Indonesia in 2025, aimed to serve this ambition. Nevertheless, formidable obstacles remain. From the outset, the desire to promote the yuan as a reserve currency, replacing the US dollar, is hindered by a structural contradiction: Beijing refuses to relinquish its stringent capital controls. So long as these controls remain in place, the yuan will struggle to become a credible global reserve currency.

The bloc's discourse regarding the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, however, rests upon criticisms that ought not to be dismissed. For decades, the IMF and the World Bank have been legitimate targets of contestation: the quota review, ratified only in 2016, left China and India under-represented relative to their share of global GDP. The United States preserves a de facto veto over structural decisions, and Europe maintains a monopoly over the leadership of the IMF, reflecting an overarching governance still tethered to the geopolitics of 1944.

Although this Western inertia presents the BRICS+ with a genuine and unifying rallying cry, there is an abyssal difference between reforming multilateral institutions and constructing parallel architectures. China has unequivocally opted for the latter course. The New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) did not merely emerge to rectify systemic deficiencies for the sake of global equity. They were also conceived to allow Beijing to finance strategic projects, more or less aligned with the Belt and Road Initiative. These are political projects, not merely developmental ones. By failing to incorporate robust requirements for transparency, debt sustainability, and good governance, they frequently serve to establish a supremacy built upon fragile foundations.

The enlargement of the BRICS has exponentially increased its demographic weight, yet it has fatally diluted its cohesion. By housing democracies and autocracies under the same roof, alongside economies highly integrated into global markets and regimes asphyxiated by sanctions, the group has become chronically dysfunctional.

An organisation that attempts to harmonise the interests of Iran and the United Arab Emirates, or that harbours the border, technological, and military rivalry between India and China, is condemned to tactical paralysis. The NDB itself illustrates this fragility: with subscribed capital insufficient for the colossal needs of the Global South, the bank found itself compelled to suspend its operations in Russia, faced with the threat of American secondary sanctions.

In this landscape of precarious balances, Narendra Modi, the summit's host, will focus on immediate pragmatism, ensuring that India is not dragged into an anti-Western crusade. Modi will restrict the agenda to the realm of the possible: fostering intra-bloc trade (which continues to be eclipsed by these countries' exchanges with the G7); developing interoperable cross-border payment systems outside the SWIFT network; cooperating in the digital and Artificial Intelligence sectors; and promoting bilateral trade in local currencies (yuan, rupees, reais, roubles), albeit always with the underlying concern of averting the replacement of a dependence on the dollar with a new submission to the yuan.

India and Brazil draw the principal dividing line within the bloc here: both advocate for a reform of multilateral systems, but neither supports the radicalisation of the BRICS+. For India, the grouping is merely one of several options for its strategic autonomy. Modi plays simultaneously with Washington, Canberra, and Tokyo within the framework of the QUAD, well aware that the true threat to Indian sovereignty and territorial integrity emanates from across the Himalayan borders and from the naval hegemony of its neighbouring Asian superpower, rather than from Washington.

The final image that the New Delhi Summit will endeavour to project will be one of unity and cooperation. However, the true metric of global geopolitical priorities will reveal itself the following week, during the high-level segment of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Xi Jinping, who at the BRICS will mount his customary ideological defence of inclusive multilateralism, does not plan to travel to the United Nations headquarters to participate in the General Assembly. Instead, on the 24th, a stone's throw from New York, he has scheduled a bilateral meeting at the White House with Donald Trump. The choice exposes the chasm between Chinese rhetoric and its practical interests: political narratives may marshal followers, but the grand decisions concerning the world order continue to be negotiated, above all else, in the bilateral arena of the superpowers.