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.
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