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.