What Did the New Delhi BRICS Summit Actually Achieve Amid a Region on Fire?

The 18th BRICS Summit closed in New Delhi on September 13 with a joint declaration that, on paper, papered over the very conflicts threatening to tear the grouping apart. Eleven member states sat at Bharat Mandapam while Iran remained at war with the United States and Israel, while Yemen's Houthis kept firing missiles into Saudi Arabia, a fellow BRICS member, and while Washington dangled a fresh 100 percent tariff threat over the bloc's head. That India managed to extract a unanimous declaration from this room at all deserves to be read as the summit's real achievement, even if the substance inside that declaration reads more like careful diplomatic choreography than a bold new direction for the Global South.

Consider the room itself. BRICS today comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the UAE, a bloc representing nearly half the world's population and 40 percent of global GDP. Inside that room sat Iran, still absorbing the fallout of a US-Israeli bombing campaign launched in February, and the UAE, which has quietly maintained working ties with Washington throughout the conflict. 

Getting these two to sign the same paragraph on West Asia required what analysts describe as India working behind the scenes for weeks, ultimately landing on carefully generic language that called for restraint in the Middle East without naming a single aggressor.

How Did the Summit Handle the Iran War and the Houthi Crisis?

The New Delhi Declaration expressed grave concern over escalating regional tensions and called for dialogue over confrontation, but it stopped well short of condemning the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, a silence that spoke volumes about the divisions inside the room. The same caution extended to Saudi Arabia's predicament. Just days before the summit, Houthi missiles and drones struck oil facilities and civilian infrastructure across Abha, Jazan, and Najran, wounding more than 70 people and reviving fears that the Bab al-Mandeb strait could join the Strait of Hormuz as a second maritime corridor effectively closed to global shipping. 

With Riyadh and Tehran both inside BRICS, and with Iran widely accused of backing the Houthis, the bloc had every reason to stay quiet rather than force a confrontation between two of its own members. It did exactly that, retreating into language about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity that named no names.

Why Did Trump's 100 Percent Tariff Threat Follow so Quickly?

If the summit avoided confrontation over West Asia, it walked straight into one over money. Leaders used the gathering to formally launch BRICS Pay, a payment messaging system stitching together India's UPI, China's CIPS, and Russia's SPFS into a single interoperability layer designed to let member states settle cross-border trade without routing through the dollar-denominated SWIFT network. 

Within hours, President Donald Trump posted a warning that any BRICS nation moving to replace the dollar would face 100 percent tariffs on its exports to the United States, a repeat of threats he has issued periodically since 2024. Notably, the declaration itself made no mention of a common BRICS currency and did not use the word de-dollarization even once, a deliberate omission that let India argue the summit had done nothing to provoke Washington while still giving Russia and Iran, both under heavy Western sanctions, a functioning alternative to dollar settlement.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has repeatedly stressed that India has never pursued de-dollarization and has no interest in weakening a currency used by its largest trading partner. That balancing act captures New Delhi's entire approach to this summit: build just enough financial infrastructure to protect sanctioned members like Russia and Iran, while staying just far enough from the word currency to avoid triggering Trump's tariff trigger. Whether that line holds is now genuinely uncertain, since separate US legislation, the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, already cleared the Senate 86-11 and could hand Trump explicit authority to impose steep tariffs on any country still buying Russian oil, India included.

Why Did Bangladesh Stay Away, and What Does It Reveal?

Perhaps the most telling absence from New Delhi was Bangladesh. Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, whose Bangladesh Nationalist Party took office in February following the 2024 ouster of Sheikh Hasina, did not attend, and Dhaka sent no representative at all. India had invited Rahman only in his capacity as the current chair of BIMSTEC, the regional grouping linking India, Bangladesh, and neighbouring states, rather than as head of government. Bangladesh's foreign ministry publicly objected, noting that Sheikh Hasina herself had previously attended BRICS events as head of government despite Bangladesh never being a member. The snub, deliberate or not, exposed how far Dhaka-Delhi relations have deteriorated since 2024, with disputes over Hasina's continued asylum in India, stalled water-sharing talks ahead of the Ganges treaty's December expiry, and Rahman's own Bangladesh First posture all compounding the freeze. Tellingly, Rahman has already visited Beijing and Kuala Lumpur since taking office but has yet to set foot in India.

Even China's own commitment to the summit looked shakier than usual. President Xi Jinping made his first visit to India in seven years to attend, yet skipped Prime Minister Narendra Modi's gala dinner at the last minute, reportedly due to feeling unwell, a decision that briefly triggered speculation about the 73-year-old leader's health given his continued avoidance of public appearances afterward.

What Does BRICS Actually Stand for Today?

Strip away the ceremony, and BRICS in 2026 stands for something narrower and more pragmatic than the anti-Western bloc its critics imagine or the unified Global South alternative its champions once promised. It is a coalition of convenience holding together members with directly conflicting interests. India and China compete fiercely even as their trade hits a record 151 billion dollars, Saudi Arabia and Iran sit on opposite sides of an active war, and Russia needs the group's payment infrastructure far more urgently than India does. 

What New Delhi proved over two days at Bharat Mandapam is that BRICS can still produce a signed declaration even when its members are shooting at each other's proxies, so long as that declaration is written vaguely enough to mean nothing to anyone. For a grouping built on the promise of reshaping global governance, avoiding collapse now counts as a genuine diplomatic win, even if it leaves the question of what BRICS is actually for more unresolved than ever.