Flashpoints | Diplomacy | South Asia

BRICS 2026: A Forum, Not a Front

Xi and Putin in Delhi made the headlines. The declaration tells the real story of India’s multi-alignment and why Europe should welcome it.

Much of the global attention on the BRICS Summit 2026 focused on the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi. Given the photographs of the pair with the summit’s host, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, observers might find it tempting to cast the gathering as the meeting of an anti-Western bloc. That view may make for catchy headlines, but it risks missing how India sees the grouping and what value it brings even to its Western partners.

For New Delhi, BRICS is not a camp or a bloc, but a forum – one of several – that it uses to secure a seat at one of the tables defining the unfolding multipolar order. The evidence is in the declaration the leaders adopted and, above all, in what it leaves out.

The summit convened in a three-theater world full of uncertainties, where great power contest is playing out simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. In the current interregnum – between the old and the new order – countries are navigating multiple developments and their consequences at once. The war in Ukraine is in its fifth year. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed to normal ship traffic for more than six months, ever since American and Israeli strikes on Iran in February. As a consequence, the Brent crude price, which touched $126 in March, is back above $100. The two superpowers – China and the United States – are actively working to secure their edge in energy, semiconductors, computing power, and critical minerals, which will underpin artificial intelligence and the next industrial era. Supply chains, which have been global in the past, are now being rerouted to adjust for political exposure; export controls and tariffs are being put in place and weaponized; payment systems are splitting. Additionally, defense budgets are growing. 

In such a world, India, a country of 1.4 billion people, cannot simply pick a camp to align with. Instead, it works with different power centers without allowing one relationship or grouping to determine all of its strategic and economic choices. That is what Indian officials mean by multi-alignment.

And what a year of multi-alignment it has been. India concluded a free trade agreement with the European Union and signed a security and defense partnership in the same week. Shortly afterwards, Delhi hosted the AI Impact Summit and struck a tariff truce with U.S. President Donald Trump without allowing it to dent the larger strategic relationship with the United States. India’s navy has escorted tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. It has a signed trade deal with the United Kingdom, officially entered into a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Oman, and signed a landmark free trade agreement with New Zealand, among other things. Now, India also is holding the BRICS chair. Each seems to be an active hedge against a different type of failure.

None of these actions, however, is a sign of alignment. India is not looking to choose between the West and the rest. It is trying to create strategic space for itself. India may not have been looking to use the BRICS Summit to bring all members closer together, but rather to identify issues on which there is enough common ground to keep all members together and build consensus.

When reading the BRICS New Delhi Declaration, many things are mentioned, but some important issues are not named. The declaration does not mention the Strait of Hormuz. It doesn’t specifically mention Iran – except in echoing its bid for accession to the WTO – or the United States. It does not name Ukraine or the U.S. dollar. Even the largest disruption to the world’s energy supply appears only to be framed as the “continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia,” which should be met with “maximum restraint.” The grouping continues with a hope for the “smooth flow of global trade, supply chains and energy.” The tell is the phrase “recalling our respective national positions.” This is diplomatic language for saying that members could not agree and instead wrote around their differences.

India, as chair, seems to have been working around members’ quarrels and different perspectives. Countries such as Iran or Russia would presumably have pushed for stronger wording and a condemnation of U.S. action in Iran. Saudi Arabia and the UAE might have had a different opinion, having spent the summer intercepting Iranian drones. The host country, meanwhile, is engaged in ongoing negotiations with Washington and would have wanted a nuanced, neutral paragraph. The tariffs were mentioned only in one paragraph and former headline-making topics such as a BRICS........

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