BRICS wants to build a multipolar world less dependent on Western power. Yet its own members remain deeply dependent on competing centres of technology, finance, energy, markets and security. The New Delhi summit exposed the uncomfortable gap between the rhetoric of autonomy and the realities of interdependence

Nearly 50 pages of the Delhi Declaration were adopted at the New Delhi BRICS summit last week, while the Houthi advance in the Red Sea and its seizure of major positions around a critical maritime chokepoint were pulling the world’s supply chains towards another dangerous rupture. The Trump administration’s military intervention in Iran, carried out with Israeli support, has demonstrated how rapidly the language of sovereignty can collide with military power, while the Houthi advance towards Bab el-Mandeb has given Tehran-aligned forces greater leverage over one of the world’s most consequential maritime passages. Globalisation has created prosperity by concentrating dependence along a handful of geographical, technological and financial arteries. Once those arteries become instruments of power, economics and geopolitics become inseparable.

The more important question is what kind of multipolarity BRICS is actually trying to construct. The declaration calls for reform of global institutions, condemns unilateral sanctions, demands greater representation for developing countries and promotes resilient supply chains and technological cooperation. But the central weakness of BRICS remains obvious. It is much easier to agree that the existing system is unfair than to agree on what should replace it. Its members can unite against sanctions, Western dominance and technological exclusion, but become considerably less comfortable when the question turns to whose technology, capital, markets and security interests will define the alternative. BRICS invokes strategic autonomy as though........

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