BRICS Fractures in New Delhi: Unity Is the Only Thing Members Share
Iran sits at the table while the United States wages a war against it.
World leaders from China, Russia, India, Iran and more than a dozen emerging economies have convened in New Delhi for the BRICS summit, according to the New York Times — gathering under a banner of collective ambition at a moment when the bloc's internal contradictions have never been more visible.
The timing is pointed. Iran sits at the table while the United States wages a war against it. Russia and India remain divided on energy pricing. China and India share a border that has killed soldiers within living memory. BRICS now represents roughly 40 percent of global GDP on a purchasing-power basis, and yet the countries inside it cannot agree on whether the war in Ukraine is a crime or a necessity.
What draws them together is not ideology. It is the slow, shared exhaustion of being on the wrong end of a dollar-denominated financial system — the IMF conditions, the SWIFT exclusions, the sanctions architectures built in Washington and felt in Nairobi and Mumbai. The summit's working agenda includes proposals for a BRICS payment settlement mechanism that would bypass Western financial infrastructure entirely.
Whether that mechanism ever functions is a separate question. What matters is that twenty-four nations now find the conversation worth having. When the room contains both Russia and India, both China and Brazil, the word "bloc" becomes a polite fiction. What BRICS actually is — and what New Delhi this weekend reveals — is a waiting room for a world order that does not yet exist.
The dollar is still the door.
