NextFin News - Leaders of the BRICS bloc gather in New Delhi this weekend for their 18th annual summit, and the defining question is not how much they can agree on but whether their disagreements matter. India hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the presidents of Iran and other expanded members on September 12-13 at a moment when the grouping's ambition to reshape the global order runs up against its own internal fractures. The summit is a defining moment for a club that now spans roughly half the world's population and more than 41% of global GDP measured at purchasing-power parity, yet whose members disagree on trade, governance and what a reformed world order should actually look like.
The Summit That Tests BRICS' Own Premise
India's 2026 chairship arrives with a theme that is conspicuously about process rather than confrontation: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." New Delhi has held more than 350 meetings under its chairmanship, including 25 at the ministerial level, according to Indian officials. The diplomatic machinery is real. The question is whether it produces cohesion or merely documents divergence.
The backdrop is a bloc that has grown faster than it has integrated. Four new full members - Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates - joined in January 2024, and Indonesia became the tenth full member in January 2025. Ten partner countries, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Nigeria, Kazakhstan and Cuba, were added alongside. Riyadh has not formally joined despite its invitation; Argentina declined. The expansion widened the bloc's geopolitical footprint without settling its internal hierarchy.
That hierarchy is the heart of the tension. China is the group's economic center of gravity, with the world's largest economy by purchasing-power parity. India is the fastest-growing large economy and the self-appointed voice of the Global South. Russia is a sanctioned energy superpower seeking escape routes from the dollar. Iran and the Gulf Arabs sit on opposite sides of regional rivalries yet both sit inside the same tent. Brazil and South Africa anchor the group in Latin America and Africa but carry less structural weight than the Asian giants.
The central contradiction is this: BRICS was built on the premise that the West-dominated order is illegitimate. But delegitimizing something is not the same as replacing it. When the agenda turns from complaint to construction - what currency clears trade, what bank funds development, what rules govern security - the bloc's members discover they want different things.
That is the tension this piece pursues. Can a bloc this divergent actually shake the world order? Or is divergence itself the point - a loose coalition that complicates Western dominance without ever offering an alternative?
Expansion Without Integration: The Size That Isn't Power
The most common measure of BRICS' rise is arithmetic. Add up the populations and the GDP, and the bloc looks like the future. Roughly half of humanity lives in BRICS countries; more than 41% of global output at purchasing-power parity is produced inside it. By that logic, the world order already belongs to BRICS, and the summit is merely a coronation.
But aggregation is not agency. A coalition's power is not the sum of its members' GDP; it is the product of their ability to act together. And on the issues where coordination would actually change outcomes - trade rules, currency settlement, security guarantees, development finance - the members' interests diverge sharply.
India's idea of a world order is where the voice of the global south is better heard and we become an important part of global governance. Now if you take two sides to this reform of UN security council China is not on the side of the global south. It has its own view. So it is not with us on international trade. The Americans are not with us. So we have to find our own path... And that is one problem in BRICS because all countries are not democratic. All countries are not equally global south. All countries do not believe in free trade. So these divergences are there. We have to find our way through them.
The India-China relationship is the clearest expression of this. Bilateral trade between the two runs close to $159 billion, yet India's trade deficit with China exceeds $100 billion - a lopsided dependence that New Delhi views as a strategic vulnerability, not a partnership dividend. Border tensions remain unresolved. Beijing sees BRICS as one platform among many for advancing its own great-power interests; New Delhi sees it as a vehicle for Global South representation that must not become a Chinese instrument.
The mechanism here is straightforward: the more BRICS expands, the more veto players it creates, and the lower the ceiling on collective action. A ten-member club with ten partner countries can issue declarations. It cannot easily coordinate policy. That is not an accident - it is the predictable result of prioritizing breadth over depth.
BRICS is large enough to be noticed and too divided to be directed.
De-Dollarization: Real Momentum, Uneven Reality
If there is one channel through which BRICS could genuinely alter the world order, it is the international role of the dollar. And here the momentum is real - but it is also asymmetrical, and that asymmetry is the story.
Russia reports that roughly 90% of its trade with BRICS partners is now settled in local currencies. The figure is striking, but it is also a product of necessity rather than design: after Western sanctions froze Russian dollar and euro reserves, Moscow had no choice but to reroute trade through the yuan, the rupee and other currencies. Russia's central bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina, said in February 2026 that Moscow has no interest in returning to dollar payments for exports. For Russia, de-dollarization is not a preference - it is a survival strategy.
That is the divergence. For China, local-currency settlement is a tool for reducing exposure to U.S. financial sanctions and expanding the yuan's reach. For India, it is a way to manage the Russia relationship and trim the dollar bill on energy imports - but New Delhi has no interest in replacing dollar hegemony with yuan hegemony. For the Gulf members, it is a hedging tactic, not an exit strategy: the petrodollar remains the anchor of their wealth, and they will not trade it for a basket of illiquid currencies.
The oil dimension sharpens the point. BRICS already accounts for about a fifth of global oil production; the addition of the Gulf producers adds another 20 percentage points by some estimates. OPEC+ - led by Russia and Saudi Arabia - announced a production increase of 547,000 barrels a day from September 2025, the largest single hike in recent history, signaling a shift from price defense to market-share competition. Energy is the one commodity where BRICS could credibly coordinate. Yet even here, the producers' interests collide: Russia wants volume to fund a war economy, Saudi Arabia wants price stability to fund its transformation, and China and India want cheap barrels.
The second-order implication is what most commentary misses. De-dollarization within BRICS does not weaken the dollar globally unless the currencies used as substitutes are themselves deep, liquid and trusted. The yuan is not freely convertible. The rupee is not a reserve currency. Local-currency trade among BRICS members shifts settlement plumbing; it does not displace the dollar's role as the world's store of value, unit of account and funding currency. The mechanism runs through trust, not volume - and trust is precisely what the bloc's political divergences undermine.
BRICS can move trade off the dollar; it cannot yet move trust off the dollar.
India's Chairmanship: The Tightrope of Strategic Autonomy
India's presidency is the summit's most consequential variable. New Delhi is attempting something genuinely difficult: to host a summit that includes both Russia and China, both Iran and the Gulf Arabs, while maintaining working relationships with the United States and Europe. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar framed the chairship at the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi in May 2026 around resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability, economic security, counter-terrorism and reform of global institutions.
That agenda is revealing. It is not an anti-Western platform. It is a reformist one - and that is the point. India's conception of BRICS is not to overthrow the world order but to win a larger seat inside it. UN Security Council reform, a stronger voice for the Global South, reliable supply chains: these are demands for inclusion, not secession.
The tightrope shows in the details. India wants Russian energy and defense cooperation, but it also wants U.S. technology and investment. It wants to check China's dominance in the Global South, but it cannot afford to isolate Beijing at a summit it is hosting. It wants BRICS to matter, but not so much that it becomes a Chinese vehicle. The summit's final declaration will be read for how New Delhi balanced these pressures - and the most likely outcome is language broad enough that every member can claim a win and nothing concrete changes.
The mechanism is institutional: a host country's success is measured by the absence of public rupture, not the presence of agreement. A summit where no one walks out is counted as a triumph. That bar is so low that it reveals the bloc's true ceiling.
The Counter-Thesis: Divergence Is the Strategy
The strongest case against this reading is that it mistakes the nature of BRICS. The bloc was never designed to be a coherent alliance on the NATO or G7 model. It is a coordination forum for states that share one thing: dissatisfaction with Western-dominated institutions. On that single issue, divergence is not a bug - it is the binding agent. Every member can oppose U.S. sanctions, resist Western conditionality and demand institutional reform without agreeing on what comes next.
By this logic, BRICS does not need to replace the dollar, the IMF or the World Bank. It only needs to make them less monopolistic. A world in which sanctioned states can trade in local currencies, in which developing countries have an alternative development bank, in which the West cannot assume automatic majorities - that world is already being built, incrementally, by a bloc that agrees on direction even when it disagrees on destination.
This argument has force. The New Development Bank, founded in 2015 to finance infrastructure and sustainable development in emerging markets, exists and lends. Local-currency settlement is expanding, led by Russia's near-total shift. The expansion itself signals that non-Western states see value in the forum. The G7's share of global GDP has been shrinking for two decades; the arithmetic of power is moving regardless of BRICS' internal quarrels.
But the counter-thesis has a limit. Complicating Western dominance is not the same as shaking the world order. A coalition that can only agree on what it opposes can slow the existing system but cannot build a replacement. The dollar endures not because states love it but because there is no alternative with comparable depth, rule of law and openness. BRICS offers grievance; it does not yet offer a credible alternative currency, a credible security architecture, or a credible rulebook.
The falsifying signal: if BRICS members begin to coordinate on something concrete that requires them to sacrifice national interest - a common settlement currency with shared liquidity backstops, a joint position on a live security crisis, or binding trade concessions that reduce the India-China deficit - then the divergence thesis is wrong. Until then, the burden of proof stays with the cohesion camp.
What to Watch, and What It Would Mean
The New Delhi summit will be judged by the wrong metric if observers count joint statements instead of measuring fault lines. The useful questions are narrower and harder: does the final declaration paper over the India-China deficit, or acknowledge it? Does de-dollarization language name a mechanism, or remain aspirational? Does India's chairmanship produce follow-through, or 350 meetings that end with a photo?
Split by time horizon, the picture is mixed. In the short term - the summit weekend itself - expect a declaration heavy on process and light on commitment. The host's incentive is to avoid rupture; the members' incentive is to claim credit without conceding anything. That is a stable equilibrium, and it produces communiqués, not change.
Over the medium term, the de-dollarization track is where real movement could accumulate. If Russia's 90% local-currency figure spreads - if China and India settle more energy trade in yuan and rupee, if the Gulf accepts more non-dollar payment - the dollar's transaction share inside the bloc will keep falling. But transaction share is not reserve share, and the dollar's reserve role is what gives it structural power. Watch the currency composition of BRICS central-bank reserves, not the currency composition of their trade invoices.
Over the long term, the structural question is whether BRICS becomes an institution or remains an event. Twenty years after the first BRIC investment-bank acronym, the group has summits, a bank and a membership list. It does not yet have a shared strategic doctrine. Without one, it will remain what it is now: a forum where the world's dissatisfied powers meet, disagree productively, and leave without a plan.
Three scenarios frame the path ahead. The base case is continued divergence with incremental de-dollarization - the bloc grows louder without growing stronger. The upside case for BRICS is a coordinated shock: a new sanctions round that pushes China, India and the Gulf into a shared payments mechanism with real liquidity. The downside case is fragmentation: India and China's rivalry hardens, the Gulf members drift toward U.S. security guarantees, and the expansion proves to have been a liability rather than an asset.
The central judgment: BRICS can complicate the world order, and in that narrow sense it already has. But shaking an order requires offering an alternative, and a bloc that cannot agree on trade, governance or its own hierarchy cannot offer one. The summit in New Delhi will confirm the divergence - and the divergence, not the unity, will be the story.
BRICS is not building a new world order; it is building a veto - and a veto can block a room, but it cannot run the meeting.
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