The summit of the BRICS group of emerging economies is designed to show what world leadership looks like when the West is not in the room.
And as widening clashes in the Middle East send global energy prices soaring, the gathering in New Delhi this weekend gives the leaders of China, India and Russia something Washington does not have: a seat at the table with Iran.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is hosting the BRICS club — named after its earliest members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — that has been conceived as a counterweight to the West.
The Indian capital has largely been shut down for the meeting. Soldiers in khaki uniforms carrying rifles patrolled the streets, and steel road blocks cluttered the city center. Highways leading from the airport were also blanketed with BRICS signs depicting Mr. Modi alongside slogans such as: “Together we build, together we rise.”
That slogan points to the hope that the BRICS group has of projecting solidarity among its membership, which has expanded in recent years to include countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia. The message of unity stands in contrast to the global friction emanating from the Trump administration’s tariffs and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which has disrupted global energy corridors.
In reality, expectations are low that BRICS, a loose bloc, will be able to step up to fill that gap in leadership, let alone broker a diplomatic off-ramp to the crisis in the Middle East.
The group has been split by tensions between Iran and the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. security partner that has been targeted by thousands of Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones since the war started in February. Divisions prevented the group from producing a joint statement in May after a meeting of BRICS foreign ministers. (The U.A.E. sent Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, who arrived on Friday.)
“The world is really rapidly fracturing, and in theory that’s really kind of what the BRICS have been saying all along,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “But they’re really wildly underperforming.”
“It’s very difficult to have such a big and expanded club of countries that are united by their animosity to Western hegemony but have very different interests, sometimes opposing each other, sometimes at war with each other,” he added.
A Stage for Iran
Both President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran, whose countries are mired in wars and under fierce pressure from the West in the form of sanctions, moved quickly on Friday to press their agendas even before the summit started.
Mr. Pezeshkian criticized U.S. power and urged fellow members to build alternative financial tools to protect themselves from Western pressure. “Who said it should decide for the entire world, that others have no rights, and that whatever they want everyone else has to obey?” he said in a speech. “This is something we will not accept.”
Mr. Modi, however, used a meeting with Mr. Pezeshkian on Friday to deliver a pointed message, urging him to safeguard “freedom of navigation and commerce” — a tacit reference to the chokeholds on the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea that threaten India’s own fuel imports.
That messaging is the kind of global leadership that Mr. Modi wants to be seen exercising. He does not share the same opposition to the West as Mr. Putin and Mr. Pezeshkian, embodying instead India’s historical preference for nonalignment and strategic friendships with powers from across the ideological spectrum. India’s chief rival for influence in the group is China, which has sought to use BRICS to displace U.S. power.
The summit is an opportunity for Mr. Modi to burnish his statesman credentials at a time when his political power at home has weakened and the Indian economy continues to take a back seat to China’s.
Will the Chinese and Iranian Leaders Meet?
The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to arrive on Saturday, but officials have not said if he would meet with Mr. Pezeshkian.
Iran is Beijing’s closest strategic partner in the Middle East, but China also has economic ties with Persian Gulf states that have been targeted by Iranian strikes.
At a recent regional security summit in Kyrgyzstan, Mr. Xi and Mr. Pezeshkian met only briefly on the sidelines rather than in a separate bilateral meeting.
That fueled speculation that Beijing was unhappy over the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Xi could have also been distancing himself from Tehran to avoid provoking President Trump, whom he is scheduled to meet in Washington later this month.
“A substantive bilateral meeting in New Delhi would therefore carry significance well beyond protocol,” said Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
“It could help clarify whether China still sees Iran as a strategic partner worth investing political capital in at a moment of acute pressure, or whether Beijing is increasingly keeping Tehran at arm’s length,” Mr. Azizi said.
Perhaps more important to China is Mr. Xi’s meeting with Mr. Modi later in the day.
Mr. Xi’s visit will be the first he has made to India in seven years, and is a sign of the continued stabilization of relations between Beijing and New Delhi. Ties hit a low in 2020 following a clash of Indian and Chinese forces in a disputed border region.
For South Africa, It’s Complicated.
Other leaders arriving in New Delhi brought their own awkward entanglements with the group’s Western-skeptic tilt.
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa shares Mr. Modi’s preference for using BRICS to build relationships across the globe. But the coalition has also created diplomatic headaches for Pretoria.
In January, South Africa was criticized by the Trump administration for allowing Iran to participate in BRICS naval drills off the South African coast at a time when the Iranian government faced accusations of fatally crushing street protests in Iran.
Mr. Ramaphosa said that China was running the exercises and that South African waters were chosen because of the convenient location.
South African officials have been disappointed that the bloc has not been able to reach consensus opinions on divisive conflicts like the wars in Iran and Gaza, said David Africa, an international relations analyst based in Cape Town.
“South Africa has knocked its head and realizes it won’t extract much diplomatically on the issues it’s concerned about,” Mr. Africa said. Instead, he said, South Africa is likely to focus on economic issues like trade, business and development at the summit.
Reporting was contributed by Valerie Hopkins in Moscow, Rania Khaled in Cairo, John Eligon in Johannesburg and Yeganeh Torbati in Istanbul.
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