NEW DELHI — The photograph was designed to project unity. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, hands clasped, with a vast water feature behind them. Together, they planted trees beneath banners declaring: “Together we build, together we rise.”
But the image also revealed a quieter tension.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stood near one end of the lineup. At the other was Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, representing the United Arab Emirates. The physical distance between the two men was striking — and, in a gathering built around diplomatic choreography, difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence.
The BRICS summit in New Delhi this weekend brought together leaders from some of the world’s most consequential and most pressured nations – countries united by a determination to reshape a global order they regard as rigged in Washington’s favor. Yet the breadth of that ambition exposed the coalition’s most persistent weakness: a membership too large, too diverse, and too internally divided to forge a unified front on the crises that matter most.
The group’s joint statement, released Saturday, called for “maximum restraint” in the Middle East while carefully avoiding any attribution of blame. It was a formulation that satisfied no one entirely but kept all parties at the table.
“They were able to get everyone to agree to a watered down statement,” said Sarang Shidore, director of the global south program at the Quincy Institute in Washington. “It is more of a relief for BRICS than it is a great victory.”
The retreat from previous BRICS language was deliberate. A 2025 BRICS statement had explicitly condemned a 12-day war against Iran. This year’s communiqué acknowledged only the “respective national positions” of each member – language that analyst Manoj Kewalramani of the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru described as preserving “room for disagreement” in place of a “unified BRICS view on the issue.”
Iran’s president arrived with an agenda that extended well beyond the summit’s formal sessions. In a speech on Friday, before opening ceremonies began, Pezeshkian delivered a pointed critique of unilateral Western power, pressing fellow members to build alternative financial infrastructure to protect themselves from the economic coercion that Washington has deployed against both Moscow and Tehran. “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 told the gathering. “This is something we will not accept.”
The speech crystallised the bloc’s sharpest internal tension. Iran and Russia – both under sweeping Western sanctions – need urgently to route trade and finance outside the dollar system. As Washington simultaneously advances new sanctions powers against Russia, the pressure on both countries to build parallel financial architecture has only intensified. India, as summit host, prefers strategic flexibility over alignment. The UAE has its own reasons to preserve the existing order.
“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,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
The economic heart of the summit was the push for de-dollarization – reducing global reliance on U.S. currency as the world’s reserve standard. India proposed linking BRICS banking systems more directly, allowing member states to settle bilateral trade without routing sums through dollars. It is already purchasing Russian oil in rupees and rubles. The joint statement condemned the use of sanctions as economic weapons and raised concerns about unilateral tariff measures.
Donald Trump has made clear he regards de-dollarization as a direct challenge. At the start of his second term he warned that any country attempting to create a new BRICS currency could “say goodbye to selling into the beautiful U.S. economy.” The ultimatum reflects how seriously Washington takes the bloc’s economic ambitions, though it has done little to slow the expansion of bilateral currency arrangements quietly advancing among BRICS members.
The summit’s most consequential bilateral meeting came between Modi and Xi – the Chinese president’s first visit to India in seven years. Ties had deteriorated sharply after a deadly military clash in the disputed Himalayan borderlands in 2020. The two leaders discussed a “mutually acceptable resolution” to the lingering border disputes, according to India’s foreign ministry. Xi described China and India as “partners, not adversaries.”
Also watching carefully was Pezeshkian. Officials declined to confirm whether he and Xi would hold a formal bilateral meeting. At a recent summit in Kyrgyzstan, the two leaders met only briefly on the sidelines, feeding speculation that Beijing may be keeping Tehran at some distance as Xi prepares to meet Trump in Washington later this month.
“Any substantive meeting could help clarify whether China still sees Iran as a strategic partner worth investing political capital in at a moment of acute pressure,” said Hamidreza Azizi of the International Crisis Group.
For South Africa, the summit produced a familiar exercise in damage limitation. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who shares Modi’s preference for strategic flexibility, has found BRICS creates diplomatic complications for Pretoria as often as it resolves them. South African officials have grown frustrated that the bloc has been unable to reach consensus on divisive conflicts, an international relations analyst based in Cape Town noted. The focus has shifted instead toward economic themes like trade, investment and development finance – terrain where agreement is more achievable, if less dramatic.
The question the New Delhi summit left unanswered – as every BRICS summit does – is whether the bloc can convert its collective economic weight into something more than a carefully worded statement of concern.
