On the eve of the BRICS summit in New Delhi, the most useful key to reading it comes not from the Indian capital but from Bishkek. The relevant question is not whether BRICS can become the new anti-Western pole, whether it will produce a common currency, or whether it can turn the „Global South” into a coherent bloc. More telling is what happened ten days ago, in a different room, with almost the same cast.

On 1 September, the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation signed the Bishkek Declaration. According to The Wire, the document was signed by the heads of all member states, including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Masoud Pezeshkian. The text condemns the military strikes on Iran but, unlike the 2025 Tianjin Declaration, no longer names the states responsible. On the economic front, according to Al Jazeera, members declared their opposition to „unilateral coercive measures” that run counter to the rules of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. Here too, the United States, Israel and the West go unnamed.

In BRICS, the same crisis had produced the opposite effect in May. According to Reuters, the foreign ministers of the BRICS states, including those of rivals Iran and the United Arab Emirates, failed to adopt a joint statement after two days of talks in New Delhi. India, the host, issued only a chair’s statement, which laid bare the divisions. Al Jazeera reported that Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, alleged, without naming the Emirates, that one member state had blocked parts of the text.

Iran was the same. India was the same. China and Russia were the same. What changed was who sat at the table. This is where a transformation begins that matters more than the classic „BRICS versus the West” debate. The international system is organised less and less around exclusive blocs and increasingly around platforms used differently, for different problems. Geopolitics is becoming à la carte.

Expansion has brought diplomatic weight and new points of deadlock

BRICS expansion is usually described in numbers: a larger share of the world’s population, more energy resources, broader access to Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia. The picture is accurate but incomplete. Each new state brings to the table not only population and GDP, but also its own rivalries.

Iran brought its confrontation with the United States, Israel and the Gulf monarchies. The Emirates brought the security calculations of the Gulf. Egypt and Ethiopia entered together with their dispute over the Nile. Indonesia brings its tradition of non-alignment and its appetite for strategic autonomy. Saudi Arabia remains the most ambiguous case. According to Reuters, Riyadh has not accepted full membership and participates through lower-level delegations. In New Delhi, it will be represented by Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud.

The paradox stems from the rule by which the group operates. BRICS decides by consensus, and every expansion simultaneously adds diplomatic weight and potential points of deadlock. Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, framed the problem in the same Reuters report: tensions among the new members, Iran and the Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia, are bad news for an entity built on consensus. The irony, he argues, is that expansion reflects the group’s appeal, while the divergent views of its new members could make it less effective.

The war in Iran makes the mechanism visible. Reuters notes that Tehran and Abu Dhabi are on opposing sides of the conflict. The Emirates, struck by Iranian missiles since the start of the war, suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran in August. Abu Dhabi cannot sign, without political cost, a text framed entirely in Tehran’s terms. Tehran, for its part, cannot accept wording that casts it as the principal party responsible for the escalation.

The Kremlin has publicly acknowledged the impasse. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that the differences between the Emirates and Iran were having a negative impact on the drafting of the joint declaration. He nonetheless expressed hope that the leaders would find wording acceptable to both states.

The problem is not that BRICS has become „pro-American” or „anti-Chinese”. It is simpler than that: the differences between two members feed directly into the organisation’s consensus mechanism.

Bishkek and New Delhi: the same crisis, a different room

This is why the comparison with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is instructive. The Emirates are not a member of the SCO. They are a member of BRICS. That single difference alters the space within which consensus is possible.

This does not mean that the SCO is „pro-Iran” and BRICS „anti-Iran”. It means that institutional architecture matters. A formula acceptable in one organisation becomes impossible in another when the actor directly affected by it is in the room. Yet Bishkek shows that consensus in the SCO did not come free either. Dropping any reference to the United States and Israel, compared with the Tianjin text, and the generic wording on unilateral coercive measures were the price paid for all ten capitals, New Delhi included, to be able to sign.

The result is a defining phenomenon of the new geopolitics: strategic forum shopping. States no longer seek a single organisation to represent all their interests. They choose the institution whose membership, rules and agenda offer the best return on the issue at hand:

For Iran, the SCO can deliver a political position that would be unattainable within BRICS.
For India, BRICS serves economic cooperation and the reform of global governance, while the Quad serves its Indo-Pacific calculus.
For the Gulf states, the relationship with the United States remains fundamental to their security, even as China becomes an economic, technological and energy partner.
For China, BRICS, the SCO and dialogue with Washington are not mutually exclusive alternatives, but different instruments.

Compartmentalised cooperation: political failure, technical progress

The same logic explains an apparent contradiction. While members struggle to agree on common language on the Middle East, the financial file is moving forward. According to Reuters, India will propose at the summit linking the central bank digital currencies of BRICS states for cross-border payments, despite political and technical hurdles. The idea was first put forward in January by the Reserve Bank of India. TRT World notes that the proposal builds on the declaration of the 2025 Rio summit, which called for interoperability between members’ payment systems.

The project is far more modest than earlier talk of a common currency. Business Today notes that New Delhi remains wary of a unified payments system that could be perceived as a rival to SWIFT. Such a system could give the group an explicitly anti-dollar or anti-Western image.

Compartmentalisation has its limits, however. The same source cited by TRT World warns that strained relations between states such as Iran and the Emirates will remain a sticking point, now that Abu Dhabi has severed its financial ties with Tehran. Cooperation along separate tracks does not immunise the organisation against divergences among its members. It merely allows it to keep functioning despite them.

Herein lies one of the most common errors in the analysis of BRICS. The organisation is judged either as a future anti-Western alliance or as a dysfunctional structure because it does not behave like one. Both readings miss the real subject. BRICS does not need to produce a common foreign policy for its members to find it useful. It can fail on the Middle East and still advance on cross-border payments.

The BRICS bank, a laboratory of contradictions

The New Development Bank offers an almost textbook example. Created by the BRICS states and headquartered in Shanghai, it is one of the group’s few concrete institutions. Yet in March 2022, the bank announced in an official statement that it had put new transactions in Russia on hold, citing „unfolding uncertainties and restrictions”.

A founding member of BRICS thus became subject to restrictions within the very financial institution that BRICS created. And yet the bank continues to operate, the group endures, and Russia remains a participant. On the technical track, work has not stopped even amid a regional war. According to The National, a delegation from the UAE Ministry of Finance took part on Thursday, in Mumbai, in the meeting of BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors, as well as in the special meeting of the NDB Board of Governors.

In a classic geopolitical bloc, such a situation would be a major contradiction. In a modular structure, it is entirely possible.

Beijing does not need a „NATO of the Global South”

This calls for correcting a common simplification: the assumption that China’s success should be measured by its ability to turn BRICS into a disciplined anti-American bloc. There is insufficient evidence that this is the actual objective.

Chinese discourse emphasises multipolarity and the reform of global governance. In Bishkek, according to Xinhua, Xi Jinping called for an „equal and orderly” multipolar world and fairer global governance. He warned that hegemonism, unilateralism and protectionism are resurging against the tide of history.

For this project, China does not need to turn the Emirates into an adversary of Washington, nor India into an ally of Beijing. It is enough for major states to consider it legitimate and useful to take part in institutions whose agenda is not controlled by the United States and Europe. A heterogeneous BRICS serves this strategy perfectly. The organisation’s very inability to compel its members to choose sides helps explain its appeal.

Who pays for the lack of coherence

If this reading is correct, the absence of a common foreign policy does not cost all members equally. China can afford an ambiguous BRICS. India benefits from one. The Gulf states maximise their options.

Russia and Iran are more exposed. For Moscow, an organisation capable of converting its members’ economic weight into a coherent political front against sanctions would carry additional strategic value. For Tehran, the political solidarity of a group that includes some of the world’s largest economies would matter all the more in wartime. But the expansion that enlarged the BRICS table brought in precisely the actors capable of limiting such a transformation. Not because they execute Washington’s policy, but because they have interests of their own. That is the essential distinction.

India, the textbook case of an emerging system

India did not invent this world, but it practises it perhaps more explicitly than any other major power. It participates simultaneously in BRICS, the SCO and the Quad, alongside the United States, Japan and Australia. It imports Russian energy on a large scale while deepening its economic and strategic relationship with Europe.

The events of these days illustrate the model perfectly. According to the Kremlin, as cited by Reuters, Vladimir Putin is meeting Narendra Modi today, ahead of the summit. Tomorrow, New Delhi welcomes the leader of the state it regards as a strategic rival along the Himalayan frontier. Business Today notes that the visit will be Xi Jinping’s first to India in nearly seven years, following the 2019 informal summit at Mamallapuram.

Xi arrives in New Delhi on Saturday. According to Reuters, China’s Foreign Ministry announced today that the two sides are arranging a bilateral Xi–Modi meeting on the sidelines of the summit. Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stressed, according to the Deccan Chronicle, that this will be the third consecutive year in which the two leaders meet, following Kazan and Tianjin. CNBC reports that experts expect New Delhi to use the SCO and BRICS summits to highlight its multipolar alignment.

This is not classic neutrality. India does not stand outside rival systems, but within several at once. That is what separates the non-alignment of the twentieth century from the modular multilateralism of the twenty-first.

What to watch in New Delhi

The summit opens tomorrow and closes on Sunday. According to Reuters, those expected include Vladimir Putin, Masoud Pezeshkian, Cyril Ramaphosa, Alexander Lukashenko, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Prabowo Subianto. The Emirates are represented, on behalf of President Mohamed bin Zayed, by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi Media Office announced. Even a founding member is lowering its level of representation: Outlook Business indicates that Brazil will be represented by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira.

The final declaration will matter, but not in the binary terms in which it is likely to be read. Experts consulted by Reuters see the key test as finding language on the Middle East crisis that both Abu Dhabi and Tehran can accept. Should no such language be found, BRICS will not unravel. It will simply confirm that expansion has introduced enough contradictions to prevent the organisation from turning every crisis into a common position. Should a consensus declaration emerge, the question becomes the price of that consensus: how general the wording must become for every capital to sign without abandoning its own position.

The thesis has its limits. If New Delhi produces firm language on the war together with a concrete commitment on digital payments, BRICS will prove more cohesive than the modular reading assumes. If, conversely, the technical track also stalls under the strain of the rupture between Iran and the Emirates, compartmentalisation will have reached its limit. Both scenarios should be judged by the texts adopted on Sunday, not by declarations of principle.

The world does not divide neatly in two

The international order is not necessarily evolving towards a simple confrontation between a Western bloc and a Sino-Russian one. Around the two major centres of power, a growing category of states refuses exclusivity. They buy weapons from one side and infrastructure from the other. They take part in one organisation for security, in another for economics and in a third for diplomatic influence. They vote with Washington on one file and against it on the next. They draw closer to Beijing without accepting Beijing’s tutelage, and maintain ties with Moscow without adopting its policy wholesale.

For Europe, and by extension for Romania, the consequence is a practical one. Relations with powers outside the West can no longer be measured solely by the question „whose side are they on?”. In many capitals, the question itself is now considered obsolete. European diplomacy will have to work file by file, institution by institution, interest by interest, with India, the Gulf states and Indonesia alike.

In Bishkek, one configuration of states was able to reach consensus on Iran, at the price of more cautious wording. In New Delhi, a slightly different configuration will attempt the same from tomorrow. The great powers have not changed in ten days. The room has.

In a system in which states can choose from an ever greater number of rooms, power will no longer belong solely to whoever builds the largest bloc. It will also belong to whoever knows which table to sit at for each negotiation.

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