BRICS leaders recently met in New Delhi for their annual summit. Unsurprisingly, the event attracted worldwide attention. BRICS is one of the main international platforms, already surpassing two older groups of the same kind — the G7 and G20 — in importance and effectiveness.
The weight of BRICS stems from the size of its members. It includes the world’s two most populous countries (India and China); three of the five largest by land area (Russia, China and Brazil); and five of the world’s 10 largest economies (China, India, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil). Moreover, the group includes the three countries currently targeted by the collective West — China, Russia and Iran. BRICS activities are therefore followed with considerable concern in Washington and European capitals. Donald Trump has threatened BRICS several times, trying to intimidate its more timid or vulnerable members.
Political and Diplomatic Outcomes of the New Delhi Summit
The New Delhi summit was successful for at least three political and diplomatic reasons.
First, attendance: almost all the leaders of the group’s 10 countries — including Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — were present. The exceptions were the leaders of Brazil and the United Arab Emirates. President Lula, in the midst of his re-election campaign, was unable to make the long trip. His absence was certainly felt — Lula is one of the founders of BRICS and has played an active role in the group — but everyone understood, of course, that it was a matter of force majeure.
Second, the 10 countries managed to reach a joint declaration, something that does not always happen at such international meetings. Disagreements on important issues often prevent a joint communiqué, so this was a considerable challenge. The communiqué runs to no fewer than 140 paragraphs, covering all issues relevant to the world and BRICS. It is remarkable that such a heterogeneous group, including notably antagonistic members such as Iran and the United Arab Emirates, managed to produce an extensive joint declaration dealing, among many other thorny issues, with the war against Iran and the humanitarian tragedy in Palestine.
Third, and perhaps most important, New Delhi confirmed earlier signs of rapprochement between China and India. Building on steps toward easing tensions taken throughout 2026, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping held a long bilateral meeting. This is strategically significant not only for the two countries, but also for BRICS and the Global South as a whole. Disputes and tensions between China and India, driven mainly by territorial disagreements in the Himalayas, have obstructed BRICS activities for several years. These disputes have deep roots and even culminated in a war between the two countries in 1962, won by China. Rapprochement is a complex process and will take time, but the important point is that it has begun.
Why was the China-India rapprochement possible in 2026? One reason, perhaps the main one, is that India was caught off guard by the Trump administration’s various tariff attacks and threats. Until 2025, India imagined that it enjoyed a special relationship with the US and relied on American support as a counterweight to its rivalry with China. Indians now realize that this special relationship was at least partly illusory. It has therefore become clear that India gains little or nothing from keeping its distance from China in pursuit of US goodwill.
BRICS Finance Track
The three factors — the attendance of almost all the leaders, the joint declaration and the China-India rapprochement — are political and diplomatic. But BRICS — and this is another of the group’s strengths — extends beyond this terrain and has been active on economic issues of various kinds. Among them, financial issues stand out. I will briefly discuss the group’s main financial initiatives: the New Development Bank (NDB), the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and the cross-border payment system known as BRICS Pay.
The NDB, better known as the BRICS Bank, is headquartered in Shanghai and is by far the group’s most important practical achievement to date. It was created as a counterweight to the World Bank and other regional development banks. It is a fully established institution with 11 years of operation and more than 300 employees, based at its Shanghai headquarters and four regional centers in Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa. It has approved more than US$40 billion in infrastructure and sustainable development projects. Membership has grown from the five founding countries to 10, with several more already approved by the NDB Board of Governors but still needing to complete their national accession procedures.
That said, I think it is fair to recognize that the NDB has not yet become a truly global financial institution. Membership has grown to 10 and may reach 14 or 15 in the short term, but this is still clearly insufficient for a bank that aims to operate on a global scale. The small number of members limits capitalization and lending opportunities. In addition, the NDB remains predominantly dollarized on both the asset and liability sides. Significant progress has been made in this area, especially through bond issues and loans denominated in renminbi, but the dollar still accounts for about 60% of the bank’s borrowing and lending. The leaders’ statement referred to these two outstanding issues, but only in general terms, instructing the NDB to increase “financing in local currency” and consider “in an accelerated manner applications for membership from interested countries” (paragraph 115 of the declaration).
The CRA, created in 2014 alongside the NDB, has not yet begun operating and is therefore much less well known. It was created to serve as a monetary fund for the group and a counterweight to the IMF. The arrangement’s operational structure has been completed and several functional tests have been conducted. However, the macroeconomic monitoring unit provided for in the treaty that established the CRA remains to be created. The accession of new BRICS countries that may wish to join the arrangement also remains pending. Once these steps are taken, the CRA could begin operating as a source of external liquidity. Although the five founders — perhaps with the exception of South Africa — do not need balance-of-payments support, some of the new BRICS countries do. Egypt and Ethiopia, in particular, are under highly conditional IMF agreements and could benefit from CRA support once they become members.
The CRA therefore needs several changes and practical measures, preferably under guidance from BRICS leaders. The New Delhi declaration was vague or silent on these points. It did not mention the task, pending for more than 10 years, of creating a monitoring or surveillance unit, which is required before the arrangement can undertake actual operations. Nor did it mention de-dollarizing the arrangement, which currently provides only for swaps involving US dollars. And it made only a vague, bureaucratic reference to “completing the discussions” on the five new BRICS members joining the CRA “on a voluntary basis and in accordance with country-specific circumstances” (paragraph 97 of the declaration).
The NDB and CRA date to 2014, when the bank’s Articles of Agreement and the CRA Treaty were signed at the BRICS summit in Fortaleza. BRICS Pay is a newer initiative, first discussed in 2024 under Russia’s BRICS presidency. It would be an international payment system alternative to Western-controlled platforms such as SWIFT, which have been used to sanction and coerce countries considered hostile or uncooperative, notably including two BRICS members — Russia and Iran.
From a technical standpoint, this proposal is within reach. Brazil already has a national digital payment system, PIX. Other members — including China, Russia, Iran and India — have similar national payment systems. The challenge is to integrate them into a unified system that allows cross-border payments to be made faster, more cheaply and, above all, more securely than through existing systems, which are somewhat antiquated and notoriously vulnerable to Western intervention. The declaration gave this subject some prominence in paragraph 90, referring to work on the cross-border interoperability of national payment and messaging channels. It also called for the continued promotion of BRICS national currencies in trade and investment. The goal, the declaration states, is to find “practical solutions that are fast, low-cost, more accessible, efficient, transparent and secure” — in other words, everything missing from Western-controlled systems.
If BRICS does achieve this result, it will be a milestone: a qualitative change in the international relations of its members that would protect them to some extent from direct and indirect sanctions imposed by the US and its allies or satellites.
Obstacles and How to Overcome Them
There are internal obstacles to achieving these strategic objectives, and I will highlight two of them. The first, little known to those who have not participated in the BRICS process, is resistance from our central banks — or most of them — to anything that deviates from the script set by the United States and Europe. This largely explains the modest progress of the CRA and discussions about BRICS Pay. Both the CRA and BRICS Pay fall within the central banks’ area of responsibility, which gives them the ability to obstruct these initiatives even when doing so contradicts guidance from leaders and ministers of state. This is yet another example of the problematic nature of the legal autonomy from governments granted to central banks in some BRICS countries.
The second obstacle is more broadly political in nature: the influence within BRICS countries of pro-Western political forces that object to actions seen as contrary to the financial and geopolitical interests of the US and Europe. The behavior of various BRICS central banks is only one expression of the strength of these Western-linked circles. Their influence is felt across many areas of the group’s societies and economies. The weight of political factors should therefore not be underestimated. The West is in relative decline, but it retains considerable residual influence, felt to varying degrees in all or almost all BRICS members.
A full discussion of how to overcome these and other barriers lies beyond the scope of this essay. I will mention only one requirement that has yet to be met and receives little attention from those who follow the group from a distance: abandoning BRICS’s practice of deciding exclusively by consensus or unanimity, which gives every member a veto and tends to paralyze the group’s initiatives. The alternative, already identified in the 2024 Kazan leaders’ declaration, is to allow initiatives, when appropriate, to proceed on a “voluntary and non-binding basis” — that is, through a subgroup of BRICS countries and, perhaps, other countries of the Global South. Countries not persuaded by an initiative could join later if they wish. Establishing a new decision-making process will be especially important if rapprochement between India and China takes a long time.
China will hold the group’s presidency in 2027. We will see how it acts to address these challenges and advance BRICS initiatives. One question is whether China will work to advance the group’s financial projects — the NDB, CRA and BRICS Pay — or concentrate on its own national initiatives in this area, leaving BRICS in the background. Without going into detail, I will note only that, to protect itself from Western sanctions, China has for several years been gradually building its own alternative international financial architecture, centered on the renminbi and driven by the state and Chinese companies. Needless to say, from the perspective of the other BRICS countries, a transnational path negotiated within the group is preferable to a scenario in which China replaces the US and the renminbi replaces the dollar.
The Brazilian Presidential Election and Our Participation in BRICS
In conclusion, a word about Brazil. Our October presidential election is highly significant for BRICS, as it will determine whether one of the founding countries remains in the group. If Lula loses his re-election bid and Flávio Bolsonaro wins, Brazil may even decide to leave BRICS. Even if it stays, the country would reduce its participation in the group’s activities to a minimum, as happened during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. BRICS would lose substance through the departure or diminished engagement of one of its principal members. Brazil, in turn, would exclude itself, wholly or partly, from what has become its main platform for international cooperation.
I would not trust India or UAE who are close to Israel and the US despite everything.
Many of us are hopeful that BRICS will create sufficient wealth for its members that people who went West will want to return.