BRICS and Limits of Multipolar Consensus

The 12 September 2026 BRICS Summit in New Delhi exposed the widening gap between the bloc’s growing geopolitical ambitions and the limits of its internal consensus. Leaders criticised unilateral sanctions and expressed concern over conflicts in the Middle East, while India emphasised that BRICS is “not against anyone” and that the Global South should become a rule-shaper. Russia and China advocated a more multipolar order, while Iran promoted greater use of national currencies to reduce reliance on Western financial systems.
Yet, the summit also exposed BRICS’ central contradiction. Despite representing roughly half of the world’s population and calling for peace, sovereignty and respect for international law, members could not agree on a unified demand for an immediate cessation of hostilities. The outcome demonstrates that BRICS can increasingly challenge the Western-led order, but divergent strategic interests continue to constrain its ability to translate multipolarity into coordinated collective action.
The Summit represents a shift from Western-dominated unipolarity toward a more institutionally fragmented or “unbalanced” multipolarity, rather than the emergence of a unified BRICS-led alternative world order.
The failure was not simply diplomatic weakness; it was a structural consequence of BRICS’ heterogeneity.  BRICS has never been a military alliance or a conventional political bloc. Its members share an aspiration to reform the international system, increase the voice of the Global South and reduce excessive dependence on Western-dominated institutions. But they do not share a common geopolitical worldview.  Recent scholarship on the expanded BRICS emphasises that its members have different strategic interests and competing conceptions of what a multipolar order should look like. China and Russia generally favour a stronger geopolitical role for BRICS, whereas India and Brazil have been more cautious about turning the organisation into an explicitly anti-Western bloc.  
That contradiction became particularly visible in New Delhi.  BRICS now brings together countries that are not merely neutral toward the Middle East conflict but have interests on different sides of it. Iran is directly involved in the conflict. The United Arab Emirates has its own security relationships with the United States and regional actors. Saudi Arabia participated as an invited guest rather than as a core member, while India maintains important strategic and economic relationships with Washington, Moscow, Tehran and the Gulf simultaneously.
Under these circumstances, demanding an immediate ceasefire in language that implicitly assigns responsibility would have risked splitting the organisation.  Thus, “maximum restraint” became the lowest common denominator.  A demand for an immediate ceasefire would have raised a difficult question: ceasefire between whom, and following whose actions?
If the declaration explicitly condemned US or Israeli military operations, some BRICS members could have resisted. If it explicitly condemned Iranian actions, Tehran could hardly have accepted it. If it condemned both sides equally, the language could have been interpreted as morally and politically false equivalence.  The compromise was therefore to condemn the escalation itself rather than identify a single perpetrator.  This is classic consensus diplomacy: the more heterogeneous the coalition, the more abstract its common language becomes.
India’s strategic autonomy also shaped the summit’s outcome. New Delhi has little incentive to turn BRICS into an anti-Western alliance; instead, it participates in BRICS, the Quad, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other forums to preserve maximum diplomatic flexibility. Modi’s emphasis that BRICS should be “not against anyone” reflects this approach.
For India, BRICS is therefore more valuable as a forum for managing differences than as a geopolitical alliance. India’s economic and strategic interests span Russia, Iran, China, the Gulf and the United States, making an uncompromising BRICS position potentially restrictive. India’s cautious diplomacy was thus an expression of strategic autonomy and diplomatic flexibility.
China’s position presents another paradox. Xi Jinping has sought to portray China as a supporter of political settlements and a potential mediator in Middle Eastern conflicts, urging BRICS to play a greater peacemaking role while emphasising the centrality of Palestine. Yet China’s influence remains constrained because BRICS is not a Chinese alliance.
India resists turning BRICS into an instrument of Chinese leadership; Brazil has generally opposed excessive politicisation, while Gulf members and Russia pursue their own interests. China–India strategic competition further complicates the bloc’s agenda. Thus, even China’s considerable influence could not produce the stronger collective declaration Beijing might have preferred.
There is another reason the New Delhi language deserves attention.  In May 2026, BRICS discussions reportedly ended without a joint statement amid divisions over the Iran war.   Against that background, the New Delhi declaration should arguably be understood not simply as a weak statement but as a recovery of consensus.  The diplomatic achievement was that countries with conflicting positions managed to agree on the text.  Iran and the UAE could sign the same document.  That tells us something about the evolution of BRICS; the organisation may be more useful as a diplomatic platform for keeping channels open than as a collective security organisation capable of enforcing peace.
The most important lesson from the New Delhi Summit is that BRICS has become much more representative of the Global South through expansion. Its economic and demographic weight is substantial, and its political influence is growing. But expansion has also made consensus harder.  The scholarly literature increasingly identifies this trade-off. New members bring greater economic and geopolitical weight, but they also bring regional rivalries, different relationships with the United States and different conceptions of global order.  
One recent study goes further, arguing that BRICS’ lack of a permanent secretariat and legally enforceable decision-making structure, combined with member heterogeneity and China–India rivalry, produces coordination deadlocks.  The larger BRICS becomes, the more representative it becomes, but the harder it becomes to speak with one voice.  This is where the New Delhi Summit exposes the larger question about BRICS.
If BRICS seeks to become an emerging pillar of global governance, challenging Western institutions, unilateral sanctions, dollar dominance, and the existing distribution of power is not sufficient. Its credibility will increasingly depend on a harder question: what can BRICS do when war threatens international peace? A durable role would require practical mechanisms for mediation, special envoys, ceasefire facilitation, humanitarian coordination, and cooperation with the United Nations, including measures to protect energy supplies, food security, and maritime trade.
The summit therefore illustrates a central paradox of multipolarity: greater diversity of power centres does not necessarily produce greater collective action. It can expand diplomatic autonomy and representation while simultaneously making consensus more difficult when members' strategic interests diverge. The absence of a stronger ceasefire demand was thus less a single diplomatic failure than an expression of BRICS’ institutional and geopolitical constraints.
Ultimately, BRICS can challenge the architecture of the Western-led order, but its greater test is whether it can help build mechanisms capable of managing conflict. Until it develops such capacity, BRICS will remain an important instrument of multipolarity – but not yet a fully developed instrument of collective security.
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The writer is a 2026 Legislative 
Policy Fellow of the US Congress