NEW DELHI, September 11 — Russian President Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi on Friday morning, two days before India opens the 17th BRICS Leaders’ Summit, a meeting that will test whether the bloc can raise its profile while its own members sit on opposite sides of the United States-led war on Iran. The summit runs September 12–13 in the Indian capital.
It comes more than six months after the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran, and it is the third attempt by the bloc to find consensus on the war that has dominated global attention and battered economies this year, according to the source material.
A bloc built to challenge the West
BRICS began as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — emerging countries that wanted to challenge the Western-led order. In more recent years it has widened to include Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia. Iran and the UAE both joined in 2024.
That widening is also the source of the summit’s central problem. Tehran and Abu Dhabi stand on opposing sides of the Iran war, and the divisions limit what the group can do collectively on foreign policy and security.
Analysts say BRICS has helped make the world more multipolar but has struggled to build a coherent alternative to the West. The dollar remains dominant, and the bloc’s ability to act as one on security questions is constrained by the same disagreements now on display in New Delhi.
What the bloc has delivered
What BRICS has created is a platform outside Western-led institutions, giving Global South countries greater bargaining power and economic alternatives. That platform, its defenders argue, is the point. “We tend to undermine any BRICS-led initiative as it is not the revolution we have expected,” said Brazilian researchers Octavio Oliveira and Enzo Godinho at the BRICS Studies Group at the University of Sao Paulo, in an emailed statement.
“Yes, it does not have the institutionality or the capacity of the UN to tackle specific geopolitical issues, but its mere existence is a much more important platform for Global South countries to express their voices and bypass the West in cooperation.” The two researchers said BRICS was built to challenge the US-led Western order but was never meant to replace it.
The bloc emerged after the 2008 financial collapse and the failures of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round — trade negotiations that aimed to reform the international trading system in favour of Global South countries. “Countries that were spearheaded to become the next ‘developed’ nations understood that their voice would be best heard if they organised themselves as a group,” Oliveira and Godinho said.
BRICS emerged from those countries’ efforts to pursue a common development agenda outside traditional international organisations and the United Nations, and in that sense its very origins challenged the Western-led order, the Brazilian scholars said. Emerging powers wanted greater influence over institutions they felt were dominated by the West.
Sean Burges, an associate professor of international relations at Carleton University in Ottawa, says that remains a major priority uniting the group today. The 17th BRICS Summit last year was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As the alliance nears its 20-year anniversary, the question hanging over the New Delhi meeting is whether a group this broad can still speak with one voice on the issues that divide it most.
For now, the arrival of Putin — a head of state whose country is a founding member — sets the tone. What follows over the next two days will show how far the bloc can go beyond a shared platform and toward shared positions.
