India will host BRICS leaders in New Delhi on September 12 and 13 as the war involving Iran exposes a fundamental weakness in the expanded grouping: its decisions still depend on consensus among states whose immediate security interests can sharply conflict.
The summit brings together major non-Western economies at a moment of severe disruption across the Middle East. Iran is a BRICS member, but so is the United Arab Emirates, whose relationship with Tehran deteriorated after Iranian missile attacks. Reuters reported that Abu Dhabi suspended trade and financial transactions with Iran in August, creating an unusually direct dispute inside a bloc that prefers to emphasize cooperation and political autonomy from Western-led institutions.
The immediate diplomatic challenge will be the summit declaration. India must find language on the conflict that Iran can accept without alienating the UAE or reducing the document to general appeals for restraint. Failure to agree would weaken BRICS claims that its larger membership can translate economic weight into coordinated international influence.
All member states are expected to be represented at leadership level, with UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed attending for Abu Dhabi. The presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian gives the meeting substantial political visibility, but it also brings competing priorities to the same table.
For Tehran, the summit offers an opportunity to demonstrate that it is not diplomatically isolated. China and Russia remain important partners, while India has longstanding energy, trade and connectivity interests involving Iran. Yet New Delhi also has deep commercial and security relations with the Gulf Arab states and cannot afford to frame the gathering around Iranian preferences alone.
Energy will be inseparable from the political debate. Fighting and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel, according to Reuters. The waterway carries a major share of globally traded petroleum, so prolonged instability threatens importers such as India and China as well as Gulf exporters. Higher prices also complicate inflation management and growth across the wider developing world that BRICS says it represents.
The summit is therefore a test of more than diplomatic wording. The original BRICS format was easier to manage when it consisted of five large states with broad interests but fewer direct disputes among them. Expansion increased the group’s demographic and economic reach, while also importing regional rivalries into its internal negotiations.
India is likely to steer discussion toward areas where practical cooperation remains possible, including trade in national currencies, development finance, technology and reform of global governance institutions. Those themes can preserve continuity, but they cannot erase the conflict now dividing members.
If New Delhi produces a joint declaration, the wording will show how far BRICS members are prepared to compromise when solidarity carries real strategic costs. If it does not, the summit will underline the gap between the bloc’s ambition to reshape international order and its limited ability to manage a crisis within its own ranks.
