The Fault Lines of BRICS
A House Divided Against Itself

On September 12, as this piece goes to press, the leaders of eleven nations are gathering in New Delhi for the eighteenth BRICS summit. Xi Jinping is expected on Indian soil for the first time since 2019. Vladimir Putin will sit at the same table as Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, whose government spent the first half of this year at open odds with a fellow BRICS member, the United Arab Emirates, over a war that neither man started but both were forced to take sides on. The optics will be carefully managed: garlands, group photographs, a shared communique with language soft enough that nobody has to disown it. What the cameras will not show is a bloc that, foreign ministry by foreign ministry, has spent 2026 failing to agree on almost anything of consequence.

This is the paradox at the heart of BRICS. As an economic fact, it is close to undeniable: the grouping now accounts for somewhere between a third and 40 percent of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity, holds roughly 45 percent of the world’s population, and includes three states, Russia, China, and India, that no serious accounting of global power can ignore. As a political fact, it is closer to a fiction. BRICS has expanded faster than it has cohered. Every major new member arrived carrying a rivalry that predates the bloc by decades, and the older members brought a few unresolved rivalries of their own. The result, visible in plain sight this year, is a club whose members distrust each other roughly as much as they distrust the West they claim to be balancing against.

This piece takes a wholesome view of that contradiction: not to dismiss BRICS as theatre, because its economic weight is real and its diplomatic value to individual members is real, but to map honestly where the cracks run, how deep they go, and what they mean for the bloc’s ability to ever act as a unified pole in a multipolar world.

Start with the numbers, because they are the strongest card BRICS holds. The original five, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, already commanded a share of world output that rivalled the G7 by the early 2020s. The 2024 to 2025 expansion, which brought in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, Indonesia, and eventually Saudi Arabia in a still-ambiguous capacity, added population and energy weight rather than economic depth. China alone still generates well over half the bloc’s combined GDP. India contributes the second largest share. Everyone else, including large, proud, ambitious states like Brazil, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia, are minority shareholders in an enterprise two countries dominate.

That last figure is the one that matters most and gets discussed least. BRICS has no charter comparable to NATO’s Article 5, no customs union comparable to the EU’s, no standing secretariat with the authority to compel a common position the way the European Commission can. It is, structurally, a summit-plus-bank: an annual gathering, a rotating chair, and the New Development Bank in Shanghai, which since its founding in 2014 has disbursed a fraction of what the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank move in a single year. Everything else, the declarations on de-dollarisation, the talk of a common payment system, the language about reforming the UN Security Council, is aspiration voiced in a room, not obligation written into law. When members agree, it is because their interests happened to align that year. When they don’t, as 2026 has shown repeatedly, there is no mechanism to force alignment, only the option of silence.

That absence of binding structure is not an accident. It is the price of admission. BRICS was always going to be a coalition of states that refuse to be told what to do by outsiders, and a club built on that principle cannot easily tell its own members what to do either. The bloc’s founding appeal, sovereignty first, no ideological tests, no conditionality, is also its structural weakness. It can gather grievances against the existing order. It struggles to convert grievance into coordinated action.

The most consequential fault line in BRICS runs through its two largest Asian members, and it is the one the bloc can least afford and most struggles to manage. India and China fought a bloody hand-to-hand clash at Galwan Valley in June 2020, the first fatal confrontation on the Line of Actual Control in over four decades. Bilateral leader-level visits froze. Trade kept growing anyway, India’s deficit with China widened past 80 billion dollars a year even as troops stood eyeball to eyeball in eastern Ladakh, a reminder that economic entanglement and strategic hostility can coexist indefinitely rather than resolve into either war or friendship.

A genuine, if narrow, thaw began in October 2024, when Modi and Xi met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan and agreed on patrolling arrangements meant to de-escalate the most contested points along the LAC. Since then the two sides have taken small, deliberate steps: renewed direct flights, a resumption of religious pilgrimage routes, and in January 2026 a visit to India by a Communist Party of China delegation led by Vice-Minister Sun Haiyan, who met senior figures from India’s ruling establishment. Modi travelled to Tianjin for the SCO summit in August 2025, his first visit to China in nearly seven years. Xi’s expected presence in Delhi this week would be his first return since 2019.

None of this amounts to resolution. The underlying territorial dispute, roughly 3,800 kilometres of contested and undemarcated border, remains exactly where it was. China’s infrastructure build-up along the frontier continues. India’s own military modernisation, explicitly framed around a two-front contingency involving both China and Pakistan, continues in parallel with the diplomatic thaw, not instead of it. What has changed is tone, not substance: both governments have concluded that permanent hostility is expensive and that a managed, transactional relationship, cooperative in forums like BRICS and the SCO, guarded and competitive on the border and in the Indian Ocean, serves both better than open confrontation. That is a mature adjustment. It is not trust, and it is not alliance.

What India-China tension does to BRICS internally is corrosive in a specific way. India will not accept any BRICS initiative, financial or political, that it perceives as a vehicle for Chinese primacy. This is why New Delhi has consistently slow-walked proposals for a common BRICS currency, why it insists on the New Development Bank maintaining genuinely multilateral governance rather than becoming a China-dominated lending arm, and why India’s own BRICS chairmanship in 2026 has been built around carefully neutral language, “resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability”, designed to avoid any formulation that could be read as endorsing a China-centric vision of the bloc’s future. Every BRICS initiative that requires India and China to subordinate national advantage to collective advantage runs into this wall, quietly, procedurally, without ever needing to be stated aloud.

There is a second, quieter dimension to this rivalry that rarely makes headlines but shapes BRICS from the inside: the competition for leadership of the Global South narrative itself. China wants BRICS to be read as an extension of its own Belt and Road vision, a financial and infrastructural order radiating outward from Beijing. India wants BRICS to be read as a genuinely plural forum in which no single capital sets the agenda, a framing that conveniently also protects India’s own strategic autonomy and its parallel relationships with Washington, Tokyo, and Canberra through the Quad. These are not compatible visions of what the bloc is for. They are managed, summit to summit, through vague communique language that lets each side claim the framing it prefers, which is itself a symptom of the deeper problem: BRICS has never had to resolve what it actually is, because resolving it would force India and China to admit, out loud, that they are building toward different and ultimately competing ends.

If the India-China fault line is old and managed, the one running through BRICS’ newest members is fresh and, in 2026, has already broken the bloc’s ability to speak with one voice. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE all joined the expanded grouping within roughly a year of each other, and each brought a regional rivalry that BRICS membership was never going to dissolve.

The clearest rupture came in February 2026, when joint American and Israeli strikes hit Iranian territory. Tehran wanted the bloc to issue a unified condemnation of the United States and Israel. The UAE, which has accused Iran of striking its own territory amid the wider regional escalation, blocked language it regarded as one-sided. The result was a BRICS summit that concluded without a joint statement, an almost unheard-of failure for a grouping whose entire diplomatic value proposition rests on projecting unity against Western dominance. India, holding the chair, issued its own standalone statement calling for unity, a polite way of confirming that the members themselves could not agree on one.

The pattern repeated in May 2026. The BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, convened around the theme of reforming global governance, ended without a consensus outcome document, again because of the Iran-UAE split, compounded by the UAE’s separate effort to soften the bloc’s language on Palestine and a two-state solution, a position every other member state opposed. A grouping that likes to present itself as a coherent counterweight to Western institutions could not, twice in one year, produce the single most basic diplomatic artifact those institutions produce routinely: an agreed sentence.

Layered underneath this is an older and still unresolved tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two Gulf heavyweights whose proxy competition has shaped conflicts from Yemen to Lebanon to Syria for the better part of two decades. Chinese mediation produced a headline-grabbing Riyadh-Tehran normalisation in 2023, and Saudi Arabia’s own path into BRICS has been characteristically Saudi: an invitation accepted in principle, membership left deliberately ambiguous for years, full participation calibrated to what serves Riyadh’s relationship with Washington at any given moment. The Kingdom has never fully closed the door on its American security relationship in order to walk through the BRICS one, and it does not intend to. That hedge is rational statecraft for Saudi Arabia. It is also a signal of how little BRICS membership actually constrains the foreign policy of its own members.

The Russia-China relationship inside BRICS is not usually described as a fault line, because on the surface it is the bloc’s most functional bilateral pair, no open border dispute, coordinated positions at the UN, expanding trade. Look closer and the asymmetry is stark enough to count as a structural weakness of a different kind. Since 2022, Russia’s economy has become steadily more dependent on China as a market for its energy exports and a source of the technology, machinery, and consumer goods that Western sanctions cut off. Chinese purchases of Russian crude and gas, settled increasingly in yuan rather than dollars, have kept the Russian state afloat. But the deals are struck overwhelmingly on Chinese terms, at discounted prices, with Beijing under no obligation to offer more.

This is not the relationship of two co-equal poles jointly balancing the United States. It is closer to a patron and a increasingly dependent client, dressed in the rhetoric of a “no limits” partnership that both sides have quietly stopped repeating as often as they did in early 2022. China has been careful not to provide Russia with direct military material that would trigger secondary sanctions on Beijing itself, has continued trading with Ukraine’s Western backers on a far larger scale than it trades with Russia, and has offered Moscow diplomatic cover without matching commitment. For a bloc built partly on the promise of an alternative to Western hegemony, having its second-largest member effectively economically subordinate to its largest is an uncomfortable structural fact that BRICS communiques never mention and every serious member privately understands.

No BRICS ambition has generated more headlines and less delivery than the promise of an alternative to dollar dominance. The idea of a common BRICS currency, floated loudly around the 2023 Johannesburg summit, has effectively been shelved. The technical obstacles were always larger than the political appetite to solve them: a shared currency requires some convergence of monetary policy, capital account rules, and fiscal discipline among states as different as Russia, a sanctioned war economy, and Brazil, a inflation-targeting democracy with an independent central bank. No member has been willing to cede the monetary sovereignty such convergence would require, least of all China, which has no interest in diluting the yuan’s own slow internationalisation into a multilateral basket it would not fully control.

What has actually happened is more modest and more real: a steady rise in bilateral trade settled in local currencies rather than dollars, particularly between Russia and its remaining trade partners, and between China and a widening circle of commodity exporters. The New Development Bank has begun issuing more local-currency loans. A BRICS cross-border payment messaging system, an alternative to SWIFT, has been discussed for years and remains in pilot stages rather than operational reality. This is directional change, not structural rupture. The dollar still settles the overwhelming majority of global trade and reserves, and nothing on the table at the 2026 Delhi summit changes that fact within any near-term horizon. BRICS members want to reduce dollar exposure for reasons that range from sanctions insurance, Russia and Iran, to strategic hedging, China, to simple transaction cost savings, everyone else. They do not agree on how fast, how far, or under whose architecture that reduction should proceed, and that disagreement has proven far more durable than the shared complaint about dollar dominance that produced the ambition in the first place.

The 2024-2025 enlargement was sold as evidence of BRICS’ rising gravitational pull, and in one sense it was: dozens of states applied or expressed interest, more than the bloc was prepared to admit. But expansion imported new fractures faster than it built new consensus. Ethiopia and Egypt, both now full members, carry an unresolved and periodically dangerous dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and its effect on Nile water flows into Egyptian territory, a conflict with the kind of existential stakes, water security for over a hundred million Egyptians, that does not soften because both governments now share a seat at the same summit table. Indonesia joined as the bloc’s first Southeast Asian member and largest Muslim-majority democracy, bringing a foreign policy tradition of non-alignment that sits awkwardly next to Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea, waters Indonesia itself has had friction with Chinese vessels over.

Each addition increases the bloc’s raw economic and demographic mass while increasing the number of bilateral vetoes, informal but real, that any collective statement must clear. A grouping of five could occasionally paper over disagreement through sheer diplomatic effort. A grouping of eleven, with three separate live conflicts or near-conflicts among its members, Israel-Iran with UAE on the other side, India-China on the border, Ethiopia-Egypt over the Nile, cannot reliably do the same. The 2026 record, two failed consensus documents inside seven months, is the mathematical result of that arithmetic, not a temporary bad patch.

There is also a quieter cost to expansion that gets less attention than the headline disputes: the dilution of India’s own relative weight inside a bloc it helped found. When BRICS was five members, India was unambiguously the second pole after China, with genuine leverage to shape outcomes simply by threatening to withhold consensus. In a bloc of eleven, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia each bringing independent interests and independent relationships with Washington, India’s veto power is diluted even as its diplomatic workload, chairing a fractious summit, mediating between Tehran and Abu Dhabi, balancing its own China relationship, has only grown. New Delhi has to work harder for less influence than it held a decade ago, which is its own kind of fault line: not between members, but between the bloc’s expanding membership and the diminishing marginal power each founding member retains within it. Brazil and South Africa, the two founding members with the least individual leverage even before expansion, feel this most acutely, reduced from equal architects of the original BRIC concept to increasingly peripheral voices in a conversation now dominated by Asian and Gulf heavyweights.

Argentina’s experience is instructive here, even though it never formally joined. Invited alongside the six other new members in 2023, Buenos Aires withdrew its acceptance the moment a new government took office, on explicitly ideological grounds, refusing to “ally with communists.” That reversal is a reminder that BRICS membership is not a durable strategic commitment for many of the states weighing it; it is a revisable policy choice, subject to the next election, the next change of government, the next recalibration of a country’s relationship with Washington. A bloc whose membership can be un-joined by a single election result is not a bloc with the institutional permanence its proponents like to claim for it.

None of this means BRICS is meaningless to Washington, Brussels, or Tokyo. A grouping that controls a rising share of global GDP, holds a large share of the world’s energy reserves through its Gulf and Russian members, and includes the two most populous countries on earth cannot be dismissed simply because it fails to issue joint statements. But the specific form of BRICS’ weakness, chronic internal division rather than external constraint, is precisely what limits how seriously Western capitals need to take it as a unified strategic actor. A coalition that cannot agree on how to characterise a missile strike on one of its own members is not a coalition capable of coordinating sanctions relief, joint military posture, or a common negotiating position at the UN Security Council, however much its combined GDP might suggest otherwise on a spreadsheet.

What BRICS does provide, reliably, is a stage. It gives India a platform to project chairmanship and mediating credibility without requiring New Delhi to choose between Washington and Moscow. It gives China a forum in which to appear as a benign convenor of the Global South rather than a unilateral rival to American power. It gives Russia proof, however threadbare, that it has not been fully isolated. It gives Gulf states leverage in their bilateral bargaining with Washington. Each of these functions is real and individually valuable to the member using it. None of them requires, or produces, collective action. That is the honest description of what BRICS currently is: a venue where great and middle powers extract individual advantage from shared membership, not a bloc that acts as one.