The 18th BRICS Summit convenes on 12–13 September 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, with India chairing under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” The bloc now has 11 full members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Indonesia — alongside 10 partner nations. Iran holds full membership while conducting the maritime disruption that has raised global energy costs by approximately $35 per barrel since February. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are members and victims. The summit agenda covers trade, digital infrastructure, local currency settlement, and global governance reform. The Hormuz crisis is not on it. The bloc’s expansion has made it larger and less coherent simultaneously.
1. The Membership Problem
When the original BRICS bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — admitted six additional members effective January 2024, the stated rationale was the amplification of Global South voices in international institutions and the construction of a more balanced multipolar order. [Established — 15th BRICS Summit Johannesburg communiqué, August 2023, publicly available; India’s BRICS chairship documentation, brics2026.gov.in.] The six new members included Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — a configuration that contains, in the same legal framework, the principal actor in the world’s most active geopolitical conflict and two states that are suffering material economic damage from that actor’s operations.
This is not a theoretical tension. Brent crude is at $94 per barrel because Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forces have blocked maritime passage through the Strait of Hormuz since late February 2026. [Established — 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis timeline; The Leadsman prior coverage.] Saudi Arabia and the UAE are Gulf Cooperation Council members whose shipping, insurance markets, and regional economic security are directly impaired by the same IRGC operations that Iran’s BRICS+ membership implicitly legitimises. ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi national oil company, reported 15 vessels struck since February. [Established — referenced in The Leadsman, Sounding No. 27, 31 August 2026.] The UAE intercepted an Iranian drone over its own territorial waters on 1 September — the first such incursion confirmed by the UAE government. [Established — The Leadsman, Sounding No. 30.] These are two BRICS+ partners in direct military confrontation nine days before their heads of state are scheduled to sit at the same table in New Delhi.
2. India’s Chair Position and the Silence It Requires
India has positioned itself throughout the Hormuz crisis as a non-belligerent bridge power: maintaining energy imports from Iran, maintaining strategic relationships with Washington and the Gulf states, declining to endorse the US naval blockade, and declining to endorse Iran’s closure of the Strait. [Assessed with high confidence — India’s consistent non-alignment posture is documented across multiple coverage periods and official statements; specific operational details of its Iran trade are not independently verified.] This positioning is consistent with India’s historical foreign policy of strategic autonomy and is, in the abstract, the logic of any responsible middle power in a crisis between two actors it cannot afford to alienate.
As BRICS+ chair, the position requires India to produce a summit declaration that 11 heads of state can sign. A declaration that addresses Hormuz would require Iran to agree to language characterising its own maritime operations in terms that either validate or condemn them — neither of which Iran will accept. It would require Saudi Arabia and the UAE to sign a document that does not address the threat to their territorial and economic security. The result is what India’s summit agenda already reflects: the Hormuz crisis is absent. [Assessed with high confidence — the published agenda priorities (trade, digital infrastructure, local currency, global governance) do not include maritime security in the Strait, which is the structurally logical outcome given the membership configuration.]
The summit theme — “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” — is the diplomatic grammar of strategic evasion. [Established — India BRICS chairship documentation, brics2026.gov.in; EoIRiyadh.gov.in press release, 18th BRICS Summit.] Resilience, in this context, means the ability of the bloc to function despite its internal contradictions. The India-chaired BRICS will likely demonstrate that it can hold a summit, adopt a declaration, and issue communiqués about local currency settlement and multilateral institution reform — none of which address the primary source of global economic disruption in 2026.
3. What the Expanded BRICS Actually Is
The question the September 12–13 summit poses is structural rather than procedural: does the expanded BRICS represent a coherent alternative to US-led international order, a loose coalition of shared grievances, or something in between? The Johannesburg expansion was presented as the former. The New Delhi summit will demonstrate the latter.
A coherent alternative order requires, at minimum, a shared position on the use of force. NATO has one. The UN Security Council is supposed to have one. The expanded BRICS does not — because Russia, China, and Iran are on one side of the Hormuz conflict and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt are on the other, while India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia decline to take sides. A bloc in which a significant fraction of members are currently conducting military operations that materially harm another significant fraction of members is not an alternative order. It is a forum. [Assessed with high confidence — the structural definition of “alternative order” as requiring a shared security position is analytical; its application to the current BRICS+ membership is the Cartographer’s reading.]
The more precise description is that BRICS+ has become a platform for bilateral and sub-group initiatives that do not require bloc-level consensus — local currency payment systems between India and Russia, China-Brazil trade agreements, digital infrastructure cooperation between India and the Gulf states. These are real and consequential. They describe a world in which the dollar’s dominance as a settlement currency is gradually eroding at the margins, cross-border digital payments are being built on non-Western rails, and global supply chains are being reconfigured around non-Western hubs. None of this requires the bloc to have a common foreign policy. The summit’s published agenda items — trade, fintech, supply chain resilience, multilateral institution reform — are exactly what a forum without a security consensus can deliver. [Established — India BRICS chairship documentation; brics2026.gov.in agenda priorities.]
4. The Structural Verdict Nine Days Out
The New Delhi summit will produce a declaration. The declaration will endorse local currency settlement mechanisms, call for reform of the IMF and World Bank voting structures, reference the importance of digital public infrastructure, and note the importance of resilient supply chains. It will not mention Hormuz. It will not contain a joint statement on the Iran-US conflict. It will not include a position on the naval blockade. Saudi Arabia and Iran will both sign it. [Assessed with high confidence — this projection follows directly from the membership configuration and the logic of consensus-based multilateral declarations; it is assessed because it concerns a future event.]
What this tells us, structurally, is that the BRICS+ expansion of 2024 succeeded in its narrow institutional goal — a larger bloc with broader geographic coverage — and undermined its stated strategic goal in the process. A bloc that cannot discuss the most consequential geopolitical event affecting the global economy at its own summit is not an alternative international order. It is a useful venue for bilateral business that did not require a multilateral forum to conduct. The distinction matters for anyone trying to assess whether BRICS+ represents a genuine challenge to the post-1945 international institutional architecture or a parallel set of arrangements that coexist with it without replacing it.
The answer, nine days before the summit, is the second option. The alternative table is set. The menu cannot include the one dish everyone is watching.