The expanded grouping has the numbers to challenge the old world order. But wars, rivalries and conflicting interests may leave it more as a strategic forum than a coherent power bloc.
There is something almost paradoxical about the BRICS summit opening in New Delhi.
Here is a grouping that, on paper, looks increasingly like the outline of a new global power. It brings together some of the world's largest populations, fastest-growing economies and biggest energy producers. Its members stretch across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Its economic weight is substantial and its political reach is expanding.
Yet two of its members, Russia and Iran, are caught up in wars that expose precisely how difficult it is for BRICS to act as a coherent geopolitical force.
That contradiction will hang over Delhi.
The 18th BRICS summit, on 12 and 13 September, comes at a moment when the international order is being reshaped. Russia's war in Ukraine continues to challenge European security. Iran has been drawn into a major Middle Eastern conflict. The US-China rivalry is spilling into trade, technology and strategic competition. Tariffs, sanctions and competing supply chains have made economic interdependence itself a matter of national security.
It is precisely the kind of world in which BRICS ought to thrive.
But whether it can is another question.
BRICS was originally conceived as an economic grouping seeking greater representation for emerging economies in institutions designed when Western powers dominated the global economy. That argument has become harder to dismiss.
The economic centre of gravity has shifted towards Asia. China has become an industrial giant. India is increasingly central to global growth. The Gulf states command enormous financial and energy resources. Brazil remains a major agricultural and commodity power.
The expansion of BRICS reflects this changing reality. But numbers alone do not make a power.
The difficulty is that BRICS is not NATO. It has no common military doctrine, mutual-defence obligation or ideological glue. It is not even a conventional economic union.
Its members frequently disagree on the most important questions of international politics.
India and China are strategic competitors despite sitting at the same BRICS table. Saudi Arabia and Iran have sharply divergent regional interests. The Gulf states maintain close security relationships with the United States while deepening economic ties with China and Russia.
Brazil has little interest in becoming an appendage of either Beijing or Moscow. Indonesia has traditionally guarded its strategic autonomy. And then there is Russia.
Moscow would like BRICS to become part of a broader challenge to Western dominance. India, by contrast, has every reason to resist turning the organisation into an explicitly anti-Western alliance. New Delhi wants stronger relations with Washington and Europe, access to Russian energy and a stable relationship with China.
This is not a minor difference. It goes to the heart of what BRICS is supposed to become.
The war involving Iran makes the problem even clearer. Tehran naturally expects political support from fellow BRICS members. But the grouping contains countries with very different interests in the Middle East. If BRICS cannot agree on a major conflict involving one of its own members, it will struggle to behave like a geopolitical alliance. Perhaps it should not try.
There is another possibility: BRICS could become a strategic platform rather than a traditional bloc.
Its members do not need to agree on everything. They need to cooperate where their interests converge.
India's presidency appears to be moving in that direction, emphasising resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability, with attention to climate action, energy, digital cooperation and sustainable development.
That may sound less revolutionary than talk of a new world order. It is probably more realistic.
Consider the dollar. A common BRICS currency makes for dramatic headlines, but it remains a distant prospect. The economies are too different and their monetary policies too divergent. Local-currency trade is more plausible.
If BRICS members can gradually make it easier to settle trade without passing everything through the dollar, develop alternative payment arrangements and expand the use of their own financial institutions, they could reduce exposure to sanctions and financial pressure without trying to overthrow the dollar. That would be a quiet but significant shift.
The New Development Bank could play a similar role by financing infrastructure and development projects while expanding local-currency lending.
Supply-chain resilience, energy security, food security, digital infrastructure and climate finance offer other areas in which practical cooperation could produce results. The danger lies in becoming anti-Western.
There is a temptation in some BRICS capitals to portray the organisation as the nucleus of a new anti-Western order.
That could be its undoing.
Most BRICS members do not want to choose between Washington and Beijing. They want the freedom to deal with both.
The summit should be judged less by the grandeur of its communiqué than by what survives after the leaders leave.
Can BRICS make trade between members easier? Can it strengthen local-currency settlement? Can the New Development Bank finance more projects? Can members cooperate on energy, food and supply-chain security? Can they coordinate demands for reform of the IMF, World Bank and UN institutions?
And perhaps most importantly, can they maintain dialogue when their members are on opposite sides of a war? Those would be meaningful achievements.
A common currency would be impressive. A common foreign policy would be dramatic. Neither is necessary for BRICS to matter.
The world does not need another NATO.
It may, however, need a forum capable of telling established powers that the Global South will no longer accept decisions being made without its participation.
That is the opportunity before Delhi.
BRICS is becoming important not because its members agree, but because the world in which they operate is fragmenting.
The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, the weaponisation of trade and finance and the demand for strategic autonomy have created a space for institutions outside the traditional Western framework.
BRICS is one of the few platforms capable of occupying that space.
But its future will depend on understanding its limitations.
It is unlikely to become a unified geopolitical bloc soon. Russia and Iran's wars make that contradiction stark. India-China rivalry makes it harder still. The diversity of the expanded membership makes a single strategic doctrine almost impossible.
That does not make BRICS irrelevant.
Its most realistic future may be more interesting than the one its loudest advocates imagine.
It could become the negotiating table of a multipolar world: a place where countries that disagree on wars and ideology nevertheless cooperate on money, trade, energy, technology, climate and development.
That would not replace the Western-led order overnight. But it could gradually constrain its dominance.
The question, then, is not whether BRICS can replace the West. It probably cannot.
The more consequential question is whether BRICS can become powerful enough so that neither the West nor China can afford to ignore it.
If it succeeds, BRICS may not emerge as a new empire.
It may become something subtler and potentially more enduring: the institutional voice of countries that no longer want merely to be subjects of the global order, but want a hand in writing its rules.
