BRICS Leaders Open a New Delhi Summit With Iran Present and Dollar Settlement on the Agenda

The eighteenth BRICS summit convened in New Delhi under the shadow of the war in the Gulf and concluded with leaders adopting the New Delhi Declaration by consensus, Indian officials said, a result Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government had pushed for as summit chair, with no member raising an objection. The New York Times had noted going into the summit that the group can do something Washington cannot, which is seat Iran at the same table as China, India and Russia while oil prices rise, and that the same war divides members whose interests as energy importers and exporters conflict. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto arrived in New Delhi as one of the newer members of the enlarged bloc.

The declaration addressed the division the Times had flagged. Indian and wire reports said the text was reached despite sharp differences among members over how to characterize the West Asia conflict, stressing conflict prevention and the peaceful resolution of disputes without naming individual states, and voicing concern about nuclear danger and about unilateral coercive measures that strain international law. Al Jazeera reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had used the run-up to criticise the dominance of the dollar in international settlement, both governments having direct reasons to want alternatives since sanctions restrict their access to dollar clearing. BBC Hindi reported that analysts saw India's central objective as preventing BRICS from becoming an anti-Western grouping, and the consensus text suggests that objective was largely met.

On money, the formal outcome was narrower than the rhetoric surrounding it. The declaration stopped short of endorsing de-dollarization, instead encouraging the bloc's payments task force to keep working toward cross-border settlement that is faster, cheaper and more accessible, a more cautious position than the one Pezeshkian pressed at the BRICS Business Forum, where he said the bloc's New Development Bank existed to help members reduce their dependence on the dollar. Members have been discussing settlement in local currencies and an independent cross-border payment system since last year's Rio meeting, and preparatory talks in May ended without a joint declaration. Washington has threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on countries that advance the bloc's payment plans, which raises the cost of every incremental step for trade-dependent members such as India, Brazil and Indonesia.

The monetary significance remains cumulative rather than dramatic. No currency union was on offer, and the final text did not go further than a mandate to keep studying settlement channels that reduce the share of trade requiring dollar clearing. What New Delhi produced was a political outcome rather than a monetary one: a bloc holding together long enough to sign one document despite a war that puts some of its members on opposite sides of the same barrel of oil.