The BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in Delhi, in the shadow of the ongoing West Asia war, was expected to be uncomfortable. But with Iran’s Abbas Aragchi using the platform to call on fellow member states to formally condemn what he termed “unlawful aggression” by the United States and Israel against Tehran, the gathering has quickly exposed just how fractured the bloc’s once-unified voice has become.
No country feels the tension of this meeting more acutely than the host itself. India, holding the BRICS chair for 2026, is navigating a very complex diplomatic moment. New Delhi’s partnership with the UAE — a fellow BRICS member — is deepening and its historically calibrated ties with Israel makes matters more complicated. Demanding India choose a side is, effectively, asking it to rupture multiple strategic relationships at once.
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Why is the BRICS meeting in Delhi significant?
The stakes are not merely diplomatic for most nations attending the meeting. India is the world’s third-largest oil importer and the Strait of Hormuz — which Iran has effectively closed to uncleared vessels since early March — is a critical artery for its energy supplies.
The blockade, through which 20% of the world’s oil and LNG once flowed freely, has triggered one of the biggest supply disruptions in recent history. The energy crisis created by the war cuts across the BRICS membership in different ways. China, like India, depends heavily on Gulf oil transiting the strait. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both BRICS members, are among the world’s largest oil exporters and both ship through the very waterway now controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Even members less directly reliant on Hormuz transit — Brazil, Egypt, South Africa — are reeling from surging global fuel prices that the disruption has accelerated.
The United States, meanwhile, escalated in April by announcing a naval blockade on ships entering or leaving Iranian ports, compounding the global supply shock. Although a ceasefire is nominally in place, sporadic attacks in the Gulf have continued. This meeting is expected to help the nations reach some kind of consensus on managing the rising fuel and gas prices.
No easy consensus
Analysts are not holding their breath for a breakthrough declaration. Rafael Loss, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Al Jazeera, “It is unlikely that the BRICS summit will produce a consensus statement that goes beyond condemning attacks on nations’ sovereignty in general terms.”
The BRICS meeting also coincided with a visit by US President Donald Trump to Beijing, where he discussed the Iran conflict with Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to a White House official, both leaders agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open and that Iran should never obtain nuclear weapons.
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Limits of BRICS
What this moment reveals is the fundamental structural tension within BRICS: a bloc built on the promise of a multipolar world order, now struggling to act as one when that order is directly tested. Iran wants condemnation. India wants stability. China is talking to Washington. The UAE wants open shipping lanes. And Saudi Arabia is watching oil prices with equal parts anxiety and calculation.
The New Delhi meeting may yet produce careful communiqués and diplomatic pleasantries. But the Strait of Hormuz — and the war that closed it — has made BRICS’ internal contradictions impossible to paper over.
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