Global turbulence and BRICS 2026: Can intra-BRICS trade replace the West?

Rarely has a BRICS Chairmanship arrived amid so much simultaneous turbulence. As India prepares to host the 18th BRICS Summit at Bharat Mandapam on 12-13 September 2026, under the theme ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability’, the grouping finds itself navigating a Russia-Ukraine war that refuses to end, an Iran-Israel-US crisis that has already claimed the life of Iran’s Supreme Leader, a US Congress moving to weaponise tariffs against Russian oil buyers, a Sino-Indian relationship only cautiously thawing after years of border tension and outcome of SCO 2026. Global turbulence, in other words, is not merely the backdrop to BRICS 2026; it has become the agenda.

A sequence not of India's choosing, but to India's advantage: Impact of SCO 2026

The 26th SCO Summit at Bishkek, held barely ten days before Bharat Mandapam, has effectively become a dress rehearsal for BRICS. The Bishkek Declaration condemned the US-Israel strikes on Iran, mourned the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, backed a just settlement on Palestine, and reaffirmed a “representative, democratic and equitable multipolar world order.” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian personally asked Prime Minister Modi, in his capacity as incoming BRICS Chair, to help build a common position against US-Israeli military action.

Since BRICS contains Iran alongside the more US-aligned UAE and Saudi Arabia, the same fault line that surfaced at Bishkek will resurface, in sharper form, at the BRICS table. Yet the sequencing works in India’s favour rather than against it. Having already co-signed Bishkek’s language on multipolarity and non-discriminatory trade, New Delhi arrives at its own Summit with a tested template for balancing Global South solidarity against its own strategic autonomy vis-à-vis Washington. Over 350 preparatory meetings across 25-plus cities this year testify to a chairmanship that has been methodical rather than reactive, the diplomatic equivalent of India’s subtraction and addition strategy: subtracting friction points before they harden into disputes, while adding areas of convergence the grouping can act upon together.

The tariff weapon and the limits of collective retaliation

The most immediate turbulence is economic. The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, passed by the US Senate, authorises tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the largest importers of Russian oil and gas, a measure that would strike directly at India, China and, depending on final designation, Brazil. It is legislation dressed as Ukraine policy but built, as several US analysts have noted, to double as general-purpose tariff leverage against precisely the economies BRICS represents.

Can BRICS respond as a bloc? The economics counsel caution. Intra-BRICS merchandise trade runs at roughly USD 700-800 billion annually, against combined BRICS trade with the US and EU exceeding USD 5 trillion. No BRICS economy, including China’s, is prepared to sacrifice Western market access for bloc solidarity. What the tariff threat can do, paradoxically, is accelerate what internal diplomacy has struggled to achieve: greater coordination on payment systems, supply chains and financial cooperation, precisely because external coercion, when it targets multiple members simultaneously, narrows the space for free-riding. The lesson for BRICS is unambiguous, intra-BRICS trade must expand substantially if the grouping is to develop genuine resilience against an economic hegemon acting alone.

Xi's possible visit and the China variable

Adding to the turbulence is the prospect of Xi Jinping’s first visit to India since 2019, pre-dating the deadly Galwan clash of 2020. A delegation of some 400 officials is reportedly being readied, even as reports of a fresh border friction point complicate the atmospherics and India’s top security official has been in Beijing for talks. If the visit materialises, it will be read globally as a signal that the India-China relationship is entering a phase of competitive coexistence rather than open confrontation, correct diplomacy for both capitals, given that neither benefits from a permanently frozen bilateral track feeding into a wider “Cold War 2.0” narrative that neither India nor China wishes to be boxed into.

This matters for BRICS because the China-India contradiction remains, as I have argued elsewhere, the grouping’s most consequential internal tension. Beijing increasingly treats BRICS as a pillar of an alternative architecture reducing Western influence; New Delhi insists on a genuinely multipolar Asia rather than a China-centric one, and on BRICS as a reform platform rather than an anti-Western instrument. A cordial Modi-Xi meeting at the margins of Bharat Mandapam would not resolve that contradiction, but it would demonstrate that BRICS’s consensus-based model can still accommodate rival visions without capsizing, itself a form of concirclement, in which India manages competing power centres around it rather than being encircled by their rivalries.

Energy security: The silent common thread

Running beneath the geopolitics is a shared, less discussed vulnerability – energy security. Any escalation that threatens the Strait of Hormuz strikes directly at India’s oil import bill and inflation, and at similar exposures across China, and much of the Global South that BRICS claims to represent. The Bishkek statements on energy cooperation and India’s own MoUs on climate and connectivity are not separate from this turbulence; they are hedges against it. Chabahar Port, discussed in Prime Minister Modi’s sideline meeting with Iran’s President, and India’s continued, calibrated purchase of discounted Russian crude despite tariff threats, both reflect the same underlying calculus: energy security first, ideological alignment a distant second.

Calibrated activism as the only viable course

None of this turbulence is likely to derail the Summit’s declared, deliberately non-controversial themes of resilience, innovation, cooperation and sustainability. The harder question is whether members will stay within those bounds once they are in the room together, given how many of them arrive carrying grievances, Iran’s demand for solidarity against the US and Israel, Russia’s search for sanctions relief, and China’s institutional ambitions for BRICS as counterweight to the West all sit uneasily against India’s preference for a reform-not-confrontation agenda. India’s answer has to be calibrated activism: firm enough to hold the chair’s agenda together, restrained enough not to let BRICS be captured by any single member’s confrontation with the West. This is consistent with New Delhi’s parallel engagement with the G20, the Quad and the SCO, competitive coexistence with all major poles rather than exclusive alignment with any one of them.

Conclusion

BRICS at twenty was already navigating internal contradictions of size, ideology and economic asymmetry. BRICS in 2026 must do so while absorbing external shocks, war, assassination, tariff coercion and great-power rivalry, arriving almost simultaneously. That the grouping’s chair this year is a nation practised in balancing exactly these pressures, and that its Summit follows so closely on the SCO’s own test of the same balancing act, is more opportunity than accident. Whether Bharat Mandapam converts turbulence into cohesion, or merely papers over it for another year, will depend on India’s ability to keep BRICS anchored to its founding purpose: reform of an unrepresentative global order, not participation in a new bloc confrontation. That, ultimately, is the measure by which this Chairmanship, and this Summit, should be judged.