BRICS Expansion Has Given the Bloc More Weight and Less Unity

BRICS foreign ministers arrived in New Delhi in May 2026 with Iran, one of the group’s newest members, at war. Gulf shipping was under pressure. Oil markets were reacting to danger around the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran wanted the forum to condemn the United States and Israel. India, as chair, tried to keep a larger and more awkward room together.

The meeting ended without a joint statement.

That failure gave the crisis its institutional meaning. Expanded BRICS had become harder for outside powers to ignore after adding Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia, along with other new participants. They joined the original five members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The same expansion made a common wartime line harder to produce. A larger BRICS now carries more diplomatic weight, more energy exposure, and more internal friction.

AP reported that the New Delhi meeting ended with India’s chair statement recording national positions because members held different views. Reuters described the meeting as a test of BRICS unity and reported that Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi pressed members to condemn U.S. and Israeli actions.

The test was narrower than many outside readings suggested. BRICS was never going to behave like NATO, the European Union, or a military command. It has no alliance treaty and no machinery for binding members to another member’s security narrative. The sharper question was whether a consensus-based political forum could turn shared discomfort with Western dominance into usable diplomatic language during a war involving one of its own members.

New Delhi answered that question bluntly. BRICS gave Iran a stage and gave India a chair’s role in crisis diplomacy. The expanded bloc still lacked a single wartime script.

A Bigger Forum Has a Harder Time Speaking as One

BRICS has always worked best as a forum for signaling, institutional bargaining, and broad political alignment. Its members use summits and ministerial meetings to argue for a larger non-Western voice in global governance, criticize unilateral sanctions, defend sovereignty language, and coordinate around parts of the development agenda. Those themes leave room for different national interests.

A war around Iran left much less room.

General language about the UN Charter, sanctions, development, and sovereignty can survive inside a wide grouping because members hear different national priorities in the same phrases. A direct statement on the Iran conflict would have required members to decide how far those principles should travel. Would BRICS condemn Washington and Jerusalem in terms close to Iran’s position? Would it imply criticism of a Gulf member that Tehran accused of helping its enemies? Would it let a diplomatic forum become a wartime caucus?

Those questions exposed the cost of enlargement. The older BRICS format could claim a degree of coherence partly because it had fewer regional disputes inside the room. The expanded format has more reach and more credibility as a gathering of non-Western powers. It also imports more conflicts, dependencies, and bilateral relationships into every attempted consensus.

The missing communiqué therefore did more than embarrass the chair. It showed the political trade-off behind expansion. BRICS is more visible because it is larger. It is less nimble for the same reason.

India Tried to Keep the Room Together

India’s position shaped the meeting. As the 2026 BRICS chair, New Delhi had to manage Iran’s demand for a sharper response while preventing the group’s internal split from becoming the story. India also had its own exposure to the crisis: energy imports, maritime trade, Gulf relationships, and the risk that insecurity around Hormuz or the Red Sea would feed into prices and shipping costs.

According to Reuters, Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar emphasized safe and unimpeded maritime flows through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea as vital for global economic well-being. He also criticized unilateral coercive measures inconsistent with international law and the UN Charter.

That pairing was careful. The sanctions language echoed familiar BRICS themes and gave Iran some of the vocabulary it wanted. The maritime language pulled the meeting toward a practical concern shared by major importers: keeping vessels moving and energy routes open. India could speak as chair of a non-Western forum without sponsoring Tehran’s requested condemnation.

India had further reasons to avoid an Iranian maximal line. Reuters has described New Delhi’s deepening relationship with the UAE, a state Iran accused of involvement in operations against it. The dispute therefore cut through India’s own Gulf diplomacy. New Delhi was mediating inside BRICS while protecting relationships outside the meeting room.

A chair’s statement was the natural fallback. It preserved a record of the discussion and avoided pretending that members had endorsed a common position. That is weaker than a joint communiqué. It is also a cleaner outcome than a forced consensus that would have collapsed under the first serious reading.

Iran Won Access, Then Met the Limits of Access

Iran entered the meeting with the clearest diplomatic objective. Reuters wrote that Araghchi urged BRICS members to condemn what he called unlawful aggression by the United States and Israel and to resist Western hegemony. AP also reported Tehran’s push for condemnation.

BRICS membership made that appeal more useful for Iran than it would have been from outside the group. Tehran could frame the war as a test of non-Western solidarity in a room where many governments already criticize unilateral sanctions and Western dominance in international institutions. The forum gave Iran a way to internationalize its case beyond familiar allies and adversaries.

Access, however, is different from control. The absence of a joint statement showed that other members were unwilling to turn BRICS language into an endorsement of Iran’s wartime narrative. The group gave Tehran a microphone. A disciplined coalition remained out of reach.

The UAE dispute made the limits sharper. Araghchi accused the United Arab Emirates of direct involvement in military operations against Iran, Reuters reported. In the expanded BRICS format, that accusation landed inside the room rather than outside it. The target was another participant in the same broader grouping.

That changed the meeting from an exercise in external condemnation into an internal stress test. A forum can more easily criticize an outside power when its members face no direct conflict with one another. It becomes harder when a new member asks for solidarity while accusing another participant of helping the other side.

This is the diplomatic bargain Iran accepted by joining a wider forum rather than a tighter alliance. BRICS can amplify grievances against Western power. It cannot automatically convert those grievances into a collective line when member interests diverge.

Energy Exposure Set the Floor for the Discussion

The Iran crisis also reached BRICS through oil, shipping, and insurance costs. Reuters described the Strait of Hormuz as a corridor associated with roughly one-fifth of global oil and energy flows. Its reporting also described reduced vessel passages, tanker delays, and hundreds of vessels unable to transit safely during the crisis. Separate Reuters energy reporting placed Brent crude near $108 and WTI above $100, with Saudi exports and production sharply lower in March 2026.

Those details explain why India’s maritime language carried so much weight. For large importers, diplomatic alignment was only one part of the crisis. The same war affected refineries, inflation, shipping insurance, and balance-of-payments management. A disrupted Gulf route can move from foreign-policy debate to domestic economic pressure quickly.

China had similar structural reasons to care about open sea lanes, even though available public reporting leaves Beijing’s detailed line from the New Delhi meeting unclear. Reuters said China was represented by its ambassador to India and has heavy exposure to Middle Eastern and African crude routes. That exposure gives Beijing a clear interest in de-escalation and reliable shipping. The public record still falls short of showing that China led the BRICS response.

The same discipline should apply to the rest of the expanded grouping. Brazil and South Africa remained central. Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Russia and the UAE gave the forum broader political reach, along with other participants. The public record from the meeting supports a narrower conclusion: a larger BRICS had to manage a crisis whose costs and risks fell unevenly across its members.

That uneven exposure helps explain why consensus was elusive. Iran wanted political condemnation. Importers wanted sea lanes open. Gulf partners wanted room to protect their own relationships. Russia could favor anti-U.S. language while still wanting BRICS to remain broad enough to serve as a durable non-Western platform. Those incentives overlap in slogans and diverge in crisis language.

New Delhi Showed the Shape of Expanded BRICS

The New Delhi meeting clarified what BRICS has become after enlargement. It is a heavier diplomatic venue, able to convene states that Western-led institutions cannot easily absorb or direct. Iran would not have pressed the forum so publicly if membership carried no value. India would not have worked for a common line if the chairmanship were empty theater. AP and Reuters would not have treated the meeting as a test of unity if the grouping had no political weight.

The same meeting showed the limits of that weight. BRICS can criticize unilateral coercive measures, argue for more representative institutions, and offer governments a platform outside the Atlantic diplomatic circuit. It struggles when those broad positions have to become a specific judgment on a war involving a member, touching the trade routes of several others, and entangling another participant in the accusation itself.

The result fits the forum’s design. BRICS was built for political coordination among sovereign states that guard their freedom of maneuver. Expansion has made that design more consequential and more exposed. The forum now has more countries able to use it, more crises likely to enter it, and more occasions when its members will prefer a chair’s statement to a joint line.

The first major war-stress test of expanded BRICS therefore produced an ambiguous result: visible enough to draw pressure, divided enough to resist alignment, and useful enough that its members are unlikely to walk away. Future crises will probably repeat the pattern. The larger room will keep attracting governments that want a non-Western stage. The same room will keep making unanimity harder to obtain.