Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Time went so far as to headline its assessment “Why a Divided Brics Poses No Challenge to America,” while emphasizing that India, the summit host, still wants Brics to accomplish things without antagonizing Washington. “Brics leaders gather in New Delhi as wars and rivalries strain the expanded bloc,” noted the Washington Post, while the NYT observed that while “China wants Brics to challenge American power, India wants it broad enough that countries don’t have to choose. In an interview ahead of the summit, he said: “India and China together can really make a multilateral world,” describing their cooperation as central to the emergence of a genuinely multipolar order, while noting that Brics represents roughly half the world’s population and economic output. Sachs, in fact, has gone further in pushing for an Asian partnership, arguing that “India should leave the Quad, period.”
TOI correspondent from Washington: It’s a club MAGA boss Donald Trump loves to hate — one that New Delhi not only refuses to leave but wants to lead. As India hugged Brics without breaking up with America, presiding over a geopolitical game of musical chairs where nobody gets eliminated, reviews in Washington of the just-concluded summit sounded more wary than alarmed despite the group’s growing strength and a reprimand of Uncle Sam without calling him by name. trade barriers, and sanctions, warning that such measures distort global commerce and violate the spirit of the WTO — while dancing around the issue of wars involving the US, Russia, and several members — the reaction in Washington to the summit has been more hmmm than horror While the New Delhi Declaration took aim at unilateral tariffs. The broad consensus in the American commentariat is that Brics is acquiring political heft, but remains far too divided to become a coherent anti-American alliance. Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist and prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy, made the argument much more emphatically.
PM Modi is expected to attend the G20 leaders’ summit to be hosted by President Trump in Miami December 14-15. However, New Delhi, which seems quite happy to collect diplomatic memberships the way some people collect airline miles, is staying on as a member of a rather moribund Quad while using its Brics chairmanship to portray itself as a leading voice of the Global South. So Washington takes comfort in the fact that Brics has not displaced the dollar, created a common currency or produced anything resembling Nato in reverse – things that President Trump growled against. Which is probably why, with its eminence grise out causing ripples in Ireland, there was no substantive public White House or State Department statement about the summit.