BRICS New Delhi Summit 2026

India opened the summit carrying two agendas at once: more intra-BRICS trade and a push to settle that trade in local currencies rather than dollars, which would shrink global demand for the dollar and blunt the US's ability to use financial sanctions (cutting a country off from dollar-based payments) as a foreign-policy weapon. The problem was visible from day one: an enlarged bloc that now spans Gulf energy exporters and Asian energy importers is powerful on paper but almost impossible to steer, because the US-Iran war splits members in different directions before anyone has even sat down.

With Iran's president in the room and Zelenskyy offering to meet Putin at the G20 in Miami, New Delhi became the clearest illustration yet of India's strategic autonomy, the foreign-policy idea that a country refuses to join either camp and instead keeps lines open to both. That positioning gave Modi a platform no Western capital could occupy, but it also meant India had to hold together a summit where members disagreed on the two biggest wars on the planet.

The unanimous New Delhi Declaration condemning unilateral sanctions is the most concrete output of the summit and the part that matters most for markets: sanctions only isolate a target if everyone enforces them, and a bloc covering this share of global GDP collectively refusing to do so makes the tool significantly weaker. Longer term, every percentage point of commodity trade that shifts to non-dollar settlement reduces demand for US dollars, which puts upward pressure on what the US government has to pay to borrow, because the dollar's reserve-currency status has historically let Washington borrow more cheaply than it otherwise could.

Finance Minister Sitharaman's push on global tax rules extended the summit's logic from trade and sanctions into a third arena: the OECD's proposed 15% global minimum corporate tax, a floor on what multinationals pay wherever they operate, was written by rich-country governments and limits the tax incentives emerging markets use to attract investment. If BRICS coordinates a rival position, multinationals face a fragmented tax landscape and the reform process stalls, which is exactly the kind of slow-moving structural shift that reprices assets over years rather than weeks.