The Room That Still Holds

World leaders participating in a tree-planting ceremony at the 18th BRICS Summit held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on September 12, 2026. Leaders visible (left to right): Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Source: www.brics2026.gov.in

This needs to be understood simply - the New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the 18th BRICS Summit on 12 September 2026, with its one hundred and forty paragraphs of committee prose, is the only text of its kind issued anywhere this year that carries the assent of both the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Few people expected it. When the BRICS foreign ministers met in Delhi in May, they could not agree on a common text at all; the chair was reduced to issuing a summary in his own name. Consensus is not a courtesy in this grouping — it is the constitutional rule, and any single member can withhold it. Through the summer, the working assumption in most chanceries was that Iran would not sign anything that failed to name the United States and Israel, that the UAE would not sign anything that ignored Iranian strikes on its own soil, and that India's chair-ship would end with a chair's statement and a great deal of face-saving.

Consider the ground on which that assumption rested.

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for months, a blockade at one end and Iranian ordnance at the other, with roughly fifteen million barrels a day removed from the world's calculations. Saudi Arabia's answer was to push crude westward through its east–west pipeline to Yanbu and out through the Red Sea — an escape hatch that worked until the Houthis walked into Mokha, took a Red Sea island, and put the pipeline's western end under drone attack. Riyadh suspended the line as a precaution. Saudi cargoes now go the long way, through Suez or around the Cape, at a cost the market has already priced into every fuel pump from Rotterdam to Ranchi. Bab al-Mandab and Hormuz, the two gates of the Indian Ocean's western approaches, are simultaneously unreliable for the first time in the modern history of the oil trade. This is not a regional crisis, but a structural one.

It is precisely at this moment that BRICS produced a joint text — and the way it did so is instructive. Paragraph 28 expresses deep concern at escalation in West Asia and then inserts a phrase that will be read for years: recalling our respective national positions. That clause is the hinge on which the whole document turns. It does not paper over the disagreement; it formally acknowledges that a disagreement exists and refuses to let it be dispositive. Paragraph 29 goes further, condemning deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and on peaceful nuclear facilities under full IAEA safeguards — language that Tehran can read as a condemnation of the campaign against it, and that Abu Dhabi can read as a condemnation of strikes on installations in the Gulf. Both readings are available; neither is foreclosed.

Paragraph 64 then insists on undisrupted energy flows and the protection of critical energy infrastructure, including cross-border infrastructure, without naming a single strait. This is not evasion. It is the oldest craft in diplomacy: finding the sentence that two adversaries can each carry home.

The sceptic's objection is obvious and should be met head-on. A paragraph does not reopen a strait. No clause in this declaration will lower the insurance premium on a VLCC transiting Bab al-Mandab, and none will stop a drone. Critics have argued, not without evidence, that BRICS under India's chair-ship has been conspicuously quieter on the war than it was under Brazil's, and that the price of consensus was the excision of anything with teeth. There is force in that. A document that condemns violations of international law while declining to name any violator is, by design, a floor rather than a ceiling.

But the value of a floor is that people can stand on it. And the harder question the sceptic must answer is: which other room? The Security Council is paralysed by the very powers whose conduct is at issue. The G7 does not contain Iran and never will. The Gulf Cooperation Council exists in part to exclude Iran. The OIC has not produced a coherent line on an intra-Muslim security crisis in decades. NATO is a party, not a mediator. Strip away the currency talk and the de-dollarisation headlines that so exercise Washington, and what BRICS actually is — its irreducible function — is a room in which states that are shooting at each other's neighbourhoods still sit at the same table and put their names to the same page. In September 2026, it is the only such room with Tehran and Abu Dhabi both in it.

This is where the case for BRICS has always been misunderstood, by its boosters as much as its detractors. It was never plausible as a bloc; it has no common ideology, no shared threat perception, no alliance obligation, and its members are frequently rivals. Its coherence is not of the alliance type but of the congress type — closer in spirit to what the 1955 Bandung conference attempted than to anything in the post-1945 Atlantic architecture, a lineage the declaration itself invokes at paragraph 16. Such bodies are judged not by what they compel but by what they keep open. Their output is optionality. And optionality, in a year when two of the world's chokepoints closed at once, is not a small commodity.

There is a lesson here for India specifically, which spent months in back-channel work to get this text. A civilisational state that has spent three thousand years accommodating irreconcilable positions within a single frame has a comparative advantage in exactly this kind of labour. It is unglamorous. It produces no photograph. It yields a document that a hurried reader will dismiss as boilerplate.

But the boilerplate is the point. Wars end when adversaries can be got into a room and given a sentence they can both sign. Delhi has just demonstrated that such a room still exists, and that it is not in Geneva or New York. That is not a small thing to have proved in a week when the oil was going around Africa.