A Candid Diagnosis of BRICS’s New Delhi Declaration: Rhetoric, Indicators & Stats

This article is not designed to skip the facts, just because its author is simply pro-BRICS. It’s an honest, realistic, friendly, and necessary analysis, that readers interested in a summarized diagnosis of the current state of geopolitical affairs need to know.

On September 12, the eleven leaders gathered at Bharat Mandapam did what New Delhi’s diplomats had spent a year quietly engineering: they adopted, by consensus, a roughly 140-point document without a single member raising an objection.

For a bloc that now spans Brazil to Indonesia, Russia to the UAE, and includes at least two capitals — Tehran and Abu Dhabi — that were reportedly still trading sharp remarks over West Asian affairs in the drafting room, unanimity on anything is an achievement worth noting before we start dissecting the declaration.

And there is a great deal of text to pick apart because the New Delhi Declaration is less a manifesto than a very long, very polite letter to an international order that has not been in the habit of answering its mail.

The Comparison Writes Itself

Strip away the diplomatic upholstery and the Declaration reads as a punch list against the institutions Washington built after 1945 and has since treated as permanent fixtures rather than living systems.

BRICS wants the UN Security Council reformed to give Brazil, India and the African and Latin American blocs a real seat at the table, a request first lodged decades ago and renewed, again, almost as ritual.

It wants the IMF and World Bank’s voting shares brought into line with the size of the economies actually generating global growth, rather than the size of the economies that generated it in 1944.

It wants the World Trade Organization’s two-tier dispute system restored to working order. And it’s demanding an end to unilateral tariffs, secondary sanctions and carbon border taxes dressed up as environmental policy, none of which names a country, yet all of which was written with one capital very much in mind. Needless to say which capital it is.

The comparison writes itself because the incumbent order has spent the intervening years demonstrating exactly the dysfunction BRICS is complaining about. The WTO’s Appellate Body has not been able to hear a new case since December 2019, after Washington spent several years blocking the appointment of judges it decided it no longer trusted; by this June, the selection process had been blocked for the ninety-eighth time.

The IMF’s sixteenth quota review, a 50% increase in the Fund’s resources, agreed by the Board of Governors backs in December 2023, still has not been ratified by the body that alone can hold it up the United States Congress, which controls enough voting power to veto any governance change on its own and has simply declined to schedule the vote.

It is visiting the irony for a moment: the very quota reform BRICS keeps invoking wouldn’t even shift relative voting power, since the 2023 increase was applied equally across the board. The real reallocation is supposed to happen under the next review, but nobody has set a date.

Borrowing the SC’s Unused Vocabulary

The security aspects of the........

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