By TN Ashok
The 18th BRICS Summit, held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on September 12–13, 2026, was never going to escape Washington’s shadow — and it didn’t. Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi steered eleven member states toward a unanimously adopted New Delhi Declaration that pointedly avoided naming the United States,
President Donald Trump’s response arrived within hours: a renewed threat of tariffs of up to 100 percent on the bloc, extending a pressure campaign he has waged through 2026 against what he calls BRICS’s “anti-American” trajectory. The verdict from Delhi is unambiguous — India again succeeded in keeping the Global South’s loudest voices, China and Russia, from tipping the summit into open confrontation with the West. The verdict from Washington was equally unambiguous: Trump isn’t buying the distinction.
The 45-page, 140-paragraph New Delhi Declaration, adopted on the summit’s opening day, was a study in calculated ambiguity. It expressed “deep concern” over unilateral tariffs and sanctions, condemned “deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities” in the West Asia conflict, and called for “maximum restraint” — all without once naming the United States or President Trump. Bloomberg’s Delhi team, reporting from the summit, noted that the document was clearly aimed at Washington’s tariff campaign and sanctions policy even as it studiously avoided saying so.
That omission was India’s doing. Diplomatic sources cited by CDM Press described a tense negotiation in which Russia, China and Iran pushed for sharper language against the dollar and against Western financial institutions, while India — as this year’s chair — insisted on a “balanced” text that would not jeopardise New Delhi’s strategic partnership with Washington and Brussels. The compromise: a reference to “unilateral measures,” unnamed but unmistakable.
If India hoped ambiguity would buy goodwill in Washington, it didn’t. Trump has spent much of 2026 threatening BRICS members with punitive tariffs — as high as 100 percent — over any move to challenge the dollar’s dominance, and an additional 10 percent on countries he judges supportive of the bloc’s “anti-American policies.” ZeroHedge’s summit coverage noted that the response from Washington to the New Delhi Declaration was immediate, with Trump reiterating the 100-percent tariff threat even as the bloc’s actual step — a payments architecture for routing trade around Western financial rails — fell well short of a common currency, which India itself had blocked.
That gap between rhetoric and outcome matters. Bloomberg’s pre-summit assessment framed the meeting as occurring at “a defining moment” for BRICS precisely because Trump’s tariff threats and his description of the bloc as anti-American have hung over every session since. WION’s Delhi desk went further, arguing that Trump’s shadow was unmistakable “from tariffs and trade wars to the US-Iran conflict, energy security, sanctions on Russia and the future of the dollar” — even though he was never in the room.
For India specifically, the stakes were sharper than for any other member. With a roughly $500 billion trade relationship with the US hanging in the balance and tariffs on Indian goods having already been raised over its Russian oil purchases, retired diplomat Srikumar Menon told Outlook India he had no doubt Trump’s threats would push New Delhi toward “more cautious language” at the summit — a prediction the final text largely bore out.
Notably, no senior US official — not the State Department, not Trump himself in a formal statement — engaged with the New Delhi Declaration’s substance point by point. The response was blunt and transactional: a tariff threat, not a rebuttal of the bloc’s stated grievances over IMF quota shares or UN Security Council reform. That asymmetry — Delhi’s carefully hedged diplomatic language versus Washington’s blunt-instrument response — was itself read by several commentators as evidence that the Trump administration views BRICS less as a forum to be argued with than as a bloc to be priced out of existence through trade pressure.
If Washington’s reaction was combative, Brussels’s was cautious and analytical rather than confrontational. A commentary published by the EU Institute for Security Studies characterised India’s BRICS chairship not as a hostile pivot but as evidence of “multi-alignment” — India’s demonstrated capacity to operate across competing groupings, from the G20 to BRICS to the Quad, without collapsing into any single camp. The EUISS argued this has direct implications for “how Europe approaches its cooperation with New Delhi,” suggesting Brussels reads India’s balancing act as an opportunity rather than a threat.
That measured European posture echoes the tone Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa struck during their state visit to India in January 2026, when the two sides issued a joint statement built around continued EU-India engagement rather than confrontation. There was no equivalent fire-and-brimstone response from Brussels to the New Delhi Declaration — a contrast that Western commentators were quick to notice.
Coverage across major Western outlets converged on a similar reading: BRICS is not yet the unified anti-Western bloc its critics fear, but it is becoming a more capable challenger to Western-dominated institutions with each summit. A widely circulated wire analysis put it plainly — for the United States and its European allies, New Delhi “showed a grouping that is not yet a unified anti-Western alliance but is increasingly capable of challenging Western influence in diplomacy, trade and global governance.”
Al Jazeera’s takeaways piece stressed that the declaration reiterated commitment to “multipolarity” and quoted Modi’s own framing — a call to move the Global South “from being a rule-taker to a rule-shaper” — as the summit’s defining line, alongside his appeal to “transform this pyramid of privilege into a platform of partnership.”
Financial commentary was more skeptical of the dollar-threat narrative itself. One analysis argued that headlines proclaiming an imminent dollar collapse confuse payment plumbing with the deeper function of reserve-currency status, and that the summit’s actual achievement — a wholesale central bank digital currency settlement framework — represents incremental “de-risking,” not displacement.
India’s diplomatic management of this summit was, on balance, a success by its own metrics: it delivered a unanimous declaration despite genuine fractures over the West Asia war between Iran and Gulf members like the UAE, and it did so without inviting the kind of Western backlash a more explicitly anti-dollar text would have guaranteed.
But the reaction from Washington shows the limits of that strategy. Trump was never going to be placated by a declaration that avoided naming him while still targeting the substance of his tariff and sanctions policy — and he wasn’t.
Europe’s cooler, more analytical response suggests Brussels is willing to treat India’s balancing act as a diplomatic asset rather than a provocation, a distinction that may prove more consequential for New Delhi’s long-term positioning than anything Washington threatens next. China, for its part, leaves Delhi with the BRICS chairship for 2027 and, if the pattern holds, another attempt to push the currency question further than India was willing to go this year. (IPA service)
