BRICS Is Not One Bloc - It's At Least Three, And Conflating Them Is a Mistake

One Label, Three Different Foreign Policies

The Flattening Problem Every

BRICS summit produces the same headline framing: is this bloc turning anti-Western? The question itself is the mistake. It assumes 11 countries share one motive for being in the room, when a closer look shows something closer to three separate strategies wearing the same badge.

Three Positions, Not One

At one end sits Iran, for whom resistance to US power is close to a founding political identity - BRICS offers legitimacy and a partial shield against isolation and confrontation with the West is the point, not a side effect.

Russia and China occupy a different position: both are locked in genuine competition with Washington, using de-dollarisation and institutional reform to reduce Western leverage over them, but neither actually wants to exit the Western-shaped order - they want a bigger, more equal seat inside it.

Then there is India, alongside Brazil, pursuing something different again: strategic autonomy without alienation. Both maintain deep institutional and economic ties to the West - India through the Quad, Brazil through its own historical and diplomatic roots in the Euro-Atlantic world - while using BRICS to secure multi-aligned supply chains and push for reform, not rupture.

Brazil made this explicit just ahead of this summit, publicly rejecting both anti-West framing and any move toward a common BRICS currency.

Why Conflating Them Is Costly

Collapsing these three postures into one "anti-Western bloc" label does real damage in both directions. It hands BRICS's harder-edged members - chiefly China and Russia - false cover to claim the whole grouping backs their confrontational posture, when India and Brazil's presence is precisely what prevents that from being true.

And it hands Western capitals, particularly Washington, a lazy justification for treating the bloc's diverse members as a single undifferentiated threat - the same logic behind tariff threats aimed indiscriminately at any country expanding local-currency trade, regardless of that country's actual posture toward the West.

India's Actual Job This Weekend

India's genuine diplomatic task at this summit isn't managing a joint communiqué - it's making sure this distinction survives contact with both BRICS's own internal pressure to present a unified anti-Western front and external commentary eager to read the whole bloc that way. India's own dual membership - sitting inside both BRICS and the Quad without contradiction - is itself the clearest evidence that the spectrum is real, not a diplomatic fiction invented to avoid an uncomfortable choice.