When leaders from Russia, China, and Iran gather under the banner of BRICS, the event is more than a crowded diplomatic photo opportunity. It is a reminder that the world’s revisionist powers are increasingly comfortable using international forums to advertise a simple message: the United States no longer gets to set the terms of global order by itself.
If such a meeting takes place in India, that message becomes even more significant. India is not an American adversary. It is a strategic partner of the United States, a member of the Quad, and a country Washington has rightly viewed as central to balancing China in the Indo-Pacific. Yet India is also committed to strategic autonomy, and its willingness to host a BRICS summit that includes Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran would underscore an uncomfortable truth for U.S. policymakers: many countries want closer ties with America without signing up for America’s full geopolitical agenda.
What BRICS Is — and What It Is Not
BRICS began as a grouping of major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. In recent years it has sought to expand its global profile and present itself as a counterweight to Western-led institutions. Its members do not agree on everything. In fact, some of them are strategic rivals. India and China have deep border disputes. Russia and China may be aligned against the West today, but that does not make them natural long-term partners. And many BRICS states have different economic systems, regional priorities, and security concerns.
So it would be a mistake to treat BRICS as a formal anti-American alliance on the model of NATO. It is not that. But it would be an equally serious mistake to dismiss it as empty theater. International politics often moves first through symbolism, then through institutions, and only later through hard power arrangements. Forums like BRICS matter because they create habits of coordination. They give governments a stage on which to criticize Western sanctions, promote trade outside the dollar system, and test the appeal of a more fragmented international order.
Why Russia, China, and Iran Matter Together
The presence of Russia, China, and Iran in the same diplomatic frame would be especially notable because each has strong reasons to weaken American leverage.
Russia, isolated by the West after its invasion of Ukraine, has every incentive to demonstrate that it still has powerful partners and access to major non-Western markets. China wants to present itself as the organizing center of a post-American world, especially across the Global South. Iran, under long-standing U.S. sanctions and in growing alignment with both Moscow and Beijing, benefits from every opportunity to normalize its role in alternative diplomatic and economic structures.
None of these governments shares America’s interest in a rules-based order grounded in transparent commerce, freedom of navigation, and political accountability. They may use that language when convenient, but their actual preference is for a system in which power is less constrained, authoritarian states face fewer penalties, and the West has less ability to isolate rogue behavior.
That is the larger significance of a high-profile BRICS gathering. The point is not just who is in the room. It is the model of world politics they are trying to legitimize.
India’s Balancing Act
For conservatives in the United States, India’s role deserves especially careful attention. There is a temptation in Washington to sort countries neatly into camps: with us or against us, democratic or authoritarian, aligned or hostile. India does not fit comfortably into those categories, and pretending otherwise only leads to bad policy.
New Delhi has long pursued an independent foreign policy. It has maintained defense ties with Russia even while expanding security cooperation with the United States. It competes sharply with China, yet remains with China in BRICS and other multilateral settings. It wants Western investment and technology, but it does not want to be seen as an American junior partner.
That can frustrate U.S. officials, but it should not surprise them. Great powers behave like great powers, and India increasingly sees itself as one. The prudent American response is not moralistic scolding. It is clear-eyed statecraft. Washington should deepen ties with India where interests align, especially on maritime security, supply chains, defense technology, and balancing Chinese influence, while recognizing that India will continue to hedge.
A mature foreign policy does not confuse partnership with control.
What This Means for the United States
The deeper issue raised by a BRICS summit of this kind is whether the United States is adjusting seriously enough to a world in which rival coalitions are becoming more organized. Too often, Washington oscillates between complacency and melodrama. One camp insists every anti-Western gathering is overhyped. Another speaks as though American decline is already settled fact. Both instincts are unhelpful.
The United States remains the world’s leading military power, the issuer of the dominant reserve currency, and the central player in the most capable alliance network on earth. Those are not small advantages. But advantages erode when they are treated as permanent entitlements rather than assets requiring stewardship.
That stewardship starts with domestic strength. A country burdened by chronic fiscal disorder, political drift, and industrial vulnerability will eventually project weakness abroad. Washington cannot talk convincingly about long-term competition with China while failing to secure critical supply chains, reform permitting, maintain a credible defense industrial base, and put its own budget on a more sustainable path.
It also requires diplomatic seriousness. If the United States wants countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to resist the pull of Chinese and Russian influence, it must offer more than lectures and slogans. It needs trade relationships, investment frameworks, energy partnerships, and reliable security commitments. Nations do not align with us because they enjoy hearing about our values in abstract terms. They align when they judge that American power is competent, durable, and in their interest.
A Warning Against Strategic Laziness
There is a broader lesson here for American policymakers. When authoritarian powers build parallel institutions, coordinate around sanctions resistance, and court non-Western states dissatisfied with the existing order, the correct response is not panic. It is discipline.
That means distinguishing between the real and the performative. BRICS still contains internal contradictions. India is not China. China is not Russia. Iran’s ambitions are not identical to either. But internal contradictions alone do not neutralize strategic intent. The United States has often made the mistake of assuming rival powers will remain too divided to matter. History is not kind to that assumption.
What is needed now is a foreign policy that is confident without being smug, competitive without being reckless, and grounded in the old but still necessary understanding that power matters. America’s allies and partners are watching closely. So are its adversaries.
A summit in India featuring Russia, China, and Iran would not by itself rewrite the global balance of power. But it would reveal, once again, that the contest over that balance is already underway. The question for Washington is whether it intends to meet that challenge with strategic patience and institutional seriousness, or with the familiar habit of noticing the problem only after others have started organizing around it.
