BRICS Softens Its Iran Line to Keep the Club Intact

BRICS leaders adopted the New Delhi Declaration on Saturday after Iran and the UAE, members on opposite sides of the Gulf war, accepted a call for maximum restraint. Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the 18th summit that no member had raised an objection.

The two-day meeting opened at Bharat Mandapam under India’s 2026 BRICS chairship theme, Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. The text also asks members to keep trade, supply chains and energy moving, a clause written for a waterway that has been a battlefield since February 28.

Both Sides of the Gulf War Share a Table

The 2024 expansion put Tehran and Abu Dhabi in the same consensus club. Any one member can block a leaders’ text, and both had hardened their drafts before Saturday’s session. Negotiators closed the gap only after back-channel talks, and Modi announced the result at the end of the first day.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the room. So did Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, standing in for the UAE. Their governments have been on opposite sides of the war the United States and Israel have waged on Iran since February 28, a conflict that resumed tit-for-tat strikes after a pause through much of August.

Abu Dhabi had cut economic ties with Tehran. Iranian missiles, drones and tanker attacks had already hit the UAE. On the sidelines in Delhi they met face to face for the first time since that opening day of fighting. The Iranian embassy in India posted the encounter as a diplomatic fact, not as a ceasefire.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian met with UAE Crown Prince Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit. pic.twitter.com/keBkQ8VIvu

— Iran in India (@Iran_in_India) September 12, 2026

Getting both men into one photograph is the host’s product. It is also the reason the war paragraph had to be written so that neither capital had to endorse the other’s account.

WHO SAT IN BHARAT MANDAPAM

• Heads of government: Modi hosted Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Pezeshkian, Cyril Ramaphosa, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Abiy Ahmed and Prabowo Subianto.
• Deputies: the UAE sent Sheikh Khaled; Brazil sent Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva; Saudi Arabia, still listed by the Indian chair among 11, sent its foreign minister.
• Institutions: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres attended, as did the heads of the WHO and the WTO.

Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for Guterres, said he had not yet seen the document, then added that “the fact that the group could come up with a joint declaration is something to the credit of India’s presidency.”

Last Year’s Condemnation Did Not Survive Expansion

In Rio de Janeiro on July 6, 2025, the same club still named the target. Leaders condemned “the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran since 13 June 2025” and said those strikes “constitute a violation of international law,” without naming Washington or Israel. The 12-day campaign, from June 13 to June 24, 2025, had hit Iranian military sites and the nuclear plants at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan.

Saturday’s West Asia paragraph keeps the worry and drops the verdict. It also inserts a shield phrase, “recalling our respective national positions,” that lets Iran and the UAE sign the same sentence. A foreign ministers’ meeting in May closed without a joint line on the conflict. Delhi’s test was whether a leaders’ text could exist at all.

THE LANGUAGE SHIFT FROM RIO TO DELHI

The nuclear clause is the leftover from Rio. Leaders again voiced “serious concern over deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards” of the IAEA, and said safety rules must hold in armed conflict. They still would not say who they meant.

The Strait They Can Still Agree On

The sentence every capital could live with is about cargo. The text stresses the need “to work together to maintain smooth flow of global trade, supply chains and energy, in accordance with applicable international law.” Egypt’s el-Sisi, in a closed session, tied Middle East fighting to “the global economy, trade and energy flows, and supply chains.”

On Friday, Modi used his meeting with Pezeshkian to press for freedom of navigation and commerce, and for the safety of ship crews. India, which imports about 90 percent of its crude, has spent five months talking to Tehran about passage for India-bound ships, and the two leaders have held three calls on the strait since the war began. Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim raised the same waterway with Pezeshkian on Saturday.

About a fifth of the world’s oil usually moves through Hormuz. The International Energy Agency estimated August flows at 7.6 million barrels a day, 13.1 million below pre-war levels, with about 10 million barrels a day of Gulf output still shut in. Iran did not treat every flag the same; vessels tied to a short list of states, including India, kept some access while traffic to the United States, Israel and allied ports was blocked.

HORMUZ IN AUGUST

• Usual share: about a fifth of the world’s oil transits the strait in peacetime.
• August flows: 7.6 million barrels a day, per the IEA.
• Gap vs pre-war: 13.1 million barrels a day.
• Shut-in Gulf output: about 10 million barrels a day in August, the IEA said.

Xi, on his first visit to India in seven years, said the fighting had caused “serious losses to people across the region” and “does not serve the common interests of the international community.” The communique’s energy clause is that point in committee language: keep the oil moving, argue about the war later.

What the Text Does With Payments and Tariffs

BRICS will keep working on faster, cheaper cross-border payments and on trade settled in members’ own currencies, with no common BRICS money and no single replacement for the dollar. The New Delhi Declaration tells the BRICS Payment Task Force to pursue options that are “fast, low-cost, more accessible, efficient, transparent, and safe,” while “respecting national priorities” and admitting there is “no one-size-fits-all approach.”

That is the file the club can still move because the split is with Washington, not with each other. The text condemns “unilateral coercive measures” and “unilateral economic sanctions and secondary sanctions,” and says they hit the poor first. It also voices “serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules,” the complaint finance ministers had already tabled against duties the United States has hung on several members.

Donald Trump has called the grouping “anti-American” and threatened extra tariffs on countries that line up with it. The Delhi answer is plumbing, not a new currency: link national payment and messaging systems, study local-currency settlement, and keep the New Development Bank expanding. Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s petroleum minister, said the text also backs interoperable cross-border payment systems as part of a wider push on supply chains.

China and Russia, the two permanent UN Security Council members in the club, again backed a greater role for India and Brazil at the UN, including the Security Council. The trade chapter supports WTO accession bids by Ethiopia and Iran, and notes China’s zero-tariff treatment for 53 African countries with which it has diplomatic ties. Those lines cost Iran and the UAE nothing they were not already willing to give.

Seven Years Later, Xi Is Back in Delhi

Xi landed on Saturday morning. The trip is his first to India in seven years, and it sits beside a slow thaw that both governments have advertised in public handshakes. Official photographs from Bharat Mandapam show Modi and Xi shaking hands after the closed session of member countries, the image New Delhi wanted from day one.

The chair used the 20th year since the 2006 founding to talk about outdated institutions. Modi said the day’s discussion made clear that “the changing world cannot be steered by outdated institutions” and that reforms were needed “in representation, responsiveness and rule-making.” He told colleagues the New Delhi Declaration “provides a clear direction for our shared resolve” and that it was now their job to turn resolutions into results.

India logged more than 400 BRICS meetings in 30 cities during the chair year. Partner countries sat in the outreach track; Malaysia’s Anwar was among the guests. The show of width is real. So is the limit: a family that now includes Iran, the UAE, Egypt and Indonesia can fill a round table and still fail to describe the war in the Gulf in one voice.

The One Clause That Names Israel

Where the Iran war is anonymous, Gaza and Lebanon are not. Leaders voiced “deep concern on the continued violence in Gaza despite the ceasefire agreement of October 2025,” opposed forced displacement, and backed full UN membership for Palestine in a two-state frame on the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as capital. They restated support for UNRWA and noted the International Court of Justice measures in the case South Africa brought against Israel.

Israel is named once as a government that should move troops. On Lebanon, the text welcomes a ceasefire, demands full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and then does what the Iran paragraph would not.

We call on Israel to respect the terms agreed with the Lebanese government and to withdraw its occupying forces from all of the Lebanese territories, in which they remain.

BRICS leaders, New Delhi Declaration, 18th BRICS Summit

Four Indonesian UNIFIL peacekeepers are among the dead the text mourns. That clause was available because Indonesia is now a full member, and because naming Israel over Lebanon does not force the UAE to recant its war with Iran. The Pahalgam paragraph was available for the host: leaders condemned “in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025, during which 26 people were killed and many more injured,” and called for zero tolerance, including on cross-border movement of attackers.

Oman Meets on Monday With No Hormuz Deal

Day two still sits on the calendar, September 13, with outreach sessions still to run. The war the communique declined to adjudicate does not pause for the family photo. A senior Iranian official said a meeting with Gulf states planned for Monday in Oman would discuss the Strait of Hormuz and was not expected to produce a signed agreement on the blocked waterway.

Saturday’s document is the most the expanded club could say with Iran and the UAE in the same hall. It keeps last year’s alarm about nuclear plants, names Israel on Lebanon, and asks everyone to hold fire so tankers can move. The joint text exists. The strait, as of Saturday, still does not work like a strait.