The family photograph did the political work the summit’s final declaration could not.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood shoulder to shoulder as the Brics summit closed in New Delhi on Sunday – a single frame capturing an 11-nation bloc that now spans four continents and nearly half the world’s population.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres attended the gathering of emerging economies alongside World Trade Organization Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, New Development Bank president Dilma Rousseff and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank president Zou Jiayi.
As Washington leans on tariffs and steps back from the institutions it once dominated, the United Nations, the WTO and the WHO sat at a table built by the Global South.
What the leaders signed – the New Delhi Declaration – was neither a revolt against the dollar nor a blueprint for a new world order. It was a hedge.
Experts say the document treats de-dollarisation as insurance. By promoting local-currency settlement, linked payment rails and a louder voice within the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Brics members aim to ensure trade keeps moving even if the United States turns its dollar, or the institutions around it, into a political weapon.
“As we move irreversibly to a multipolar world, all countries must work to strengthen and safeguard a multilateral system that delivers for all with the United Nations at its centre,” Guterres told the summit.
Multipolarity, he said, required “reforming multilateral institutions, including the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods system, to reflect the world of today”.
“From Gaza, to the broader crisis in the Middle East, to Ukraine, Sudan and beyond, our world needs peace.”
Brics finance ministers and central bank governors had already set the economic demand. Before the summit they called for quota changes at the IMF, a bigger voice for emerging economies at the World Bank, and leadership contests not locked to the West.
“We reiterate the urgent need to reform the Bretton Woods Institutions to enhance their legitimacy,” their joint statement said.
India closed the door on the idea of a common Brics currency – a door US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to slam.
“There is no proposal in the Brics for a Brics currency, as of now,” Sudhakar Dalela, India’s Brics sherpa, told reporters on Saturday.
He added that local-currency settlement was “a practical mechanism to reduce transaction cost in bilateral trade” and had been “encouraged as complementary to the global payment and settlement system”.
The declaration sent the Brics Payment Task Force back to work on interoperable payment and messaging channels and on settling trade in members’ own currencies, “acknowledging that there is no one-size-fits-all approach”.
Chinese scholars who follow the grouping describe a double movement: press the old institutions to make space, and build parallel machinery in case they do not.
Liu Zongyi, a senior fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, pointed out that “dissatisfaction with the US-led international order” was one of the key reasons Brics was established.
Members were seeking both to reform the existing system and to build new mechanisms. Liu said moves towards a Brics payment system and greater use of national currencies were “especially driven by the constraints imposed by the US dollar-dominated financial system, particularly on countries such as Russia and Iran”.
“These measures will gradually change the international financial system and enhance the strategic autonomy of Brics countries,” Liu said.
Sourabh Gupta of the Institute for China-America Studies said these efforts were easy to misread. “I’d say it’s less about de-dollarisation, since much of their trade will continue to be denominated in dollars, and more to do with lessening the capacity for dollar weaponisation,” he said.
Invoices can stay in dollars. Gupta said payment itself could move to infrastructure over which the US Treasury did not have jurisdiction, such as a network of correspondent banks, and be “routed amongst themselves but outside the plumbing of the dollar-based system.”
The secondary aim is slower. Members want to “build out their own local currencies-based trading and settling directly with counterparts”, he said. “But this process will take a much longer time. That’s where central bank digital currencies come in too, at a later date.”
According to Gupta, the nearer-term prize is more precise: “Transact in dollars, and instantaneously, while sitting outside the back office market infrastructure that is an essential basis of the dollar’s centrality, and via which Treasury can flex its jurisdictional powers.”
That infrastructure is why the dollar is more than a unit of account. Cross-border dollar payments still run, in large part, through correspondent banks, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) messaging network and US-centred clearing.
After 2022, Russia learned what happens when those channels close. Iran has lived with that constraint for far longer. Other Brics members have watched tariffs and secondary sanctions and drawn the lesson without wanting to announce it.
A more public experiment is Brics Pay, developed through the Brics Business Council rather than as a finished intergovernmental system, which aims to let people pay in national currencies across member countries. It is not yet operational.
Lin Minwang, vice-dean at Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies, was sceptical about the scale of any shift. Members had a shared interest in reducing reliance on the US dollar after facing sanctions from Washington, he said, adding that local-currency payments were moving “slowly but steadily”, though a Brics currency remained unrealistic.
“Even if local currencies are used for settlement, it would not have a major impact on the dollar system,” Lin said, because Brics’ economic power remained fragmented and its members were not sufficiently united. The work still mattered, he added, because it was strengthening members’ “strategic autonomy” and their ability to respond to US pressure.
Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Programme at the Quincy Institute, put the retail project in that same modest frame.
“The idea is that of a decentralised system based on blockchain technology in which Brics-wide settlement will be done of transactions by, say, a Brazilian tourist paying a restaurant bill in Mumbai or a Chinese student buying a T-shirt in a store in Cape Town,” he said.
“They’ll be able to do these transactions on their phone via QR codes. It will cut out intermediary credit card companies that charge fat commissions and are typically American, and also avoid intermediate steps of dollar conversion.”
Even success would leave the core of dollar power untouched. “The system has ways to go before being adopted, with barriers present, including the question of political will,” Shidore said.
“Several Global South states don’t want to create the impression that they are trying to ‘de-dollarise’.”
“Brics Pay, even if it were fully functional, would not touch the big wholesale trade transactions between countries that matter much more to dollar usage,” Shidore said. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
