Modi’s ASEAN Miss and the Cost of Balancing Trump and BRICS
While US think tanks, mostly with democratic party moorings, trash the Trump administration for pushing “pro-West” countries away from the US and into the tight embrace of China and Russia, the disturbing truth is that US President is doing what he promised—he is breaking BRICS.
When Jim O Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the phrase BRIC countries in the belief that these countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, will drive world growth after the global slowdown of 2008, it was believed that the world order was changing. It did not change fast enough. BRIC was eventually expanded to include South Africa.
Russia is believed to have realised that it needed India to counter balance China. Later it realised that China was using multilateral bodies to enhance its own interest and in the process growing rapidly.
What worries the BRICS nations most are the sanctions that have steeled the resolve of countries like Russia, China that are trying to only survive but even prosper, despite all the sanctions that have been imposed on them.
Persuaded by China, BRICS has set up the New Development Bank (NDB) and is creating parallel structures to the one built by the Western nations. The most significant addition is the alternative created by BRICS that one integrates all the domestic payment systems with an overarching network. India’s UPI is part of it.
This is the reason Trump calls the members “anti-US” and wishes the BRICS to go away. India does not want the BRICS nations to deepen this impression and wants the de-dollarisation as a policy to be jettisoned. China and Russia are keen advocates of this policy and have made light of Washington’s objections.
India, which will host the next BRICS summit in Delhi, is in dithers about the anti-West noise emanating from this 11 member bloc. Ideally it would like to tone it down, lest it attracts hostile reaction from the US. This strategy is misconstrued by some members as being a lackey of the West.
During the Rio Summit in July 2025, a Brazilian economist called India as a Trojan Horse or an “outlier”, a country that cannot be trusted. This is a slap on the wrist, in many ways, but in a world where suspicion overwhelms sanity, Trump would want such anti-US groupings to crack up under his pressure. The big question remains: will India successfully host the BRICS summit in 2026? And will it attended by all heads of states or a truncated version?
Much will depend on how India resolves Russian oil crisis.
(Sanjay Kapoor is a veteran journalist and founder of Hardnews Magazine. He is a foreign policy specialist focused on India and its neighbours, and West Asia. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)