BRICS’ 18th Delhi Summit Kicks Off Expanded Bloc’s Push for Dollar-Light Trade

The Delhi gathering echoes the 1955 Bandung Conference—another moment when emerging nations, led then by Nehru and Sukarno, tried to write rules outside great-power frameworks. Like the creation of the petrodollar system after the 1973 oil shock, today’s push for local-currency settlements challenges a half-century of dollar centrality, yet without a unified alternative bears the same frictions that doomed earlier monetary experiments such as the 1979 European Currency Snake. Structurally, the summit reflects three long arcs: the demographic-economic shift toward the Global South; the slow erosion of post-1945 Bretton Woods institutions; and the perennial difficulty of forging solidarity among diverse rising powers—seen before in the fracturing of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1980s. Whether Delhi 2026 marks a hinge-point or a headline will depend on concrete follow-through—if, a century from now, imperial currencies are plural and digital, historians may trace the inflection to initiatives like the BRICS Payment Task Force; if not, the summit may be footnoted as another ceremonial bid for multipolarity that stalled on intra-bloc rivalries.