The 16th BRICS National Security Advisers meeting in New Delhi wrapped up with the customary family photo, firm handshakes, and a dense communique targeting non-traditional security threats. On paper, the expanded eleven-member bloc stood united against terrorism, cyber warfare, and energy vulnerabilities. In reality, the two-day summit hosted by Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval exposed a deep structural friction within a group trying to rewrite the rules of global security while its primary actors remain deeply suspicious of one another.
India used its 2026 chairship to focus on technical issues like supply chain resilience and the weaponization of emerging technologies by militant networks. Yet, the presence of Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi turned the quiet diplomatic corridors of New Delhi into a geopolitical chessboard. While official state releases described smooth coordination, a closer look at the competing national interests reveals that BRICS is struggling to turn its collective economic weight into a functional security apparatus. Also making headlines lately: Why the Jaishankar Mongolia visit matters more than you think.
The primary query under inspection is whether this coalition can actually protect the Global South from modern security threats, or if it remains a talk shop paralyzed by internal rivalries. The answer lies in the diverging threat perceptions of its core members.
The Illusion of Unity Against Terror
For years, the bloc has issued declarations condemning terrorism in all its forms. The New Delhi meeting was no different, reviewing reports from specialized joint working groups. However, the operational reality tells a different story. Additional details regarding the matter are covered by Al Jazeera.
India views cross-border militancy as its most immediate national security threat, specifically focusing on groups operating from Pakistani soil. China, meanwhile, continues to shield some of these very entities at the United Nations, blocking technical holds on international terror designations to protect its strategic assets in Islamabad. This creates a fundamental disconnect. One member's core security threat is viewed by another as a necessary geopolitical buffer.
Russian representation brought a different agenda to the table. Facing persistent pressure from Western sanctions, Moscow wants to reshape the counter-terrorism discussion to target Western-backed actors and intelligence networks. Sergey Shoigu used the Delhi forum to argue that traditional sovereign structures are being undermined by external political engineering. This perspective deviates sharply from New Delhi's desire to keep the forum focused strictly on regional stability and technical intelligence sharing.
The expansion to eleven members, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, further dilutes the security focus. Bringing historic regional rivals like Riyadh and Tehran under the same security umbrella makes deep intelligence sharing nearly impossible. The security agencies of these nations are structurally designed to monitor each other, not to share sensitive data on encrypted communications or maritime threats.
The Battleground of Cyber Security and Data Sovereignty
As national infrastructures become increasingly digitized, cyber warfare emerged as a central theme of the Delhi talks. The security heads deliberated extensively on how state and non-state actors exploit digital vulnerabilities to disrupt critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure Vulnerabilities and Weaponized Code
The core of the problem is that the technology stacks used across the Global South are rarely homegrown. Most member states rely on a mix of Western hardware and Chinese software, creating built-in vulnerabilities that no amount of diplomatic goodwill can fix. India has actively banned hundreds of Chinese applications and heavily restricted Chinese telecom equipment from its 5G networks over espionage fears. Sitting across from Wang Yi, Indian officials had to balance diplomatic pleasantries with the reality that their primary cyber adversary was sitting at the same table.
The Problem of Attributing Cyber Attacks
When a massive ransomware attack cripples a national power grid or a healthcare system, identifying the culprit is notoriously difficult. Within BRICS, this difficulty is compounded by politics. Russia and China are frequently accused by Western intelligence of harboring advanced persistent threat groups that launch global cyber operations.
For unaligned members like Brazil or South Africa, adopting a unified BRICS cyber defense framework means choosing between Western security compliance or alignment with eastern cyber powers. The result is a stalemate where members agree that cyber threats are dangerous, but refuse to establish a centralized command for tracking or neutralizing these digital actors.
Energy Security and the Strategic Value of Close Maritime Gates
A surprising highlight of the Delhi meeting was Ajit Doval’s public acknowledgment of the recent memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, which led to the temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
"India welcomes the understanding reached between the US and Iran," Doval stated during his opening remarks. "We have got cautious optimism, and we hope that it will work. It will help energy security."
This statement highlights the complex diplomatic game India is playing. While Russia wants to use the alliance to build an anti-Western energy bloc, India remains dependent on stable relations with both Washington and Middle Eastern energy producers. The temporary stabilization of the Strait of Hormuz provides vital economic relief for New Delhi, which relies heavily on crude oil imports passing through that narrow maritime choke point.
Strait of Hormuz Oil Flows
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Total Global Maritime Oil Chokepoint Flows: ~21 million barrels per day
BRICS Reliance Factor: Over 40% of imported crude for India and China passes here
Current Status: Fragile reopening following recent diplomatic understandings
The expansion of the bloc to include major energy giants like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran was supposed to create an untouchable energy cartel. Instead, it has internalized the volatile dynamics of the Persian Gulf. Russia wants higher oil prices to fund its state expenditures, while India requires cheap, predictable energy to prevent domestic inflation. When Russia offers discounted crude to India, it disrupts the traditional market share of Gulf members like Saudi Arabia. The economic interests are purely transactional, making a unified energy security policy highly unstable.
Supply Chain Realities vs Diplomatic Rhetoric
The disruption of global shipping routes, accelerated by maritime skirmishes and shifting political alliances, has forced the bloc to look hard at supply chain resilience. The security chiefs spent considerable time discussing how to secure trade routes for food and essential materials.
The hard truth is that you cannot decree a resilient supply chain into existence through a multilateral communique. True resilience requires massive capital investment, redundant transport networks, and deep mutual trust. Currently, the commercial lanes connecting these countries are heavily dependent on maritime choke points controlled or monitored by Western navies.
China’s solution has been its sprawling transcontinental infrastructure network, which many members view with skepticism. India has openly refused to endorse these initiatives, viewing them as a violation of territorial sovereignty and a mechanism for creating economic dependency. Consequently, when the security advisers talk about "coordinating supply chain security," they are speaking in parallel monologues. One side views security as infrastructure dominance, while the other views it as the protection of independent national trade lanes.
Weaponization of Emerging Technologies
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, automated drone systems, and decentralized financial networks has outpaced traditional legislative and military frameworks. In the hands of insurgent groups, a cheap, commercially available drone can disable a multi-million-dollar defense asset.
The Proliferation of Autonomous Drone Networks
During the closed-door sessions, Indian defense analysts presented briefings on how non-state actors along volatile borders are using automated drones for surveillance and payload delivery. These systems do not rely on satellite communication lines that can be jammed easily; instead, they use basic machine vision to navigate. The technology is cheap, hard to trace, and highly effective. The challenge for the alliance is that the components for these automated systems originate primarily from manufacturing hubs within the bloc itself, creating a bizarre loop where one member's industrial output fuels another member's border security threat.
Decentralized Finance and Terror Financing
Tracking the money that flows to militant organizations has become significantly more complicated due to the use of privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and decentralized networks. The traditional banking system, governed by international regulatory standards, is easier to police.
The security chiefs agreed on the need to monitor these digital financial flows, but implementation remains toothless. Some members are actively developing parallel financial systems to bypass international financial networks entirely. By creating alternative transactional systems to shield themselves from external sanctions, they inadvertently create blind spots that sophisticated criminal and militant networks can exploit to move capital without detection.
The Declining Power of International Institutions
The underlying message of the entire New Delhi summit was a profound lack of faith in existing international institutions. From the United Nations Security Council to global financial regulators, the mechanisms designed to maintain international order after the mid-twentieth century are visible fading in effectiveness.
Ajit Doval summarized this sentiment by noting that traditional institutional mechanisms are increasingly finding themselves inadequate to resolve or mitigate modern conflicts. Multilateralism is shrinking, replaced by minilateral coalitions and transaction-oriented diplomacy. This decline creates a dangerous power vacuum.
However, the assumption that BRICS can step in to provide an alternative security framework overlooks the structural reality of the bloc. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization works because it has a single dominant superpower and a shared ideological adversary. The BRICS security framework has neither. It features two competing superpowers in New Delhi and Beijing, an isolated nuclear state in Moscow, and a collection of regional actors focused primarily on their immediate borders.
The New Delhi meeting demonstrated that while the bloc excels at identifying the systemic failures of the Western-led order, it is far from reaching an internal consensus on what should replace it. The security chiefs will meet again, the working groups will produce more documentation, and the leaders will gather for the full summit later this year. But beneath the elite diplomacy and high-security protocols, the fundamental contradictions of an alliance divided against itself remain completely unresolved.
