When officials gather for this week's BRICS summit, much of the Western commentary will focus on China, Russia, and the push to dethrone the dollar. That lens misses the more consequential story: Asian members are quietly redefining what the bloc actually does and what it stands for.
India has long argued that BRICS should be judged by its agenda, not its rhetoric. New Delhi's position is that the bloc's expansion has shifted its center of gravity toward development, technology, energy security, and connectivity—issues that resonate across the Indo-Pacific. The numbers support that view.
Asia's demographic and economic weight
Six of BRICS' 11 members—China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—are Asian. Together, they account for roughly 83% of the bloc's GDP measured by purchasing power parity, or 90% if Russia's transcontinental economy is included. China alone supplies 58% of that output. China and India together represent 71% of BRICS' population and 74% of its GDP. The bloc as a whole now covers about 40% of global GDP and nearly half of humanity.
These figures understate Asia's pull. The six Asian members sit at the intersection of manufacturing, consumption, energy, shipping, finance, and technology. China is the world's largest crude-oil importer; India is a close second and the fastest-growing major energy consumer. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pivotal oil exporters, Iran remains a major hydrocarbon producer, and Indonesia brings Southeast Asia's vast resource and consumer economy into the fold.
Energy architecture reshapes the bloc
BRICS' expansion has created an extraordinary energy producer-consumer architecture. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran hold enormous hydrocarbon reserves that are lifelines for Asian members—China and India alone absorb 44% of their exports. In 2025, the UAE exported about 3.2 million barrels a day of crude, with 99% going to Asia and Oceania; China imported a record 11.6 million barrels a day that year.
Gas sharpens the picture further. Qatar isn't a BRICS member, but the UAE is, and the two countries' combined LNG exports account for nearly 20% of global LNG trade—almost 90% of it bound for Asian markets as of 2025. The implication is clear: energy security within BRICS is now inseparable from the safety of Gulf chokepoints and Indian Ocean sea lanes.
This is where India's 2026 chairmanship could prove decisive. New Delhi is attempting something subtler, and potentially more durable: making BRICS known for delivery rather than debate. Its theme—"Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability"—places energy security, technology, development, climate, trade, connectivity, and institutional reform alongside traditional geopolitics. The energy track, framed around "Energy for All," ties security to affordability, sustainability, and innovation. India's foreign ministry has put global-governance reform at the center of BRICS deliberations—a distinctly Asian political vocabulary that fuses geopolitics with development rather than abandoning it.
The China-India paradox
This Asianization of BRICS carries its own contradictions. China and India, the bloc's largest economies, are simultaneously collaborators, competitors, and strategic rivals. Their combined weight gives BRICS its heft; their differences complicate it. But BRICS' institutional culture allows members with radically different alignments to cooperate selectively. India can engage Washington through the Quad while working with China and Russia in BRICS. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can deepen ties with the US while sitting in a forum that includes Iran. Indonesia can preserve its non-aligned tradition while joining a grouping increasingly shaped by China, India, and Russia. This isn't incoherence—it's Asian strategic pluralism.
Indonesia's membership makes that pluralism even clearer. Its entry has pulled Southeast Asia into BRICS' institutional core, breaking the old assumption that the bloc is essentially a China-India-Russia-Brazil-South Africa conversation. Indonesia adds another Asian developmental model: an enormous archipelagic economy straddling some of the world's most consequential maritime routes. Its presence makes supply chains, critical minerals, maritime connectivity, food security, and the Global South's industrial transformation harder to treat as peripheral. Increasingly, BRICS' geography mirrors the Indo-Pacific.
De-dollarization, reconsidered
The next Asian rewiring is technological. Asian economies have aggressively experimented with digital public infrastructure, instant payments, digital identity, artificial intelligence, and technology-enabled welfare delivery. India, in particular, has shown how such infrastructure can become a developmental tool rather than merely a commercial one. These experiences give BRICS an agenda beyond its familiar fixation on dollar alternatives. The more consequential question is whether the bloc can build interoperable digital systems, AI governance principles, cross-border payment networks, and technology standards that reduce dependence on institutions designed elsewhere. That shift makes the BRICS story less about resisting the West and more about building alongside it.
The dollar remains the hardest piece of the puzzle—though here, too, Asian influence is pushing BRICS toward pragmatism. China and India have expanded local-currency trade. Gulf states have incentives to diversify their reserves. Western sanctions have pushed Russia to develop alternative payment channels. Few of these countries want to replace the dollar overnight; the more realistic strategy is financial redundancy—more currencies, more payment routes, more settlement mechanisms, and fewer single points of vulnerability. That's not revolution. It's rewiring.
West Asia moves to the center
The inclusion of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE has also redrawn BRICS' strategic map. West Asia is no longer external to the bloc; it now sits at the center of its economic and security bloodstream, where oil, gas, shipping lanes, terrorism, maritime security, and regional conflict converge. This is a far cry from the original BRIC grouping of 2009, which was essentially a China-India-Russia-Brazil conversation. Today, the bloc's center of gravity has shifted decisively toward the Indo-Pacific, and its agenda reflects that reality.
For Washington, the lesson is not to see BRICS as a monolithic anti-Western bloc, but as a forum where Asian priorities are increasingly setting the tone. The bloc's future will be shaped less by rhetoric about dollar hegemony and more by concrete efforts on energy security, digital infrastructure, and connectivity—areas where Asian members have both the need and the capacity to lead. As China's embedded AI strategy and India's digital public infrastructure show, the real competition is not about who can block the other, but who can build the more resilient systems. That is the story that matters for the Indo-Pacific.
