BRICS and QUAD Countries in Asia-Pacific Politics

India Between BRICS+ and QUAD

Indian diplomats are inviting politicians from around the world to visit as part of all manner of events. India's obsession with befriending all the world's leading powers reveals a certain discomfort and lack of confidence, as India finds itself caught between two fires: a powerful rival and the world's second-largest economy by GDP to the northeast, and a belligerent Muslim Pakistan to the northwest.

During the first half of 2026, a whole series of meetings required genuine acrobatic feats in attempting to organize all the scheduled diplomatic events. Though it was extremely difficult. One such event took place on May 14, 2026. Foreign ministers from BRICS+ countries were invited—a bloc including Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, the UAE, Indonesia, Egypt, and Ethiopia, which actively complain about Western hegemony in the world.

Then on May 26, 2026, also in India, a meeting was held of the foreign ministers of the United States, Australia, and Japan, which together with India form QUAD, a grouping created under Biden to counter China's growing potential and influence in the world and region. The month of May became a veritable hailstorm of diplomatic meetings in India.

At the BRICS+ foreign ministers level, the meeting was overshadowed by the war in the Persian Gulf, since this grouping includes Iran and the United Arab Emirates, whose armed forces are destroying each other, so it's no surprise that negotiations at this meeting ended without publishing a joint communiqué. The absence of this document may have been a way out of a problematic situation for the Indian diplomatic service, because there was no need to endorse any rhetoric or language that would, for example, require condemning America for committing violence against individual countries in the region. India preferred to focus on issues that at least don't provoke negative pushback from any side. For instance, it was proposed to develop a healthy lifestyle mission among member countries.

QUAD and the Search for a Common Agenda

If the core BRICS member countries conclude that India is pursuing a cautious policy, and if they become disappointed in this policy, then the others will view it as an inconvenient partner. After all, India is simultaneously a member of the QUAD bloc, a quadrilateral alliance with military functions. Currently, this bloc is literally in intensive care or on life support due to constant stress and shocks from Donald Trump, who is trying to extract deals, concessions, and signed agreements from China. Therefore, QUAD appears as an organization in which America has lost the trust of member countries. For their part, QUAD countries have stopped trusting Trump. Foreign diplomats in this matter believe that QUAD can still be used as an organization that could lead to some results. For example, within QUAD, one could discuss creating a system for joint naval operations to unblock the Strait of Hormuz and normalize oil supplies and communications between warring parties, as well as joint work to eliminate the monopoly of the Chinese economy in the world and region, including its dominance in extracting industrially significant minerals, rare earth metals, and new technologies in artificial intelligence.

However, no one is currently expecting a breakthrough in this direction at the New Delhi meeting. The most the foreign ministers can achieve during these negotiations is approval of India's plans for peaceful, diplomatic resolution of armed conflicts. India hopes that this kind of democratic play and freedom of opinion at such an event will persuade Trump to visit the country's capital once more for a QUAD leaders' summit planned for closer to the end of 2026. Such a high-level visit was supposed to take place back in 2025, but it was canceled because Trump began imposing tariffs on goods from India and erecting barriers to investment.

India Seeks a New Role

Some representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New Delhi have begun asking themselves: what if India signed on to a series of initiatives regarding Asia-Pacific policy in order to raise expectations about its own capabilities in the region? All this is happening because there is currently a diminishing benefit for the country when it plays the role of global organizer of some event on its territory. A trend has emerged where leaders of countries have stopped pretending that they're conducting some kind of consultative, public activity within large groups of countries like India that are chairing at a particular moment in time in one international organization or conference or another. India, for example, became the organizer of the BRICS+ foreign ministers' meeting in May 2026. Trump and Xi Jinping held another one-on-one meeting in Beijing practically simultaneously. Some political scientists believe that India needs to act ahead of events, overcoming the time vacuum, in order to talk about the most serious issues, to tell the Americans and Donald Trump that one cannot hold the entire world hostage and in fear, as the world's largest economy is doing today. India is trying to promote its role as a kind of peacemaker to the rest of the world. India, indeed, quite often appears in the eyes of the international community as a country that doesn't particularly want to show what it can teach the rest of the world. Although a country with a thousand-year history and such a rich culture and civilization certainly has something to say.