The 18th BRICS summit opened on Saturday with the bloctaking its most concrete step yet toward loosening the grip of the US dollar, adopting a 45-page New Delhi Declaration on the first day and endorsing a payments architecture built to route cross-border trade around the Western financial system. For most members the move was incremental. For Iran — under sweeping US sanctions, a naval blockade, and roughly six months into a war with the United States and Israel — it was closer to a lifeline.
Leaders gathered at the Bharat Mandapam convention center adopted the New Delhi Declaration 2026 unanimously on the opening day, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerging from a closed session to report that no member had objected to the text. The economic centerpiece was a commitment to expand trade and investment settled in members’ own national currencies, and to link their domestic payment and messaging systems so that transactions can move without passing through the dollar-denominated SWIFT network. According to the declaration, the bloc’s payment task force had studied cross-border interoperability of those channels and examined using local currencies for trade settlement and investment.
The mechanism drawing the most attention was BRICS Pay, a decentralized payment-messaging framework that stitches together India’s UPI, China’s CIPS, and Russia’s SPFS into a shared interoperability layer — a way to clear payments among members outside SWIFT. The declaration also referenced a pilot for a gold-backed “Unit” token.
Just as telling was what the bloc again declined to do. There was no endorsement of a single common BRICS currency; India in particular has resisted that leap, favoring interoperable national-currency settlement over the political and monetary complexity of a shared unit. The result, as several observers characterized it, is incremental financial de-dollarization rather than a monetary union — plumbing, not a new reserve currency.
The response from Washington was immediate. President Trump threatened tariffs of up to 100% on the bloc, extending a pressure campaign he has waged all year against what he calls BRICS’s “anti-American” trajectory. The threat carries genuine weight for export-dependent members that rely on the US market — but its deterrent power erodes with each transaction the bloc succeeds in routing through non-dollar channels.
That is the paradox Washington now faces: the tariffs are meant to punish de-dollarization, yet de-dollarization is precisely what blunts the tariffs.
No member arrived with more at stake than Iran. President Masoud Pezeshkian pressed the case for national-currency trade, telling reporters that expanding the use of members’ own currencies in intra-bloc commerce was among the most important steps the group could take. Tehran has pushed throughout the summit for mechanisms to insulate members from Western financial pressure — a priority sharpened by the sanctions and blockade it now faces.
Crucially, the summit institutionalizes at the multilateral level what Iran has already been building bilaterally. On January 29, 2026, Tehran signed a trilateral strategic pact with China and Russia, an agreement whose economic core is the construction of alternative financial mechanisms that sidestep SWIFT and reduce exposure to the dollar-centered system. That pact rests on foundations already in place: an Iran–Russia monetary agreement, operational since early 2025, that settles trade directly in rials and rubles and links Russia’s Mir card network to Iran’s Shetab system; a 25-year Iran–China cooperation framework; and the plain fact that China now buys the overwhelming majority of Iran’s oil, much of it settled in yuan.
The implication cuts against the common assumption that Iran is scrambling for a dollar workaround. It already has one.
