The significance of the 2026 BRICS summit in New Delhi is not that one power is replacing another. It is that more countries are seeking the freedom to choose their own economic and strategic paths.
BRICS reflects this shift. Its members and partner countries span Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, with different political systems, interests and ambitions. What increasingly connects them is not a common model, but a desire for more choices, greater voice and less dependence on any single centre of power.
At the New Delhi summit, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said BRICS could “widen our choices”. For Malaysia, he said, strategic autonomy means “the freedom to choose our own course, and the courage to stand by that choice when it matters.”
The key word is choice. Strategic autonomy does not mean choosing China over the United States, nor does it require distancing oneself from the West. Rather, it means developing the economic relationships, institutional capacity and strategic flexibility to avoid being forced into such a binary choice in the first place.
For Malaysia, that autonomy is economic as well as geopolitical: diversifying trade, accessing development finance, expanding technological cooperation and reducing excessive dependence on traditional markets. India has long pursued a similar principle of strategic autonomy. More choices, however, extend beyond geopolitics to the very meaning of progress.
Indonesia became a full BRICS member in 2025 and has experienced substantial economic and social transformation. But its experience also illustrates something conventional measures of development can miss. Alongside rising incomes and expanding economic capacity, societies possess forms of social wealth that are difficult to capture in GDP, productivity statistics or technological rankings: social trust, community participation, volunteering, family networks and the capacity of people to act collectively.
The Charities Aid Foundation’s 2024 World Giving Index, for example, ranked Indonesia first for the seventh consecutive year, with 90 per cent of respondents reporting that they had donated money and 65 per cent saying they had volunteered. These figures do not mean that social cohesion can substitute for productivity, good governance, education or technological capability. They suggest something more modest but important: progress does not have to be understood in exactly the same way everywhere.
For much of the modern Western development tradition, progress has been associated with higher incomes, productivity, technological advancement, institutional sophistication and individual economic choice. These remain essential measures of development. But other societies may place greater weight on community, social obligation, collective resilience or civic contribution.
This is one reason the emerging global order is more complicated than a contest between Washington and Beijing.
China brings industrial scale and technological capability. India combines scale with a long tradition of strategic autonomy. The Gulf states possess substantial financial and energy resources; Brazil combines agricultural scale with environmental significance; Malaysia brings its own emphasis on strategic choice and economic diversification; and Indonesia highlights the importance of social and civic participation alongside conventional measures of national wealth.
These differences matter because BRICS is not held together by a common political system or ideology. India and China are strategic competitors. Gulf states maintain deep relationships with the United States and Europe. Southeast Asian countries generally seek to avoid excessive dependence on any single great power. Their common interest is less a shared model of government than greater bargaining space.
The emerging order may therefore be less about replacing one dominant power with another than about multiplying the centres of capability.
That multiplication is also changing the meaning of global influence. Power is no longer simply a question of who has the largest economy or the strongest military. It increasingly depends on who can provide technology, capital, energy, food, markets and infrastructure—and, perhaps most importantly, alternatives.
For middle powers, this means greater freedom to trade with China while maintaining security relationships with the United States, cooperate with Europe while deepening links with India, the Gulf or Southeast Asia, and pursue national interests without fitting every relationship into a single geopolitical camp.
Australia illustrates this tension: its security remains embedded in the Western strategic architecture while its economic geography is increasingly Asian and Indo-Pacific. Strategic alignment and economic integration do not always point in the same direction.
The broader transformation is not the retreat of the West. Western institutions, markets, technologies and alliances remain deeply influential. What is changing is their status as the world’s default point of reference.
The world is becoming more plural—not only in where power is located, but in how societies understand development, prosperity and national success. The question is therefore no longer simply Who will lead the world? It is how much freedom countries will have to shape their own path.
