BRICS Wants to Stop Taking Orders and Start Writing Them

In Delhi, around a vast circular table, sat men who are tired of being, as one of them put it, “rule‑takers.” They voiced concern over war in the Middle East, condemned “deliberate attacks” on civilian infrastructure and nuclear sites, and denounced unilateral sanctions. These are not sermons. They are signals. When powerful rulers gather under one roof to complain of the same injuries, they are not trading laments; they are testing a coalition. In politics, common grievances are raw material. A summit like this is the quarry where new blocks are cut for the architecture of a different order.

I learned long ago that the effectual truth of any such scene lies not in the phrases about peace and concern, but in the interests at stake. Sanctions, once applied, attack a prince where it hurts most: his capacity to maintain his state. They strike revenues, technology, arms, and ultimately reputation, because a ruler who cannot shield his people from foreign pressure soon appears weak at home. Thus, when several sanctioned or sanction‑vulnerable powers sit together and condemn this instrument, I do not hear a legal argument; I hear men threatened in their survival, seeking counter‑weapons.

In The Prince, writing of fortune, I compared her to a flooding river that destroys fields where no dykes have been raised, noting, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, that “fortune… shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her.” Here the flood is the use of unilateral sanctions and the wider turmoil of the Middle East; the dykes are new financial, diplomatic, and perhaps military arrangements that make such pressure less effective. When a group like this speaks of reshaping the global order, they are talking about building those dykes while the waters are still rising over someone else’s land.

One of the hosts urged that these states become “rule‑shapers” rather than “rule‑takers.” That phrase is pure princely instinct. Whoever writes the rules collects the tribute, whether in money, obedience, or deference. The Romans understood this when they imposed their law across Italy: the allies that simply received rules became tools; those admitted to share in making them became partners in empire. To move from one condition to the other requires virtù—firmness, foresight, and a certain hardness of nerve—for the existing lawgiver rarely yields his pen willingly. The ambition to write rules is the first confession that one is ready, if need be, to challenge whoever now writes them.

Still, words alone do not found new modes and orders. In my time I saw Italian powers rely on mercenaries, and I called such arms useless, because they fight for another’s interest. A coalition of states, however, can become something else: a common army of shared necessity, if the members truly believe that each one’s vulnerability to sanctions or to conflict today may be their own tomorrow. Then they begin to harmonize currencies, trade, and diplomacy—not for ideal unity, but so that punishing one becomes harder without confronting all. If they do not reach that level of common cause, this remains only a fine theatre.

The theatre itself, though, is not trivial. I wrote that most men judge by the eye rather than by the hand; therefore appearances are a hard currency of power. To see Chinese, Russian, Indian, Iranian, Abu Dhabi, and South African leaders sit together and speak with a single voice against unilateral sanctions is already a kind of armament. It tells their own peoples that they are not isolated; it tells adversaries that any one of them cannot be bullied without noise from the rest. Summits like this are parades of an army still on the drafting table, but parades, if repeated, create facts of their own.

The open question is whether these rulers will adapt their playbooks as the times demand or whether they will, like many princes I studied, try to meet new dangers with old habits. In the Discourses, reflecting on Rome, I observed (through Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation) that founders must assume men are bad and will give loose to their appetites when free field is given them. The appetites here are clear: to trade freely, to project influence, to avoid humiliation. If these are harnessed into stable institutions—shared banks, dispute mechanisms, mutual guarantees—then this Delhi circle may become a real pole of power. If not, it will be remembered as a splendid photograph, and nothing more. The times are moving; whether these men move with them will decide if they are truly rule‑shapers or only eloquent rule‑takers in revolt.