On September 11, Houthi forces seized the Yemeni port of Mokha and Mayyun Island overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This gives Iran’s most powerful remaining proxy force in the Middle East near-complete control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coast. Directly or indirectly, Tehran now has a chokehold on around 12% of global trade that passes through that waterway while maintaining its pressure on the Strait of Hormuz which has already led to a cut of flows there from about 9 million barrels of oil a day to between 3.7 and 6.4 million.
The next day, BRICS adopted its New Delhi declaration: 140 paragraphs agreed by a bloc of eleven states representing, by its own count, 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP, and 26% of global trade. Iran is one of the eleven member states and of the remaining ten five are directly and negatively affected by the actions of Iran and the Houthis while only one benefits.
Saudi Arabia is the most exposed. Its east-west pipeline across the kingdom, built to bypass Hormuz, terminates on the Red Sea coast the Houthis now overlook. It had been running at full capacity, before being shut down after strikes from Iranian proxies in Iraq and the Houthis’ seizure of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline.
Egypt, in turn, depends on revenue from the Suez canal. The shipping traffic that underpins this income significantly decreased in early 2024 as the result of an earlier Houthi campaign against shipping lanes in the Red Sea and has struggled to recover ever since. The latest Houthi advances are not going to improve any of these numbers in maritime traffic that insurers have already treated as high-risk for months.
The UAE has suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran in late August. This move came after Iran allegedly attacked a ship owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company in the Strait of Hormuz and launched two ballistic missiles into UAE territorial waters there. All this came on top of UAE claims in May that Iran had fired some 3,000 missiles and drones at it in the first two months of the US war against Iran alone.
China and India, the world’s largest oil importers, need the Strait of Hormuz open to keep global oil and gas prices low. Both also depend on it as a trade route that the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic is unlikely to replace soon.
By contrast, Russia, whose own exports travel by other routes, is the one BRICS member whose economic outlook improves as these Iranian-controlled chokepoints tighten. And this is not by accident. In testimony to US lawmakers this month, Russia and China were both singled out as supporters of the Houthis alongside Iran. Russian personnel in Sanaa, it was alleged, have supplied technical and targeting support for attacks on Red Sea shipping. Most weapons smuggling to the Houthis is now apparently routed through Chinese companies, and a satellite firm tied to China’s military has been accused of providing intelligence used against commercial vessels. For China, supporting the Houthis may be a way to get assurances for the safety of its own ships transiting the Red Sea. For Russia, it’s mostly a pathway to increasing its profits from oil sales to India and China, the two countries that now account for 80% of all Russian oil exports.
Given these clearly conflicting interests, it’s no surprise that the New Delhi declaration of the BRICS does not mention the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, Yemen or the Houthis. It contains no reference to shipping, to maritime security, or to freedom of navigation.
The silence in New Delhi is not an isolated lapse.
At the Rio summit in July 2025, BRICS members at least managed to condemn “the military strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran since 13 June 2025, which constitute a violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations.” Ten months later, on 15 May 2026, its foreign ministers could not produce a joint statement at all, leaving India to simply offer a chair’s summary, which flagged “the importance of ensuring the exercise of navigational rights and freedoms of vessels of all states in the Red Sea and Bab Al-Mandab Strait” and then noted that one among them “had reservations on some aspects” of the paragraph that included this formulation.
Four months on, when BRICS members approved the New Delhi declaration, they managed the remarkable feat of agreeing on 140 paragraphs without even naming the single most difficult issue they collectively face.
The New Delhi declaration is by no means a timid document. In paragraphs 21 and 22, it voices “serious concerns” about unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures that “distort trade” and condemns “the imposition of unilateral coercive measures that are contrary to international law” and demands “the elimination of such unlawful measures, which undermine international law and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter”. In paragraph 33, it also condemns “the use of starvation as a method of warfare”.
Brics members find the right words only as long as their target sits outside the organisation in the US, Europe or Israel. It is absent from paragraph 28, however, because the war fought against outsiders in 2025 has become one fought inside Brics in 2026.
This lack of clear and decisive language is eroding the credibility of the claim the BRICS bloc makes for itself: that it speaks for the global south against an order that has ignored it and is unwilling to reform. That claim does not survive the inability to name the waterways through which much of the global south’s energy and trade move.
Ironically, what drives the erosion of credibility is the expansion of its membership that BRICS has been celebrating: eleven members, ten partner states, an unrivalled share of the world’s population, GDP, and trade. But what expansion did was import unresolved conflicts faster than the group built the means of handling them. Iran is effectively in a state of war with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been at odds for years over Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia. India and China, meanwhile, are at on-again, off-again conflict over border disputes along the line of control in Kashmir which intersects with their broader geopolitical competition for influence in Asia and beyond. China is also engaged in long-running disputes with Vietnam and Indonesia in the South China Sea.
Each enlargement has lowered the ceiling on what the bloc can say together. And saying nothing at all beyond expressing “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia”, recalling respective national positions, and calling for “exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation”, as paragraph 28 of the New Delhi declaration skilfully does, may be the only survival mode for the BRICS.
But a grouping whose sole remaining source of unanimity is opposition to the US and its allies and that cannot describe a crisis in which its own members stand on opposite sides is hardly likely to become a pole of a multipolar order.
Whether two of the world’s major trade and energy arteries reopen will be settled in Tehran, in Washington, and in the marine insurance market in London. It will not be settled by the eleven governments that spent last weekend calling for maximum restraint.
This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on September 15, 2026.
For a government or business with exposure to Gulf and Red Sea shipping lanes: does BRICS’s silence on its own chokepoint crisis mean the bloc has nothing to offer as a mediator here — or does it mean no one should have expected a grouping this divided to referee a crisis in which its own members stand on opposite sides?
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