Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

On 28 February the United States and Israel struck Iran. Regime change was the stated aim. Ali Khamenei died in the strikes. In January, protests had spread across the country with Washington’s open encouragement. By every Western model the Islamic Republic should have fallen by March. It did not. Mojtaba Khamenei is Supreme Leader. Pezeshkian is in Delhi.

Iranians are suffering greatly. The rial was in free fall before the first bomb. But the state survived a killed leader, an uprising and a naval blockade. The Islamic Republic was never plugged into the global economy the way Dubai or Riyadh is. Sanctions since 1979 had already cut most of what could be cut. Iran came into this war poorer for it, and harder to shock. The sanctions built a fortress by accident, and in 2026 the fortress seems to have held.

The failed ceasefire that was made in Islamabad

Pakistan brokered the first pause on 8 April. JD Vance and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf then sat across a table in Islamabad, the highest direct contact between the two states since 1979. The talks failed, the blockade came, and the talking carried on. On 12 June Shehbaz Sharif announced the final text. On 14 June Vance and Ghalibaf signed it electronically. On 17 June Donald Trump signed it at dinner with Emmanuel Macron at Versailles, Pezeshkian signed in Tehran, and Sharif’s name went on it as well. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt helped in the wings. The document has fourteen points, runs to a page and a half by Vance’s own description, and is called the Islamabad Memorandum. A billboard in Islamabad showed Sharif and Asim Munir under the words “the nation is grateful“. Now Asim Munir wants to spend that dividend on a 28th Amendment that redraws the provinces of Pakistan.

Trump declared it over on 8 July after Iran fired on ships in Hormuz. It lapsed in August. On 3 September Iranian missiles hit bases in Kuwait and the UAE, and Vance told reporters he would not call it a war.

Twenty-five years ago this week Pakistan was told it was with the United States or against it, and it chose the only option on offer. In 2026 the same state wrote the ceasefire between the United States and Iran and signed it as a party. Pakistan was one of the five governments that convened Bandung in 1955. It took seventy-one years to act like one.

On the eve of 9/11 the United States stood at the height of its prestige and its power. Twenty-five years on, misadventures in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran) have cost it both.

The Ummah’s quarrels are its own

The UAE has severed Iran. Iranian missiles have hit Riyadh and the Ras Tanura refinery, and Saudi jets have quietly struck launch sites inside Iran and militias in Iraq. On 8 September the Houthis hit oil facilities in the Saudi south and wounded 73 people.

Hormuz is near shut, so Saudi crude had been leaving through Yanbu on the Red Sea, about five million barrels a day. On Thursday drones launched from Iraq hit the pipeline that feeds Yanbu, and on Friday Riyadh shut it. Regional officials say the Houthis helped plan the strike. The Houthis now hold Yemen’s whole western coast and Mayun island in Bab al-Mandeb, the exit for whatever Yanbu still ships (Asir, Jizan and Najran were Yemen until the Treaty of Taif in 1934).

Pakistan, bound to Riyadh by the defence pact the two signed last September, stands with the Saudis on paper and hosts Tehran’s negotiators in person.

This is what post-coloniality looks like from inside. The old order gave Muslim states two roles, client and target. In 2026 they are choosing their own enemies. The right to fight each other without permission is a poor kind of freedom, and it is the only kind any post-colonial state has ever started with. India and Pakistan can confirm.

The West’s favourite non-Western power

On 17 June, the day Trump signed the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles, Modi was at the G7 in Evian shaking his hand. India can do that. India can dissent from the West and stay inside the system. Iran cannot. Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador, described Delhi’s BRICS posture this week as non-Western rather than anti-Western, and the phrase is exact. India chairs BRICS, thanks Xi for his support, buys Russian oil and stays welcome in the G7. Chietigj Bajpaee at Chatham House reads the last year as Delhi reinvesting in other relationships after strains with Trump. Reinvesting is a banker’s word.

India’s post-coloniality is licensed. It was earned at Bandung. The Ummah’s version is unlicensed, and it is paid for in a Hormuz that nobody controls. The rivalry in that hall was between two kinds of post-colonial, the approved and the unapproved.

Taste follows power

Post-coloniality arrives in stages: foreign policy first, then war, then aspiration, then taste. The elites of the Muslim world remain, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s word from 1962, gharbzadeh, westoxicated. I use the Persian because English has nothing as precise. The condition now lives in wardrobes and holiday plans rather than in parliaments. Modernity was sold to the global South as a lifestyle, and the lifestyle was measured by the ability to spend August in Paris.

The condition is most acute in the small Gulflet states the Great Powers dreamt up. The Arab states, which could have been one nation, were splintered instead and taught to take their taste from Western high culture. This may change.

A Saudi family that spends €15,000 in Paris can spend €5,000 in Istanbul and may have a better holiday culturally. Istanbul and Sarajevo already fill with Gulf families every summer. When enough of the South reroutes its August, the West stops being the place you arrive at once you have made it. London luxury houses already depend on Chinese, Gulf and Indian buyers. The hall in Delhi this morning was the political half of that switch. The shopping bag half is coming. Gharbzadegi ends at a till in Istanbul.