Vladimir Putin's arrival in New Delhi for the expanded BRICS summit marks a moment when the world's emerging economies, long aspiring to chart their own course beyond Western influence, find themselves instead at the center of the very fractures they sought to transcend. The gathering of eleven nations — now including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — carries the weight of two active wars and the quiet drama of a China-India thaw that is real enough to attempt but too fragile to trust. In the long arc of multipolarity's promise, this summit asks whether solidarity among the non-Western world i