Vietnam advances Global South cooperation as BRICS Partner at New Delhi Summit

Vietnam arrived at the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi this September not as a full member, but as something newer and still taking shape: a Partner Country with a seat at the table and a voice that the bloc's leadership wanted to hear. Prime Minister Le Minh Hung used that position to lay out three concrete proposals—strengthen the economic resilience of member nations, build new engines of growth that work for everyone, and pour resources into science, technology, and innovation. The timing mattered. BRICS was meeting against a backdrop of geopolitical friction, economic uncertainty, and the kind of internal disagreements that plague any coalition of large, ambitious nations. Into that space, Vietnam offered something the bloc said it needed: a country from the Global South with independent foreign policy, strategic autonomy, and no axe to grind between the major powers.

The Indian government, hosting the summit, took notice. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met separately with Le Minh Hung and made clear that Vietnam's presence elevated the entire gathering. Modi framed BRICS not as a bloc defined by opposition to anyone else, but as what he called an ecosystem of solutions—a place where countries from the emerging world could speak, be heard, and solve problems together. That language mattered too. It suggested BRICS was trying to rebrand itself from a geopolitical counterweight into something more like a development platform.

Beyond the formal summit sessions, the bilateral work between India and Vietnam moved forward on concrete ground. The two countries set a target of $25 billion in two-way trade by 2030, up from current levels. They discussed defense and security cooperation, energy partnerships, rare earths sourcing, and space technology. Modi reminded Le Minh Hung that Vietnam sits at the center of India's Act East Policy and its broader MAHASAGAR vision for the Indian Ocean region. These were not ceremonial gestures. They were the architecture of a deepening strategic relationship, with Vietnam positioned as what Modi called an important pillar of India's regional strategy.

Vietnamese participation also opened a wider aperture. Nine of the ten BRICS Partner Countries attended the New Delhi summit, suggesting the bloc was serious about building a broader coalition of emerging and developing economies. The New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the summit's close, explicitly recognized the value of Partner Country involvement and called for deeper engagement with emerging markets and developing nations. It emphasized resilience, innovation, sustainable development, and inclusive growth—language that reflected both India's chairmanship theme and the substance of what Vietnam had proposed.

For observers watching from outside, Vietnam's role signaled something about the direction of Global South politics. A scholar at the FORE School of Management in New Delhi noted that Vietnam's independent foreign policy and strategic autonomy made it a promising player in this emerging landscape. The country also had practical advantages: it could help build and expand global production networks, particularly by strengthening ties across ASEAN. In other words, Vietnam was not just a diplomatic voice; it was a node in actual economic infrastructure that other countries wanted to connect to.

What made Vietnam's participation distinctive was that it worked on multiple levels at once. It deepened the India-Vietnam relationship bilaterally. It gave ASEAN and the broader Global South a channel to participate in a major multilateral forum. It offered BRICS itself a way to demonstrate that it was not a closed club of the largest emerging economies, but something more inclusive and development-focused. And it positioned Vietnam as a country that could move comfortably between different coalitions and partnerships without being trapped in any single one. The summit concluded with BRICS reaffirmed as a mechanism where, as Modi put it, the voices of the Global South are heard and their experiences respected. Vietnam's presence suggested that reaffirmation was not just rhetoric.