Bridging BRICS And The Asia Pacific: Vietnam’s Partner Role And The Future Of Multipolarity – Analysis

Key Takeaways:

Vietnam joined BRICS as a partner country after Brazil backed its June 2025 bid. It crossed World Bank upper-middle-income status in July 2026 (GNI per capita $4,970 in 2025) and is now a China+1 factory hub with CSPs to 14 states plus the EU.
May 2026: ties with India rose to an Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (13 deals, $25bn trade target by 2030). India chairs the 18th BRICS Summit on supply chains, digital payments, AI, and climate finance. Vietnam hosts APEC 2027.
Hanoi should bank early India wins (defence, ports, green tech), use BRICS for finance without dropping ASEAN, and stay multi-aligned. India’s job as chair: a useful New Delhi Declaration, not a quarrel club.

When Brazil welcomed the decision of the Vietnamese government on June 13, 2025 to join BRICS, it acknowledged its relevance to the interests of the grouping. “Vietnam stands out as a relevant actor in Asia. Its efforts in favor of South-South cooperation and sustainable development reinforce its convergence with the interests of the group,” stated the government of Brazil. Founded in 2009 and soon expanded to add South Africa, the group included Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, making it a growing diplomatic counterweight to traditional Western powers.

Vietnam’s strategic geography and sustained economic dynamism make it a substantive addition to BRICS. Having transformed from a nation scarred by colonialism and prolonged conflict into a reformoriented economy focused on growth and poverty alleviation, Vietnam, crossed the World Bank’s uppermiddleincome threshold in July 2026, with GNI per capita rising to US$4,970 in 2025.

Forty years after the Đổi Mới reforms redirected Vietnam from central planning toward marketoriented policies, the country has integrated key elements of the East Asian development model, particularly its focus on exportled industrialisation. This transformation—driven by rising inward foreign direct investment and a structural shift from agriculture to manufacturing—has positioned Vietnam as an effective alternative manufacturing hub to China. Moreover, it is now a key node in global supply chains. Vietnam’s low labor costs, political stability, and manufacturing incentives have driven a massive wave of foreign investment in export factories. This momentum is accelerated by strategic proximity to Asian suppliers, key global trade pacts, and a growing push by multinationals to diversify their supply chains outside of China.

By 2026, Vietnam had pursued an extensive diversification of its external relations, trading with more than 50 countries and establishing Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships with 14 states and the European Union. This network bridges the Global North and Global South, encompassing major powers such as the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, and South Korea; advanced middle powers including Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand; and key ASEAN partners—Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.
BRICS Summit 2026: India’s focus on Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability

Although 2026 marks India’s third tenure as BRICS Chair since the grouping’s inception, this chairship of the 18th Summit unfolds amid structural realignments in geopolitics, trade, technology, energy, and supply chains that are diluting the dominance of Western-led institutions and amplifying the strategic weight of emerging economies.

Under its chairship, India is advancing an agenda focused on resilient supply chains, digital public infrastructure, local-currency settlement, AI and innovation cooperation, climate finance, and reforms to global governance—priorities that collectively seek to reposition BRICS as a platform for Global South agency rather than merely an alternative forum. The bloc’s institutional expansion—now encompassing 11 full members and a new “partner country” format that includes Vietnam—further underscores BRICS’ evolving role as a multi-speed coalition shaping norms and resources in a fragmenting global order.

For Vietnam, 2026 is a strategic inflection point that combines a qualitative upgrade in ties with India and a new institutional foothold in BRICS, offering concrete levers to diversify partnerships, de-risk supply chains, and amplify Hanoi’s voice in emerging economic and technological governance.

The context is important. Following General Secretary and President Tô Lâm’s state visit to India in May 2026, Vietnam and India elevated their relationship to an Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (ECSP), framed around “shared vision, strategic convergence, substantive cooperation.” The upgrade—supported by 13 cooperation agreements and a $25 billion bilateral trade target by 2030—signals a shift from broad-based engagement to prioritized, outcome-oriented collaboration in defence and maritime security, connectivity and logistics, green transition, and technology. In parallel, Vietnam’s inclusion as a BRICS Partner Country creates an additional institutional channel to access development finance, deepen South–South cooperation, and engage on supply-chain resilience, local-currency settlement, digital public infrastructure, and climate adaptation—complementing its ASEAN-centric diplomacy and upcoming 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in 2027, which Vietnam will host. Moreover, it places Vietnam within a structured track in emerging-economy coalitions.

Together, the Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (ECSP) with India, Vietnam’s regional influence within ASEAN, its upcoming role as host of APEC 2027, and its status as a BRICS Partner Country collectively expand Hanoi’s strategic optionality. These overlapping frameworks reduce over-reliance on any single great-power corridor by diversifying security, technology, and infrastructure partners across multiple minilateral and plurilateral platforms. They also create bargaining leverage in negotiating technology transfer, standards, and financing terms, allowing Vietnam to extract better conditions from both traditional and emerging partners. Most importantly, they enable Hanoi to help shape, rather than merely adapt to, evolving rules on trade, cross-border payments, and technology governance in the Indo-Pacific, positioning Vietnam as a rule-shaper in critical domains of economic and digital statecraft.
The way forward for Vietnam

To operationalise the ECSP with India, Vietnam should prioritise early-win projects in defence co-production, port and logistics connectivity, renewable energy, and digital/AI cooperation. Concrete deliverables in these areas will convert the upgraded political framework into measurable outcomes, build domestic and international confidence in the partnership, and generate momentum for deeper integration in high-value sectors.

To leverage its BRICS partner status, Vietnam should actively engage BRICS working groups on trade, finance, and technology. This includes seeking access to development finance instruments, local-currency payment mechanisms, and supply-chain resilience initiatives that align with Vietnam’s industrial strategy and reduce exposure to external shocks and currency volatility.

Finally, Vietnam must carefully calibrate its multi-alignment strategy by using the India–BRICS track to balance ASEAN priorities and major-power dynamics. The objective should be to ensure that diversification across India, BRICS, ASEAN, and other partners enhances, rather than fragments, Vietnam’s core strategic posture in the region, preserving strategic autonomy while maximising economic and security benefits.

Hence, while members, partners, and non-members alike will scrutinise the final outcomes of the 2026 BRICS Summit—codified in the New Delhi Declaration—prospective partners will be watching closely for tangible deliverables and economic benefits that could accrue to them. The imperative for India’s chairmanship is clear: BRICS must avoid being drawn into bilateral disputes or narrow national agendas, and instead demonstrate that it can function as a resilient, issue-based coalition that offers a complementary—not confrontational—alternative to the existing global order.