A bloc built for a different world
The world looked very different in 2024. That was the year the BRICS club of nations decided to transform itself, betting that a bigger bloc would possess greater authority on the world stage. It opened its doors. The expansion brought in new members from the Middle East and Africa, a cohort that included the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia and, most significantly of all, Iran. The stated ambition was nothing less than the construction of a genuine counterweight to American and European dominance, a new pole in a multipolar world that would finally give the Global South its proper voice. All members agreed on the need for a new global order. That part was simple. The much more difficult questions, such as what precisely that new order should look like and how exactly it might be achieved, were quietly deferred for a future summit. A different time. For a while, the dream held.
That future never arrived. Instead, war came. The conflict engulfing Iran is the first serious geopolitical crisis to confront the expanded bloc, and it could not have been designed to be more divisive. It is not an abstract problem debated in a conference hall. It is a fire raging in the house they just finished extending, a brutal, immediate test for a group that has always struggled to translate its vast economic weight into any kind of unified geopolitical influence. Tehran’s membership was always the most contentious part of the 2024 enlargement. It was a calculated statement of defiance against the West. A provocation. Now that statement has been called in, with crippling interest.
The war exposes a fundamental problem. A contradiction. The BRICS group was conceived primarily as an economic forum, a space for large, fast growing economies to coordinate policy and build institutions like the New Development Bank. It was never a military alliance. It has no treaty. It has no joint command structure or collective security guarantee like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s Article 5. Its members found unity in what they opposed, namely the current global settlement, far more than in what they proposed to build. This strategic ambiguity was a strength in peacetime, allowing countries with wildly different political systems from democratic India to autocratic China to find some common ground. In wartime it is a catastrophic weakness. The fractures are now exposed.
The fault lines are exposed
The divisions are no longer subtle. They are chasms. Each member state is pulling in a direction dictated by its own geography, its economic needs and its long established strategic partnerships. Unity is gone. There is only the cold calculus of national interest. Russia, for its part, has been staunch in its support for Tehran. Absolutely resolute. Moscow sees a valuable ally of convenience in the Islamic Republic and a useful way to stretch Western military and diplomatic resources thin, diverting attention and materiel away from the front lines in Ukraine. For the Kremlin, this is simply a second front. It is a cynical but logical extension of its existing confrontation with the United States and its allies.
China sees it differently. Beijing is more cautious. Much more cautious. While it values its political relationship with Iran, its primary concern is economic stability, something a full scale war in the Gulf directly threatens. Chinese policy is driven not by revolutionary zeal but by a deep seated pragmatism that prioritises the uninterrupted flow of energy from across the region, including from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the security of the maritime trade routes that are the lifeblood of its export machine. Beijing wants to challenge the American led order. It does not want to burn the global economy down to do it.
India finds itself in perhaps the most difficult position of all. A trap. Its policy of 'multi alignment', a sophisticated balancing act that allows it to be a member of BRICS while also participating in the Western backed Quad security dialogue, is now under unbearable strain. New Delhi has cultivated deep economic and political relationships with the Gulf Arab states, which host millions of Indian expatriate workers, alongside its historic ties to Iran and its growing strategic partnership with the West. It cannot afford to choose a side. Any choice it makes would be ruinous.
And then there are the others. Brazil and South Africa, geographically distant from the conflict’s epicentre, are isolated in their calls for a purely diplomatic resolution. Their appeals for de escalation and peace talks are principled. They are also entirely removed from the brutal power politics playing out in the Strait of Hormuz. They lack the leverage to influence events on the ground. They are observers. Not players. The result is paralysis. A bloc founded to offer an alternative to Western power has found itself utterly unable to agree on a common position, let alone a common action, in the face of the first great crisis of its new era.
Power, money, and ships
The bloc possesses enormous economic weight. That is the foundation of its entire project. Its members wanted to translate that shared mass, a huge proportion of the world’s people and its production, into geopolitical influence. But the war in Iran exposes a fatal flaw in this logic. Economic heft does not automatically create geopolitical leverage. In this case, it creates vulnerability.
The problem is brutally simple. It is about ships. It is about oil. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which a vast portion of global energy flows, is now a war zone. This is not an abstract difficulty for a policy forum. It is an immediate and existential threat to the economies of the bloc’s most important members. China and India, the industrial engines of the group, are dependent on secure maritime trade and the steady supply of oil and gas from the Gulf. A conflict that threatens to close the strait, or even just make passage prohibitively dangerous, attacks the very heart of their national economic models. They cannot function without it.
Herein lies the paradox. BRICS was created to provide an alternative to the American led global system. Yet the security of the sea lanes vital to its two largest Asian economies is not guaranteed by a BRICS fleet. It is not secured by Russian destroyers or Chinese frigates acting in concert. It is underwritten by the United States Navy, the very power they officially seek to displace. This is the dependency at the core of the crisis. China and India need the shipping lanes to remain open, forcing them into a position where their interests align more with Washington’s objective of maritime security than with Tehran’s disruptive war aims or Moscow's desire for chaos. Their economic power becomes a leash. It does not set them free. It ties them to the status quo.
This divergence of interests, driven by the hard realities of oil tankers and naval power, shreds any notion of a unified BRICS position. For Beijing and New Delhi, economic stability is paramount. For Moscow, chaos in the Gulf is a strategic gift, diverting Western attention and resources away from Ukraine. For Brazil and South Africa, the conflict simply means higher energy prices and global instability they are powerless to affect. Money has not bought power. It has revealed its absence.
The view from Delhi and Beijing
The crisis divides Asia. For India and China, the two giants of the expanded BRICS, the Iran war is not a distant problem in the Gulf. It is a direct test of their competing visions for the world and their own place within it. Their goals are not aligned. Beijing sees an opportunity to advance its long term project of building a global system with Chinese characteristics, one defined in opposition to American power. New Delhi sees a threat to its carefully constructed network of independent relationships. The bloc was supposed to harmonise their interests. The war has instead made them rivals. It pits India’s strategy of 'multi alignment' directly against China’s ambition to lead a new global pole.
China’s response is calculated. It is a tightrope walk. On one hand, President Xi Jinping’s government seeks to use the conflict to rally the 'Global South' against what it portrays as Western recklessness. It attempts to frame the crisis as a failure of American diplomacy, positioning itself as the responsible great power. This serves a clear strategic purpose. It aims to solidify China's leadership within BRICS, pulling countries like Russia and South Africa into a more explicitly anti American alignment. Yet Beijing is constrained by its own success. Its vast industrial economy cannot tolerate the severe oil price shocks or shipping disruptions that a wider war would guarantee. This forces a deep contradiction. China wants the geopolitical benefits of challenging the United States but cannot afford the economic consequences of a genuine breakdown in the global system that Washington still largely secures.
India faces a different problem. It is a nightmare. For years, Indian diplomats have excelled at maintaining productive, independent ties with states that are openly hostile to one another. The country is a strategic partner of the United States. It is also a major economic partner of the Gulf Arab states and a historic friend of Iran. The war forces a choice that New Delhi has always sought to avoid. Picking a side would be catastrophic. Siding with the West would jeopardise its energy security and historical ties to Tehran. Siding with Iran would shatter its crucial relationships with America, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, while also putting it in the same camp as its primary strategic rival, China. India’s immediate objective is therefore not to leverage the crisis, but to survive it. It works to de escalate. It seeks stability. This quiet diplomacy puts it completely at odds with Chinese and Russian efforts to use the war to fracture the international order. The bloc is paralysed by this basic disagreement.
Moscow sees an opportunity
For Moscow, this is an opportunity. The Kremlin, bogged down in a grinding war of attrition in Ukraine that has consumed vast quantities of men and materiel, views the explosion of a crisis in the Gulf as a profound strategic windfall. It is a second front. Washington’s attention is a finite resource. Every American aircraft carrier group redeployed to the Arabian Sea, every Patriot missile battery sent to defend Gulf allies, and every billion dollar aid package diverted from Kyiv is a direct and measurable gain for Russian forces in the Donbas. This is not a subtle calculation. It is the core of Russia's strategy.
The Kremlin's logic is therefore brutally simple. It will do everything it can to prolong and intensify the new conflict. This means providing staunch diplomatic support to Tehran in forums like the United Nations Security Council, where its veto is a powerful shield. It likely involves covert material support, sharing battlefield intelligence and perhaps even advanced weaponry to ensure Iranian forces can inflict maximum cost on any Western intervention. Moscow’s objective is not an Iranian victory. It is sustained chaos. A protracted Gulf war keeps the United States tied down, bleeds its resources, and frays its alliances.
The crisis also provides a powerful lever within BRICS itself. Moscow sees its moment. It will attempt to use the war to achieve a long held ambition, which is the transformation of the bloc from a loose economic forum into a hard edged political coalition defined by its opposition to American power. Russian diplomats will frame the conflict as another example of Western aggression, pushing for joint statements that condemn Washington and its allies. The goal is to force a choice. This creates an existential threat for the bloc. It puts Russia on a collision course with India, Brazil, and South Africa, states whose entire foreign policy doctrine is built upon strategic autonomy and the avoidance of Cold War style entrapments. By forcing an explicitly anti American alignment, Vladimir Putin risks alienating the very members he needs and shattering the fragile consensus that holds the entire project together. The dream of a united front could die in the Gulf.
What is left of the dream?
The grand ambition is dead. The idea that BRICS could become a political union, a genuine counterweight to the American led order, has been shattered by the first major crisis of its expanded era. It failed the test. The failure is absolute. There is, however, a strange utility in this collapse. Al Jazeera analysts suggest a silver lining exists in the wreckage. The Iran war provides a brutal, necessary clarification of what the bloc actually is, as opposed to what its more ambitious members in Moscow and Beijing wished it to be.
It is not a military alliance. It is not NATO. It possesses no integrated command structure, no treaty obligation for mutual defence, and crucially, no shared security interest that could ever bind New Delhi to Tehran or Brasília to Moscow in a time of war. The conflict simply revealed the truth. The national interests of its core members are not just different, they are often directly contradictory, a reality that makes any coherent geopolitical action impossible. The dream of a united front was always a fantasy. The war made that clear to everyone.
This dose of realism may save the entire project. Stripped of its geopolitical pretensions, the bloc can be forced back towards more achievable objectives. These are its original economic goals. Those goals remain. They are substantial. The focus can now shift entirely to expanding the capital base of the New Development Bank, turning it into a genuine alternative to the World Bank and IMF for developing nations without the political conditions often attached to Western loans. It can concentrate on building robust mechanisms for trade in local currencies, a slow but determined process of chipping away at the global dominance of the American dollar.
This is the sober future for BRICS. Not a pole in a new cold war, but a persistent economic forum dedicated to reforming the world’s financial architecture. The vision of political union died in the Gulf, suffocated by the competing strategic calculations of its own members. What survives is a chastened and more limited enterprise. A club for national economies, not a pact for global power. That, in itself, may prove to be a significant force.
Sources. BBC News World: Iran war reshapes Brics ties but also exposes divisions. Al Jazeera: The Iran war reveals the limits of BRICS.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
