An isolated Iran looks to BRICS for allies, testing a new world order

Battered by 12 days of war, Iran stands mostly alone and weakened in the Middle East. Yet the Islamic Republic has found friends elsewhere in the world.

Starting Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, Iran will join a two-day meeting of the BRICS group that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and other countries. It will be a chance for Iran, a newcomer to the group, to show it has powerful allies, even as it faces sanctions and threats of more military strikes over its nuclear program.

After Israel and the United States launched military strikes on Iran last month, the BRICS group issued a statement expressing "grave concern" and calling the attacks a breach of international law and the United Nations Charter. Still the alliance, whose members represent more than half of the world's population, stopped short of outright criticizing Israel or the United States.


Behind the scenes, divisions over how harshly BRICS should condemn the strikes have tested the alliance's ambitions to rebalance global power dynamics by offering a counterweight to the West.

"There is no alignment whatsoever on Iran," said Oliver Stuenkel, an expert on BRICS and an associate professor at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, a Brazilian university.

BRICS was founded in 2009 with the goal of increasing the influence of the world's biggest emerging economies. The group has since grown to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Analysts expect Iran to use the upcoming summit as an opportunity to shore up more forceful support from the group, particularly in a communique expected to be issued at the end of the meeting.

Iran has confirmed it will send a delegation to Brazil, though it is not yet clear who will represent the country or whether it will hold bilateral meetings with members like Russia and China.

"The optics of being part of the BRICS is very important" for Iran right now, said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.

China and Russia see BRICS as a way to challenge the United States' influence on geopolitics and decision-making, and have pushed the group to grow in size.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has resisted pressure from Russia and China to position BRICS as an anti-Western alliance, analysts said, instead casting the bloc as a way to give developing nations more say.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.