The Iran war reveals the limits of BRICS

This year’s BRICS summit has wrapped up in New Delhi with the usual promises of deepened cooperation and expanding economic ties. But there was an important absence.

Although the US-Israel war on Iran has affected most of BRICS’ 11 members and 10 partner countries, the declaration issued by the bloc did not address it directly. Nor did it condemn the United States, which – objectively speaking – is the aggressor state in the conflict.

The wording allowed all members to remain inside the same diplomatic tent. It also revealed just how difficult it is for BRICS to turn shared dissatisfaction with the Western-led order into coordinated geopolitical action.

The problem was already visible months before the summit. In May, the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi failed to produce a common position on the war on Iran. The outcome document acknowledged differences among members and avoided naming either the US or Israel.

Iran wanted the group to condemn the US and Israeli military campaign, while the UAE opposed language that ignored Iranian attacks and its own security concerns. That failure was more than a diplomatic embarrassment. It was a clear sign of the political cost of BRICS expansion.

The group’s enlargement has increased its global reach, but it has also imported regional rivalries into the organisation itself. Iran and the UAE are a particularly clear example. Both belong to BRICS, yet their strategic calculations in the Middle East collide. Their participation in the same organisation therefore creates a built-in ceiling on how far the group can go in confronting a conflict that directly affects both.

The September summit produced a declaration, but the compromise was telling. Rather than taking a clear, strong position, BRICS became a platform for managing disagreement.

The episode therefore suggests that the central problem facing the bloc is not a lack of economic or diplomatic weight. It is the difficulty of converting that weight into a single geopolitical instrument.