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. “So the solution was this very inoffensive position.”
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.
Unlike NATO, where military cooperation is central, the group has focused on an economic and geopolitical agenda, though it has struggled to make significant strides on many of its concrete goals, serving so far as a mostly symbolic alliance.
Analysts expect Iran to use the upcoming summit as an opportunity to shore up more forceful support from the group, particularly in a communiqué 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.
But within the group, diverging views on the recent attacks on Iran have highlighted the challenges posed by the alliance’s rapid expansion, adding members with competing visions of the bloc’s role on the global stage.
“It does make consensus more difficult to have more countries around the table,” Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., an economist and former vice president of the BRICS development bank.
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.
Russia called the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites an “unprovoked act of aggression,” while China urged “restraint” and dialogue. Brazil, which is hosting the summit, condemned the attacks, while trying to avoid souring its relations with the United States, its second-biggest trading partner after China.
Brazil’s 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.
“Brazil is not looking for trouble,” Mr. Stuenkel said. “It is much closer to the United States than to Iran. It has no reason to buy into this fight.”
India, another country with close ties to the United States, has also diverged on issues like the Iran strike. South Africa and Ethiopia have been similarly cautious about alienating the West.
This is not the first time that the group has experienced internal division in the face of conflict. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the alliance struggled to agree on a common stance, critiquing the West’s imposition of sanctions on Moscow without addressing Russia’s role in the war.
President Vladimir V. Putin will not attend the gathering in Rio in person but will join virtually, Russia’s state media reported. There is a warrant for his arrest related to the invasion of Ukraine that was issued by the International Criminal Court, to which Brazil is a signatory.
In a first, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will also skip the summit, after meeting with Mr. Lula in Beijing in May and attending the Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro last year. China’s premier, Li Qiang, will travel to Brazil instead.
Brazil holds the BRICS presidency, and Mr. Lula had hoped to cement his nation’s image as a leader in pursuing an agenda focused on fairness in global governance and financial systems. But with the conflict involving Iran as a backdrop, analysts say the group will have a hard time forging a united front.
“I just hope we don’t see the progress made last year being undone,” said Mr. Batista, the economist.
Erika Solomon and David Pierson contributed reporting.
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