The alliance of emerging economies hopes to offer a counterweight to the United States and other Western powers. But military strikes on Iran are testing its unity.
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.”
