Since the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, many analysts have rushed to declare that BRICS is little more than an illusion.
Iran joined the grouping as a new member in 2024. Yet BRICS has failed to articulate a unified response to the conflict. While some members—including Brazil and China—have condemned the U.S. and Israeli attacks, India has not. South Africa has remained on the fence. For the bloc’s critics, these differences have reinforced a familiar conclusion: BRICS is incoherent and “utterly ineffectual,” as Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume argued last week.
That argument rests on a flawed premise: It assumes that BRICS is supposed to behave like a formal alliance with shared positions on security. In reality, BRICS is not a geopolitical bloc—nor has it ever been.
From its earliest days, BRICS has brought together countries with very different geopolitical priorities. Leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, and China first began meeting in 2009 before South Africa joined a year later. Even then, its members did not share a unified worldview. Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have long sought to use the group as a counterweight to the G-7 and the West, especially after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Brazil, India, and South Africa, meanwhile, have pursued a multialignment strategy.
BRICS has faced criticism from Western observers since its inception. In 2011, Philip Stephens of the Financial Times announced that it was “time to bid farewell” to the “Brics without mortar.” Journalist Martin Wolf asserted in a 2012 interview that BRICS was “not a group” and that its members had “nothing in common whatsoever.” Other commentators have described BRICS as a “disparate quartet,” an “odd grouping,” a “motley crew,” and a “random bunch” based on a “faintly ridiculous” idea.
The recent BRICS expansion, which was favored by China and Russia but opposed by Brazil, India, and South Africa, has made these contradictions more visible. When Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates joined in 2024, the grouping became even more diverse and fractious. Images of Iranian drones striking the UAE—one BRICS member attacking another—capture the geopolitical rivalries that the group imported by adding so many new members.
Expansion also undermined intra-BRICS solidarity, as FP’s C. Raja Mohan argues. Prior to the group’s growth, one of its perks was that members facing Western economic or diplomatic isolation—such as Russian President Vladimir Putin or former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—could count on their ties to other BRICS nations as a diplomatic life raft. In 2014, BRICS nations supported Russia’s continued participation in the G-20; five years later, China lauded Bolsonaro’s environmental policies amid Western pressure on Brazil over fires in the Amazon rainforest.
BRICS expansion has also paralyzed decision-making within the group, particularly on the question of United Nations Security Council reform. Brazil, India, and South Africa have long sought permanent seats. But even if new BRICS members support changes to the body, there is no consensus within the group about what they would look like. African members, including Egypt and Ethiopia, have resisted language that appears to favor South Africa’s claim to a seat over their own.
Tensions came to a head at last year’s BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, when participating representatives were unable to agree on a joint statement for the first time in the group’s history.
BRICS has shown similar indecision after previous U.S. escalations against Iran. When the United States attacked Iran last June, the group issued a relatively meek statement, expressing “grave concern” and describing the strikes as a violation of international law. But the document failed to mention Washington and seemed designed not to cause friction with U.S. President Donald Trump at a time when some members—particularly India—were engaged in sensitive tariff negotiations with the United States.
BRICS divisions over renewed conflict in Iran are hardly surprising, and they aren’t especially revealing. If disagreement over a major military crisis were proof that an organization was ineffectual, then many of the West’s own alliances would fail the same test.
Both NATO and the G-7 are also divided over the war in Iran. Spain has described the attacks—carried out by the United States, NATO’s leading member—as a violation of international law. Madrid has also refused to allow U.S. forces to use jointly operated bases for the strikes, prompting a public dispute with Washington and threats of trade retaliation from Trump. Other European governments are also reluctant to get involved. “This is not our war,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Monday.
Neither NATO nor the G-7 has been able to offer unified responses when the United States has threatened to annex or invade Canada and the Danish territory of Greenland. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, several European countries—including France and Germany—strongly opposed the war. The same is true about more fundamental issues such as U.N. Security Council reform: Germany seeks permanent membership status, an idea that Italy opposes. Yet few observers would conclude that the G-7 is ineffectual or on the verge of collapse.
The same analytical standard should apply to BRICS. The grouping was not designed to produce unified positions on every geopolitical crisis. Instead, it serves a different purpose: BRICS is a platform where major emerging powers can coordinate selectively, hedge against geopolitical uncertainty, and increase their leverage in a world still dominated by Western institutions.
The bloc, for example, resisted Western calls to isolate Russia economically after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—not because its members disagreed with the West’s assessment that Putin had violated international law but because they wanted to keep their economic and geopolitical options open in an increasingly turbulent world. That kind of practical calculus is not unique to the global south: The United States recently eased oil-related restrictions on Russia amid spiking oil prices related to the Iran war.
Since its creation, BRICS has focused less on security than on economic and institutional issues—especially when it comes to reforming the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, creating development finance pathways through the bloc’s New Development Bank, and reducing dependence on the U.S. dollar. BRICS heads of government will meet in India later this year for their 18th leaders’ summit, focused on cooperation in the fields of digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
These initiatives are often slow, but they reflect a shared interest among many emerging economies to adapt the global order to better reflect their growing weight. Finally, for countries such as Brazil and South Africa, BRICS remains a unique venue to get face time with decision-makers in Asia, a region they are increasingly integrated with economically.
In this way, BRICS is less an alliance than a diplomatic space—a forum for countries that share concerns about Western dominance to explore alternatives without committing themselves to a single strategic agenda. The current divisions over Iran are simply the latest reminder of what BRICS actually is: a loose and often messy coalition of countries that cooperate where their interests overlap and disagree where they do not.
If anything, the Iran war merely affirms BRICS countries’ multialignment and quest for greater strategic autonomy. Contrary to some commentators’ recommendations that the grouping be dismantled, no country has ever decided to leave BRICS. In fact, it has grown considerably. It now includes emerging powers such as Indonesia, which recently joined and then decided to suspend its participation in the Trump-led Board of Peace.
Beyond misunderstanding the grouping, criticism of BRICS fails to grasp a more fundamental shift in global politics: The world is moving away from an order shaped by alliances toward one of ad hoc coalitions, issue-based cooperation, and Trumpian transactional dealings based on short-term interests and needs.
The first weeks of the Iran war reflect this new reality. As the United States decided to ease its sanctions on Russia, Gulf countries—which had recently refused to support a U.N. resolution affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity—asked Kyiv to send military advisors to help protect their own territories from Iranian drones. Trump then requested that China help protect the Strait of Hormuz, a request that Beijing declined. None of these actions were based on long-standing principles or alliances but rather on immediate strategic and economic needs.
BRICS will never be a unified bloc, largely because that is not in member states’ interests. Just as Brazil uses the grouping to increase its leverage when negotiating with the United States, it uses its ties to the United States and a recently signed trade deal between the European Union and Mercosur to boost its leverage when negotiating with China. BRICS is just one way that many countries are preparing for a far more fragmented and turbulent world.
