The cameras loved it. Line of leaders on a stage in some gleaming hall — handshakes, back-slaps, the whole choreography. Another BRICS summit, another family photo of the world's supposed new order. Then somebody asked about Iran, and the smiles got complicated.
That's the thing about a club built on grievance. Everyone hates the same thing. Nobody agrees on what comes next.
For two decades BRICS sold itself as the anti-West. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — five countries that decided the post-war order was rigged and they wanted a different seat at the table. Then they invited the whole neighborhood. Iran. Egypt. Ethiopia. The UAE. Saudi Arabia. Argentina before it got cold feet. Now it's ten members and counting, and the math that looked so elegant on a whiteboard suddenly doesn't add up.
When Your Ally's War Becomes Your Problem
Iran's entry into BRICS was always the strangest bet. Here's a country under crushing sanctions, locked in a shadow war with Israel, propping up proxies from Beirut to Sanaa — and BRICS rolled out the welcome mat in January 2024 like it was admitting a mid-sized economy with a clean balance sheet.
Fine. That was the point. The bloc wanted to hurt Washington, and Iran was a finger in the eye.
But in 2026, with American and Israeli jets pounding targets inside Iran and the Strait of Hormuz looking like a very expensive game of chicken, the bill came due. And every BRICS member is discovering what its membership actually costs.
Ask Delhi. India buys Iranian oil at a discount and also runs a strategic partnership with Israel worth billions in drones and missiles. Ask Riyadh. Saudi Arabia just joined a bloc that includes its most dangerous regional rival. Ask Brasília. Brazil's foreign ministry spent years preaching non-alignment, and now it has to answer for a war it never wanted.
"You can't build a movement around what you oppose and expect it to hold when there's something to actually do."
That quote isn't from anyone in particular. It's true of every coalition in history. It's true of BRICS right now.
The De-Dollarization Fantasy Meets Reality
Here's what the summit communiqué said, roughly translated from the diplomatic fog: BRICS supports a multipolar world, a reformed international financial system, and a settlement of the Iran crisis through dialogue. Standard stuff. Useless stuff.
The real story is what didn't get said.
Russia wanted a joint statement condemning the strikes. India wanted language that left room for ambiguity. China pushed for a stronger economic response — a signal that BRICS could weaponize its collective weight if pushed. Brazil and South Africa, the two members with the most to lose from an oil shock, wanted everyone to calm down and go home.
No single paragraph could hold all of that. So the drafters did what drafters do. They wrote around it.
Meanwhile the currency story — the one that gets trotted out at every summit like a family heirloom — has gone quiet. The idea that BRICS could launch a rival to the dollar and topple the greenback's reign was always more vibes than plan. Iran's war just buried it deeper. When oil markets are rattling and investors are sprinting toward safe assets, they don't sprint toward a basket of currencies that includes the ruble.
They sprint toward dollars. Every time.
The Real Divide Isn't East vs. West
The laziest take on BRICS is that it's a bloc of authoritarians standing against democracies. Wrong. The bloc's internal fault line is between countries that want to replace the current order and countries that want a better position inside it.
Russia and Iran are in the first camp. Sanctioned, cornered, they've got nothing to lose and everything to gain from tearing up the rulebook. China is a special case — it built its fortune inside the dollar system and isn't in any hurry to burn it down.
India, Brazil, South Africa, the Gulf states — they're in the second camp. They want reform, not revolution. Cheaper credit. More votes at the IMF. A world where Washington doesn't get to decide who banks with whom.
Those are two different agendas. The war in Iran just made them impossible to paper over.
Watch what India does in the next six months. If Delhi keeps buying Iranian crude while publicly calling for restraint, that tells you everything: BRICS will survive as a talking shop and a trade forum, not as a geopolitical bloc. If India starts cutting deals with Washington to hedge its bets, the whole thing quietly unravels.
The Emperor's New Photo Op
None of this means BRICS is finished. Coalitions built on resentment don't die. They just stay in a permanent state of almost-mattering. G20 with less influence. A support group for countries that think they're underpaid on the global stage.
There's real value in that. The New Development Bank is real. The trade in local currencies is real. The diplomatic cover is real. When you're a mid-sized power trying to negotiate with the IMF, having ten friends matters more than having one.
But the fantasy — the one peddled at every summit, the one where BRICS becomes the counterweight to the West and rewrites the rules of the game — that fantasy just took a missile to the gut.
Iran was the test. Not a trade deal. Not a currency basket. A war. And when the war came, ten countries with ten different interests discovered they had ten different answers.
Next summit, same stage. Same handshakes. Same family photo. Same silence where the hard questions used to be.
Ask yourself: if the club can't agree on what to do when one of its members is under attack, what exactly is the club for?
