By Independent News Roundup
Bloomberg published a piece last week about how “Iran War Shows BRICS Limits as India Pushed to Choose Sides”, which shows that it still hasn’t figured out what BRICS is really about. This is clear from the false premise upon which their article is built, namely the supposed importance of BRICS issuing a joint statement about the Third Gulf War and the perception that “BRICS risks becoming irrelevant if it doesn’t engage with the defining issues of the moment.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
For starters, BRICS isn’t a security bloc tasked with addressing “the defining issues of the moment”, unlike what an unnamed source within the group was quoted above as suggesting. In fact, “Russia’s BRICS Sherpa Debunked Speculation About It Turning Into A Security Bloc” just last month. The reality is that BRICS is a voluntary network of countries that share the goal of accelerating financial multipolarity processes in order to facilitate global governance reform for giving the World Majority more influence.
As was explained here in September 2024, “BRICS can be compared to a Zoom conference: members actively participate in talks on this subject, partners observe their discussions in real time, and everyone else with an interest in them hears about the outcome afterwards.” That year’s BRICS Summit and the next one didn’t achieve anything of tangible significance at all for this reason, and that was fine with all of its members since some of them are rival pairs who are unlikely to agree on anything meaningful.
This segues into the next point about how BRICS was destined to deadlock in the event of conflicts involving its members just like how the current one involves Iran and the UAE or if future conflicts develop between China and India or Egypt and Ethiopia. Precisely because BRICS isn’t a security bloc, nor even a political one, its statements on such conflicts don’t matter. It did release statements about the Gaza War and the 12-Day War, which Bloomberg mentioned, but they were purely symbolic.
The third point is that India isn’t “pushed to choose sides”. Pezeshkian did call upon BRICS to play a role in stopping the conflict during his recent call with Modi, whose country serves as this year’s rotating chair, but that was analyzed here as an attempt to possibly kickstart Delhi-mediated talks. The Iranian Foreign Minister recently said that India is among several “friendly nations” allowed to transit the Strait of Hormuz, thus further debunking Pepe Escobar’s already discredited claim that India “betrayed” Iran.
Likewise, the US also isn’t “pushing” India “to choose sides”, but has instead temporarily waived sanctions on both Russian and Iranian oil so that India (among others) can purchase them to help stabilize the global market. Both sides in the conflict are therefore content with India balancing between them and aren’t “pushing” it in any way to commit to them. To be sure, they’d each be delighted if it did so, but neither expects that. Iran also appears to have tempered its hopes about BRICS as explained.
Reflecting on the insight shared in this analysis, the only reason why Bloomberg wrote about this unnewsworthy subject is due to the false premise that continues to proliferate about BRICS supposedly being a security or political bloc, ergo the interest in why it hasn’t supported Iran. Astute observers who understand what BRICS is really about, however, wouldn’t have expected it to do so. With time, the rest of the global public might also wise up to this, but some might still remain delusional and in denial.
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