BRICS faces its Iran test

The Middle East crisis marks another step towards a post-Western order The military and political confrontation between the United States and Iran is becoming less a crisis than a permanent feature of the international landscape. A new center of chronic instability is emerging in south-western Eurasia, and it will shape political and economic developments across the wider region for years to come. This matters not only because of Iran’s geopolitical position, but because it’s now a permanent member of both BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Unlike Russia’s confrontation with the West, which is mediated through the conflict in Ukraine, Iran’s dispute with Washington is direct and that reality inevitably raises questions about how BRICS and the SCO will function as organizations and what role they can play in an increasingly fragmented international order. Both groups emerged from the crisis of the liberal world order that became apparent in the early 2000s when the American-led ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq convinced many governments that the promised unipolar world had failed to deliver stability or impartial global leadership. The SCO, founded in 2001, was designed to strengthen regional cooperation in Eurasia while BRICS, launched in 2009, sought broader coordination among leading non-Western powers on global issues. Both represented a growing lack of confidence in institutions dominated by the United States and its allies. Read more Ukraine’s military system is starting to collapse. Can changing generals save it? Yet neither organization has attempted to build a direct alternative to the Western-led international system. This restraint has always served two purposes in that first, it allows countries with very different attitudes towards the West to remain within the same framework, and second, it avoids alienating the many states of the Global Majority that prefer to maintain productive relations with both China and Russia on one hand, and the United States and Western Europe on the other.

As a result, BRICS and the SCO have generally adopted cautious and consensual positions and their public rhetoric has often created the impression that Western behavior presents no fundamental challenge to international stability, and that there’s little urgency in constructing alternative institutions of global governance. This has always been something of a contradiction, given the very existence of BRICS and the SCO is itself a vote of no confidence in the post-Cold War order. If their members genuinely believed that the US and the EU could provide fair and effective leadership in global governance and Eurasian security, there would have been little reason to create entities from which Western powers are largely absent. Sooner or later, both organizations were always going to confront the question of what comes next and Iran’s confrontation with the United States has simply accelerated that debate. It also exposes the limits of consensus politics as only Russia has unequivocally condemned what it describes as American and Israeli aggression against Iran. Other members, including China, have adopted far more cautious public positions; while welcoming the ceasefire in April and the memorandum signed in June, the diversity of views makes coordinated political action difficult. Read more ‘They used axes to spare the ammo’: How modern Ukraine’s Nazi heroes massacred Poles during WWII At the same time, the conflict creates several practical challenges that BRICS and the SCO cannot ignore, and the first is energy security. The assumption that the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would eventually return to their previous stability is no longer realistic given Washington has transformed its relationship with Tehran from political confrontation into military-political rivalry. That shift will