What Has Iran Gained from BRICS? |
Tehran is finding that membership in the multilateral group is not all that it was cracked up to be.
When Iran joined the BRICS last January, the government called it proof that the Islamic Republic had survived one of the world’s longest isolation campaigns. “The enemy failed in its policy and strategy of isolating Islamic Iran,” then-President Ebrahim Raisi said. On state TV, the announcement played like a homegrown victory parade. For the leadership, the moment meant more than symbolism: it felt like re-entry after decades of sanctions and exclusion. Yet the celebration carried irony. The same country that once swore by “Neither East nor West” had just joined a club led by both Beijing and Moscow.
In the early years after the revolution, Iran saw itself as part of a post-colonial wave—the “champion of the oppressed.” Through the 1980s, Tehran wrapped its Shia republicanism in anti-imperial language and showed up proudly at Non-Aligned summits. But ideals met limits. The Iran-Iraq war left the country battered and cut off from Western arms and finance. By the time the guns fell silent, “neither east nor west” was mostly an echo. During the 1990s, globalization blurred the old front lines, and independence without access to capital became another word for isolation.
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The break with the West deepened through the 2000s. Sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program tightened; oil exports plunged; the rial collapsed; inflation soared above 40 percent. When Washington launched its “maximum pressure” campaign in 2018, Tehran turned east by necessity. “Looking East” became a slogan of survival. In 2021, Iran signed a 25-year cooperation pact with China covering energy, transport, and defense.
A year later, Iranian drones appeared over Ukraine, linking its arms industry to Moscow’s war effort. By 2023, Iran had entered the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and lobbied for membership in BRICS, founded in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Iran received an invitation last year, along with four other nations. State media sold it as proof that isolation had failed.
“Iran’s participation in BRICS is beneficial, but the country’s development problems stem from poor governance and sanctions,” stated the former Iran Central Bank Chief. That line captured Iran’s new reality: visibility without freedom. On paper, BRICS looks like a revival of the Non-Aligned Movement’s dream of reforming the world order.
In practice, it is a stage managed by China’s capital and Russia’s geopolitics. For Tehran, BRICS offers recognition more than rescue. The New Development Bank—the group’s lender—avoids sanctioned members, and Beijing is careful not to trigger US........