BRICS ministers meet in India as Iran war, oil disruption and internal splits test bloc unity

Foreign ministers from the expanded BRICS bloc opened a two-day meeting in New Delhi on Thursday at a moment when the group is being asked to look bigger, steadier and more strategically coherent than its members often are in practice. The gathering comes as the war in Iran has driven up energy prices, clouded the global growth outlook and forced member states to confront questions that are harder than the familiar rhetoric about a more balanced world order. India is hosting the ministers before a full BRICS summit in September, while Donald Trump is simultaneously in Beijing for talks with Xi Jinping, adding another layer of geopolitical theater to a meeting that would already have mattered on its own.

The central difficulty is straightforward: BRICS has expanded its footprint faster than it has expanded its internal discipline. The bloc began as a forum for Brazil, Russia, India and China, added South Africa in 2010, and then widened again to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, with Indonesia joining as a full member in 2025. That broader lineup gives BRICS more demographic and diplomatic weight across the so-called Global South, but it also imports more regional rivalries, more conflicting security interests and more reasons for members to block language they dislike in any consensus document.

Iran arrived in New Delhi determined to use the forum as more than a routine ministerial stop. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi urged BRICS countries to condemn what he described as violations of international law by the United States and Israel, and he argued that Tehran remained open to diplomacy while also prepared to defend itself with all available means. That is not a small rhetorical ask inside a grouping that works by consensus, because the expanded BRICS roster now includes the UAE, a country whose interests sharply diverge from Iran’s as the regional war has widened and as Gulf security calculations harden.BRICS foreign ministers meet in India as Iran war, oil prices and divisions test the bloc’s unityapnews.com·SecondaryIndia’s Foreign Minister S.Jaishankar, right, shakes hands with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as he arrives for a two-day BRICS nations meeting in New Delhi, India, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup) Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrives for a two-day BRICS nations Foreign Ministers meeting in New Delhi, India, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup) India’s Foreign Minister S.

That tension is why the Iran war now hangs over virtually every serious discussion about BRICS strategy. Al Jazeera’s background reporting notes that the war had entered its 76th day by Thursday and that the conflict has turned the Strait of Hormuz back into the world’s most politically sensitive energy choke point. Before the war, roughly a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies moved through that waterway, and the disruption matters directly to large energy importers such as India and China while still feeding higher fuel costs into economies that are less directly exposed. A bloc that likes to present itself as the voice of emerging powers now has to prove it can do more than describe the damage after the damage is already global.

India, as host, has tried to keep the meeting from becoming a simple Iran-versus-UAE showdown or a second-order extension of Washington’s regional policy fights. In opening remarks cited by AP and ABC, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar argued that BRICS should help developing countries cope with health and financing pressures as well as high prices for energy, food and fertilizer, and he said emerging economies increasingly expect the grouping to play a constructive and stabilizing role. That is careful language by design: New Delhi wants BRICS to look useful without turning the chairmanship into a platform for any one member’s war narrative. BRICS foreign ministers meet in India as Iran war, oil prices and divisions test the bloc's unityabcnews.com·UnverifiedBRICS foreign ministers have started a two-day meeting in New Delhi NEW DELHI -- Foreign ministers from the BRICS nations began a two-day meeting in New Delhi on Thursday as the expanding bloc faces divisions over the war in Iran, rising energy prices and growing global economic uncertainty. The meeting brings together diplomats from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa along with newer member countries.

Even that balancing act, however, reveals the bloc’s contradictions rather than resolving them. India and China still compete for regional influence, Russia’s war in Ukraine has already exposed how unevenly BRICS members interpret sovereignty and alignment, and the inclusion of both Iran and the UAE has imported a live regional contest directly into the club’s formal deliberations. Al Jazeera reported that an April BRICS deputy-ministers meeting in New Delhi ended without a joint statement after Iran and the UAE clashed over how to frame the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, and it also described separate strain over how sharply to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza. Those are not procedural hiccups; they are warnings about how narrow the bloc’s shared vocabulary can become once real security interests are on the table.BRICS foreign ministers meet in India as Iran war, oil prices and divisions test the bloc’s unityapnews.com·SecondaryIndia’s Foreign Minister S.Jaishankar, right, shakes hands with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as he arrives for a two-day BRICS nations meeting in New Delhi, India, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup) Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrives for a two-day BRICS nations Foreign Ministers meeting in New Delhi, India, Thursday, May 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup) India’s Foreign Minister S.

China’s representation also tells its own story. Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not attend because he remained in Beijing during Trump’s visit, leaving Ambassador Xu Feihong to represent China in New Delhi. That does not mean Beijing is downgrading BRICS, but it does underline a stubborn reality of power politics: when a government must choose where to place its top diplomatic attention on a given day, bilateral pressure from Washington can outrank multilateral solidarity theater. For a bloc that often advertises itself as a counterweight to Western institutions, those choices matter because they show where members believe the immediate leverage actually sits.

Supporters of BRICS will still argue, with some justification, that the grouping remains one of the few high-level forums where major non-Western powers can air disputes, coordinate on economic grievances and resist the assumption that the G7 should define every major global response. Jaishankar’s emphasis on costs borne by developing economies and on a stabilizing role for emerging powers will resonate well beyond India, especially in countries that see sanctions, shipping disruptions and commodity spikes as decisions imposed from elsewhere. That case deserves to be taken seriously because the current war has once again shown how quickly crises among larger powers can be transmitted into food, fuel and financing pain for states with little direct influence over the conflict itself.

Skeptics, however, also have a serious case. Analysts cited by Al Jazeera argued that BRICS cohesion is under strain because India’s ties with the United States and Israel do not match Iran’s worldview, because China’s attention is divided, and because the bloc has historically found it easier to issue broad language about sovereignty than to produce a common line when members are implicated on opposite sides of a live conflict. AP’s account likewise points to sharper divisions over the Middle East, over trade and over the meaning of strategic autonomy in a group whose members do not share the same dependencies, alliances or threat perceptions. Put plainly, BRICS is large enough to matter but still fragmented enough to disappoint those expecting a disciplined anti-Western pole.

That is why the most revealing outcome from New Delhi may not be whether the ministers can pose for a family photograph or produce another expansive paragraph about cooperation. The harder test is whether they can say anything meaningful about energy security, maritime disruption and the Iran war without immediately exposing the internal vetoes that expansion has multiplied. If the final line is limited to general appeals for dialogue, sovereignty and stability, that will still tell readers something important: BRICS can aggregate grievance far more easily than it can aggregate strategy when its own members have conflicting stakes in the same battlefield.

The meeting continues on Friday and is meant to help set the table for India’s September summit, where the larger claims about BRICS reform, resilience and influence will be tested again. Between now and then, member states will have to decide whether the bloc is primarily a protest coalition against Western dominance, a practical economic forum for emerging powers, or an umbrella broad enough to contain both ambitions without ever fully reconciling them. New Delhi’s ministerial opening suggests India would prefer the second path, Iran is pushing hard for the first, and the rest of the bloc has yet to prove it can choose cleanly between them.