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.
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 retaliation. Even where memoranda of understanding promise cooperation, risk-management rules at BRICS institutions keep Iran out of the fine print — the actual contracts and credit lines.
An analysis noted that BRICS’s value for Iran lies less in money than in cover. The bloc gives legitimacy, not leverage. Still, Tehran uses every summit to push small, technical goals—such as oil sales in yuan or dirhams, new transport routes through the North–South corridor, and a trade network linking India, Iran, and Russia via the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. It’s an adaptation under constraint, but also a reminder of how little weight Iran carries inside the club.
BRICS talks about multipolarity, but the poles aren’t equal. China dominates through trade, and Russia seeks strategic breathing space. Beijing now buys more than 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports, around 1.4 million barrels a day as of mid-2025, mostly discounted crude moved through middlemen and sold in non-dollar currencies. The discount, now over $6 a barrel of Brent, is the price of access. The imbalance is structural: Iranian barrels account for almost all of Tehran’s exports but only about 13 percent of China’s imports. Iran increasingly markets BRICS as a de-dollarization project, a way to re-narrate dependency. In reality, it’s a political soundtrack, not a financial one.
Tehran keeps advertising new BRICS projects, a free-trade zone here, a transport link there. But everyone knows what stops them: US sanctions. The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act punishes anyone, anywhere, who trades too closely with Iran’s restricted sectors. The Office of Foreign Assets Control makes the threat explicit—touch Iranian oil, shipping, or finance, and a bank can lose its US accounts overnight.
BRICS institutions, including Chinese ones, still move money through dollar-based insurers and clearing houses. Legal advisory notes that Washington can hit “non-US persons directly or indirectly engaged” with Tehran. As Iranian poet Saadi Shirazi wrote in the 13th century, “Beauty without virtue is an empty shell.” Iran’s leaders may smile in the group portraits at BRICS summits, but the doors behind them—to the wider world of trade and finance—remain shut.
Sanctions still write the script. OFAC keeps layering new rules under the Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act and earlier executive orders. Any large foreign partner risks losing dollar-clearing or insurance if it goes too far. Chinese and Indian refiners know this; they may defy Washington on paper, but their tankers, insurers, and brokers still operate in a dollar world. BRICS can debate “de-dollarization” forever—the wiring of global trade hasn’t moved.
Beijing and Moscow have tried small detours. A few Chinese banks handle limited oil settlements in yuan through Shanghai’s free-trade zone. Russia’s SPFS system sometimes replaces SWIFT in bilateral trade, though none of it scales. The New Development Bank, BRICS’s own lending arm, froze new deals with sanctioned members in 2022 to maintain compliance. Its charter follows global banking norms, which effectively keeps Iran out by default. And Beijing’s major oil firms—CNPC, Sinopec, and CNOOC—have pulled back since 2019, unwilling to risk Western markets. Tehran still calls this turn “Looking East.” To most observers, it looks like standing still.
Dependence, though, brings predictability. By tying its exports to a few Eastern buyers, Iran secures steady demand and limited access to yuan or dirham payments, revenue that can fund imports but not modernize its economy. For a sanction-bound economy, even that feels like oxygen. But stability is not solidarity. At this year’s Rio de Janeiro Summit, BRICS condemned the “unilateral attacks” on Iran in the June airstrikes on its nuclear facilities, but stopped short of naming Israel. The gesture offered sympathy, not security, proof that the bloc’s political unity ends where members’ Western interests begin.
Inside Iran, independence has morphed into “resistance” and “resilience.” The media portrays BRICS as the “core driver of a collective international will to build a fairer world that protects the interests of independent nations.” The same moral language once used for non-alignment now justifies partnership with authoritarian peers. Iran no longer leads the Global South; it’s simply seated among it.
Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies call this “strategic multi-alignment”—a balancing act for mid-level states that can’t resist great-power gravity. Iran fits the model neatly. For all the rhetoric of equality, BRICS runs on hierarchy. Even if its institutions grow, Tehran would still need transparent banking, credible contracts, and a stable currency to benefit. Without those, membership remains decorative.
For now, the bloc offers profile, not policy. The Council on Foreign Relations notes that internal divisions make real coordination difficult. The IMF puts Iran’s 2025 growth at 0.6 percent, inflation above 40 percent, well over the BRICS average. Chinese capital is flowing toward the Gulf and Southeast Asia, where the profits are safer. For Beijing, Iran is still a partner of convenience.
In the end, BRICS acts more as a mirror than a milestone, reflecting a state adapting to constraints rather than overcoming them. In the 1980s, Iran dreamed of leading a moral bloc; in the 2020s, it accepts a place in one led by others. The Global South is rising through India’s tech drive, China’s infrastructure diplomacy, and the Gulf’s financial reach.
Iran lags behind, held by sanctions and its own governance. Ideological independence has become strategic dependence; alignment, once taboo, is now the cost of relevance. BRICS gives Tehran visibility but little control—a seat at the table without a say on the menu. Turning that seat into leverage would take transparency, credible diplomacy, and a clearer economic vision.
About the Author: Fatemeh Aman
Fatemeh Aman has written on Iranian, Afghan, and broader Middle East affairs for over 25 years and advised US and non-governmental officials. A former non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a writer, producer, and anchor at Voice of America, and a correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, her work has appeared in Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Jane’s Intelligence Review, and the Stimson Center’s Middle East Perspectives. Follow her on X: @FatemehAman.
Image: Noam Galai / Shutterstock.com.
