Iran war shows BRICS limits as India pushed to choose sides

Sudhi Ranjan Sen, S'thembile Cele and Dan Strumpf

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Almost a month after the US and Israel began airstrikes on Iran — which killed the senior leadership in that country and triggered a global energy crisis — the BRICS group has failed to take a position on the war. Driving the impasse is the fact that multiple members of the bloc are on different sides of the conflict, making any hard consensus difficult to wrangle. Iran, a BRICS member since 2024, has responded to the US-Israel attacks by firing rockets at the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The UAE joined the bloc in 2024, while Saudi Arabia is weighing an invitation to join.

Iran has asked India — which holds the rotating chairmanship of BRICS this year — to support its bid to condemn the joint US and Israeli military campaign against it, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are unlikely to agree, the people said, while China and Russia may extend tacit support to Iran.

War in Iran and the nuclear non-proliferation regime: a perspective from Pakistan

Sufian Ullah

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On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched joint missile strikes and airstrikes targeting several Iranian cities. This included a decapitating strike that assassinated the country’s supreme leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei. The apparent objective of these strikes was to fuel regime change in Tehran (as US President Donald Trump framed the situation speaking to the Iranian people: ‘When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take’) and conduct preventive counter-proliferation measures. The principal disagreement between Washington and Tehran – evident before and during their latest round of nuclear talks – has concerned the latter’s uranium enrichment levels, and monitoring mechanisms. Trump’s hardline stance with respect to Iran’s nuclear compliance – a consistent feature of both his presidential terms – has gradually narrowed the scope for negotiated de-escalation.

Diplomacy falters

In February 2026, high-level talks between the US and Iran, facilitated through third-party mediation, were underway in Oman and Geneva. These sought to reconcile the United States’ and its allies’ demands for caps on Iran’s enrichment levels with Tehran’s insistence on its legal rights as laid out in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan

Erik Green

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On 12 March 2026, China concluded its annual ‘Two Sessions’ – a large political meeting of delegates from China’s legislative body, the National People’s Congress, and its advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. At this year’s gathering, delegates approved China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (FYP), which outlines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) developmental objectives for 2026–30. This was President Xi Jinping’s third FYP as leader, delivered at a time of slowing economic growth, internal instability following last year’s widespread anti-corruption campaign and global uncertainty due to the ongoing war in Iran.

The 15th FYP highlights several points of continuity in the CCP’s strategic ambitions – namely its aim to achieve technological supremacy and self-reliance. More importantly, however, the FYP also emphasises a growing concern regarding internal and external risks that may threaten these ambitions and outlines how the CCP plans to mitigate them. As the CCP faces an increasingly unpredictable external environment as well as continued challenges at home, it is investing in enhanced early-warning and risk-monitoring systems. To achieve these ambitions and coordinate risk assessments, improvements in centre–local party relations and information flows will be key.

Taiwan’s Four Lessons from the Iran War

James Holmes

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Geography matters. Iran’s principal assailant, the United States, lies thousands of miles from the combat zone. America is a resident power in the Middle East, but heavy forces bound for the Persian Gulf typically surge from bases in the homeland. Maritime forces sortieing from the East Coast of the United States have to traverse not just vast distances, but potentially embattled waterways—the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait in particular—to gain entry to the waters and skies adjoining the Islamic Republic. Or they have to undertake the arduous roundabout voyage through the South Atlantic into the Indian Ocean.

It may not seem so considering the pounding it has taken, but Iran is actually a tremendous beneficiary of the tyranny of distance. Not so with Taiwan. In one sense, geography has cursed the island republic. It lies under the shadow of its major antagonist, China, which has armed itself with an array of weaponry to pummel the island while fending off US or allied reinforcements for a time. Nor does Beijing bother to conceal its malice toward Taipei. If the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can recruit time as its ally, it will dramatically bolster its chances of subduing the island’s defenders. And while the United States has committed only a fraction of its armed might to Operation Epic Fury, China tends to keep its massive armed forces grouped in East Asia, near potential battlegrounds. Numbers of ships, combat aircraft, and munitions are its friend.

Iran, the $39 trillion national debt and dedollarization: How Trump exposed America’s Achilles Heel in Hormuz

Nick Lichtenberg

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The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled.

The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century.

Choppy waters in the Strait of Hormuz

Nick Childs

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When the Houthis threatened shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait from November 2023, the dire economic consequences that were forecast did not materialise, in part because shippers could reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. There was also sufficient shipping capacity to cope, and markets adapted. The Strait of Hormuz is different. It accounts for 20% of all internationally traded oil, 34% of seaborne oil-trade flows and 30% of liquefied natural gas exports. It is also the only maritime route in and out of the Gulf.

There are pipeline alternatives, but they have only about one-third of the capacity that normally flows through the Strait of Hormuz. There have long been calls to build more pipelines, and even a canal, to bypass the strait. However, building sufficient capacity would be a challenge. And recent events have shown that canals and fixed land-based energy infrastructure have their own vulnerabilities.

Defending the skies of the Arab Gulf states

Albert Vidal Ribe

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Since the beginning of the current war in Iran on 28 February, the Arab Gulf states have used hundreds of missile interceptors to counter Iranian missiles and one-way attack uninhabited aerial vehicles (OWA UAVs). They have already consumed a significant portion of their stockpiles of long-range interceptors. These air-defence systems have protected the Arab Gulf states while the United States and Israel prioritised the destruction of Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers and effectively eliminated most of Iran’s launch capabilities, which led to a sharp drop in the rate of Iranian ballistic-missile fire after the first few days of hostilities.

Though Iran’s UAV attacks have also decreased in intensity, drones continue to enter the skies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states by the dozen. Compared with ballistic missiles, these are cheaper systems and easier to launch, and Iran possesses a much larger stockpile of them. In the absence of a durable diplomatic settlement to the conflict – which is unlikely, at least in the short term – Iran is likely to rely on UAVs as a major part of its harassment strategy.

Trump Needs a Humanitarian Plan for Iran and the Middle East—Before It’s Too Late

Sam Vigersky

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More than three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, with U.S. President Donald Trump unleashing the full might of military dominance, a critical feature of the country’s power is conspicuously absent—humanitarian aid.

Since 1945, the United States’ global authority has rested on being a complete power: an unmatched military paired with the diplomatic and economic tools needed to advance peace. Together, this has secured a period of safety and prosperity that has defined U.S. leadership for decades. Despite having spent an estimated $11 billion on military operations in the first week of the Iran conflict alone—and an additional $200 billion war supplemental under debate on Capitol Hill—the State Department’s new Bureau of Disaster and Humanitarian Response has yet to articul

What the Iran War Reveals About the Limits of US Power

Alexander Clackson

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This matters because global influence rests not only on capabilities, but also on credibility, coalition management, and the ability to shape escalation dynamics. On each of these fronts, the conflict is offering lessons – not only for Washington, but for its competitors.

The first lesson is that overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee strategic control. The United States possesses the most advanced military capabilities in the world, from precision strike systems to unmatched naval power. Yet Iran has demonstrated how a weaker state can impose meaningful costs through asymmetric means.

Unable to compete conventionally, Tehran has relied on relatively low-cost but disruptive tools: drones, missiles, naval mines, and attacks conducted through regional partners. These capabilities have allowed Iran to expand the scope of the conflict beyond direct exchanges with US forces. Strikes on infrastructure across the Gulf, attacks on shipping lanes, and pressure on regional bases have imposed a broader strategic burden that is difficult to neutralize quickly.

Are the US and Iran holding peace talks, and what do both sides want?

Frank Gardner

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Donald Trump has insisted the US is negotiating with Iran over an end to the war, but Tehran has repeatedly said talks are not taking place. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi admitted messages have been exchanged with the US via intermediaries, but said these constituted "neither dialogue nor negotiation, nor anything of the sort".

Trump claimed on Wednesday that Iran is "afraid" to admit to talks "because they figure they'll be killed by their own people". So, who to believe? Is peace just around the corner? Or are both sides settling in for a costly, protracted war that will keep energy prices high, affecting the whole world right through the summer?

The signs are that we are now entering into a situation not dissimilar to the logjam over ending the Russia-Ukraine war. Both sides say they want it to finish, but on their terms, which are still far apart from what the other side will accept.

Autonomous swarms are the future of drone warfare

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DRONES HAVE become a standard weapon of war. Small quadcopters currently inflict the majority of casualties on the battlefield in Ukraine, and in recent weeks Iran has rained thousands of larger drones on the cities, airfields and oil facilities of the Middle East.

The War Is Going Better Than You Think

Bret Stephens

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Most Americans probably don’t look back at March 2012 — if they remember it at all — and think of terrifyingly high gas prices. In the month when “The Hunger Games” ruled the box office and President Barack Obama was on his way to a comfortable re-election, the price of Brent crude closed the month around $123 a barrel. That would be about $175 a barrel in today’s dollars.

As of Tuesday, despite Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors’ energy facilities, it’s hovering around $100, slightly higher than the average inflation-adjusted price since January 2001, roughly $95.

Decentralize or Defeat: How Institutional Ego Slows U.S. Military Intelligence

Jared Martin

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For more than two decades, the United States has been lulled into complacency fighting counterinsurgencies against foes who were woefully overmatched by the technical prowess of the U.S. military. Satellites and high-altitude surveillance aircraft thrived in uncontested airspace which provided American forces the distinct intelligence advantage. This advantage seemed so dominant that the United States stopped evolving. In Ukraine, our illusion is being dismantled by $500 drones.

Across a battlefield saturated with electronic warfare and long-range fires, Ukrainian units now use cheap commercial drones to spot targets, track movements, provide surveillance and reconnaissance, and organize strikes in real-time. These systems do not belong to a rigid, centralized enterprise. Instead, they belong to platoons, companies, and volunteer operators scattered across hundreds of miles along the warfront. Together, they have built something no Western military currently possesses: a disposable, decentralized intelligence network designed to survive in a high-attrition war.

Trump, Iran, and Diego Garcia: Inside the Fight Over a Remote Military Base

Mariel Ferragamo

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In the central Indian Ocean, 1,000 miles south of the southern tip of India—and around 5,800 miles southeast of the United Kingdom (UK)—lies the Chagos Archipelago, a small group of roughly sixty islands designated as the British Indian Ocean Territory since 1965.

U.S. President Donald Trump has marked the cluster of islands as critical to U.S. foreign policy because of a joint U.S.-UK military base on the archipelago’s largest island, Diego Garcia. Since the Cold War era, the base has acted as a staging ground for deployments to the Middle East and East Africa, allowing the United States quicker access to these areas—which has become all the more important as the Trump administration plunges forward with the U.S. war with Iran.

Assessing the Air Campaign After Three Weeks: Iran War By the Numbers

Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park

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In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. forces struck over 1,000 targets as they worked from the long-standing U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) target list. The Israeli Air Force struck over 750 additional targets during this time. After that, the pace eased. CENTCOM likely was being judicious in using expensive and scarce long-range missiles like the Tomahawk and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM)—both around $3.5 million per shot.

The intensity of the U.S. bombing campaign picked up between Days 7 and 10 as the coalition took advantage of its air dominance over large parts of Iran. Operational success in diminishing Iran’s air defense meant U.S. planes could fly with few limitations and use less expensive, more plentiful munitions like Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), which costs less than $100,000 per shot.

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Clayton Seigle

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After more than three weeks of open warfare, Iran effectively controls the Persian Gulf. The country’s two-pronged attack against gulf commercial shipping and critical infrastructure has cut off roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, leaving only Iranian oil to make it out.

President Trump last week responded by removing sanctions from some of the oil flowing out of Iran, in an effort to ease high petroleum prices. If the money from selling that oil gets back to Tehran, the president’s move will be deeply counterproductive. Instead, he should order a blockade of Iranian oil. To negotiate an end to the crisis from a position of strength, the Trump administration should flip the script on Iran, depriving it of revenue unless the regime restores security in the gulf.

The key to securing — or blockading — gulf energy exports is not at the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that connects the gulf with global markets. Even if the United States fully secures the strait for commercial traffic, Iran will retain the firepower and range to continue striking ships and the facilities that load those ships throughout the region. Securing the strait would impose no pressure on Iran to ease up, because the country would continue exporting oil.

Empty Words Don’t Open Straits

Maisoon H. Kafafy

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Earlier this month, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted on X that the U.S. Navy had successfully escorted a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. Within minutes, the post was deleted, and the White House soon clarified that no such escort had taken place. On its face, it was a simple case of miscommunication. In practice, it revealed more about the Trump administration’s approach to crisis management than any official briefing has.

What was remarkable was not that the post was wrong. It was that, for about 10 minutes, it worked: Crude oil futures plunged by nearly 17 percent—a false signal, accepted by markets desperate for evidence that the crisis was being resolved.

Bottling the World Economy

Adam Hanieh

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Amid the destruction of the US–Israeli war against Iran, much of the world’s attention has fixed on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes. In normal times ships traversing the Strait—which runs between Oman and the United Arab Emirates on one bank and Iran on the other—follow a pair of two-mile-wide lanes for inbound and outbound traffic, separated by a two-mile buffer. Shortly after the onset of the war Iran began attacking commercial vessels and laying mines in the waterway, effectively shutting it to most marine traffic. As of March 18 around 3,200 ships were stranded in the Gulf, with only a handful of tankers permitted to pass each day.

The disruption of this vital artery has sent markets into convulsions, with the international price benchmark for Brent crude oil briefly surging to nearly $120 a barrel on March 9, its highest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked panic. Donald Trump has urged Western allies to help escort tankers through the Strait in an effort to keep prices in check, so far finding no takers; more recently he has threatened to strike Iran’s power plants if its government refuses to reopen the waterway. Oil, in this sense, has become a proxy for the war’s nearly incalculable costs.

Love Actually? Washington’s current relationship with Britain is more like Contempt Actually

Timothy Garton Ash

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“Afriend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.” Thus spoke Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister confronting the US president in a famous scene in the romcom Love Actually. Real-life British prime minister Keir Starmer has attempted to stand up ever so slightly to the current bully in the White House over the latest US war in the Middle East. Despite the British government’s right-royal efforts to flatter Donald Trump ever since he was elected US president, his response to Starmer’s little attempt has been a torrent of contempt. So the reality is not Love Actually. It’s Contempt Actually.

Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”

Iron Dome Steps up on Ballistic Missiles

Ryan Brobst, Bradley Bowman & Justin Leopold-Cohen

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Multiple videos from the past year of conflict in the Middle East appear to show the Israeli Iron Dome air defense system intercepting Iranian ballistic missiles, a capability well outside its original purpose and specifications. If these early observations are accurate, this impressive feat demonstrates how Iron Dome can, at least to some degree, complement Israel’s Arrow and David’s Sling systems and provide some modest additional protection against ballistic missiles.

To maximize Iron Dome’s emerging capabilities against ballistic missiles and continue to defend against more traditional threats for which Iron Dome was designed, Israel and the United States must work together to exploit its potential and significantly increase production capacity and Israel’s inventory.

Trump’s Iran War Turns Into Fight for the Dollar

Sven R. Larson

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Recently, various news stories have surfaced around the world about Iranian demands that oil be traded in yuan. In return for a shift to the Chinese currency, Tehran would guarantee that the Hormuz Strait is open to oil shipping.

The tie between the yuan and the U.S. special military operation against Iran is sensational. In one fell swoop, it would shift the balance of power in the conflict, away from America’s military hegemony to a point where China could deal a near-fatal blow to the U.S. dollar as the world’s preeminent currency. With such high stakes involved, Trump no longer ‘owns’ this conflict. He cannot back out of it without being absolutely sure that he does not sacrifice the dollar in the bargain.

Trump, Xi, and the Specter of 1914

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In the early 1910s, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey was surveying the world from his office in Whitehall. He saw many minor wars, but nothing that would pit the great powers at the time against one another. Even “in the early months of 1914 the international sky seemed clearer than it had been,” he later wrote in his memoirs.

World War I, of course, broke out just months later, and went on to kill 40 million people. Almost nobody saw it coming, but many, including Lord Grey, concluded afterward that it happened because the great powers did not manage to solve the many smaller conflicts that together fueled the conflagration of 1914.

Russia’s Influence Continues to Decline in Azerbaijan and Armenia

Sertaç Canalp Korkmaz

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U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s visits to Armenia and Azerbaijan in February 2026 are the most recent major indications of Baku and Yerevan’s increasing diplomatic engagement with the West and distancing from Moscow. Moscow’s influence in Azerbaijan and Armenia has declined sharply since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Moscow can no longer sustain the force posture that underpinned its role as the South Caucasus’s security guarantor.

Development of the Middle Corridor, TRIPP, Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, and Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline all demonstrate that the South Caucasus is evolving into an energy and logistics hub independent of Russian leverage.

How Trump’s Iran War Could Torch the Global Economy

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Simon Flowers has spent more than four decades working in the energy industry and analyzing it. After studying geology at Edinburgh University at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties, he worked for two years on exploration wells in the eastern Mediterranean, then joined Wood Mackenzie, which was then a stockbroker known for its energy research. When he started out, oil and gasoline prices were falling after two big shocks in the nineteen-seventies. Since then, he’s witnessed gluts in which prices collapsed, two previous Gulf wars that disrupted supply, and other major price spikes, including one in 2008 that was driven by strong demand and stagnant production, and another in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now the chairman and lead analyst of Wood Mackenzie, which has evolved into a global energy consultancy, Flowers is no stranger to dramatic turns and market volatility. 

But even he was surprised last week when Iranian missiles struck the huge Ras Laffan liquid-natural-gas (L.N.G.) complex in Qatar, which converts gas that comes out of the ground into a liquid that can be transported on ships over long distances. “It takes the whole thing to another level,” Flowers, who is still based in Edinburgh, said to me in a video interview a day after the Iranian strike, which came in response to an Israeli attack on an Iranian gas field. Looking at a screen on his desk, he pointed out that the price of L.N.G.—a fuel widely used in power stations and heating systems—had jumped by thirty per cent in a single day.

The Iran war through Asia’s eyes

Christopher Harding

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Such has been the intensity of events in the Gulf, and the relentlessness of the media coverage, that the Iran war can feel older than it is. In fact, some of the oil tankers that left the Middle East before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have yet to reach their destinations in Europe. The real impact of radically reduced supplies, across the array of industries that rely on oil and the customers who depend on their products, has yet to be felt, leaving an eerie sense of consequences pending.

To the east of the Gulf, where transit times to major Asian destinations are shorter and reliance on Middle Eastern oil is much greater, things are already looking very different. South, East and Southeast Asia have long suffered a severe energy deficit, owing to dense populations, high industrial demand for power and uncooperative geology when it comes to oil and gas production. Around 84 per cent of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz is destined for Asia, and economies in South and Southeast Asia in particular are starting to struggle. Relationships with the United States are meanwhile being stress-tested, most of all in South Korea and Japan.