The New York Times:

By Ana Ionova

Battered by 12 days of war, Iran stands mostly alone and weakened in the Middle East. Yet the Islamic republic has found friends elsewhere in the world.

Starting Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, Iran will join a two-day meeting of the BRICS group that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and other countries. It will be a chance for Iran, a newcomer to the group, to show it has powerful allies, even as it faces sanctions and threats of more military strikes over its nuclear program.

After Israel and the United States launched military strikes on Iran last month, the BRICS group issued a statement expressing “grave concern” and calling the attacks a breach of international law and the United Nations Charter. Still the alliance, whose members represent more than half of the world’s population, stopped short of outright criticizing Israel or the United States.

Behind the scenes, divisions over how harshly BRICS should condemn the strikes have tested the alliance’s ambitions to rebalance global power dynamics by offering a counterweight to the West.

“There is no alignment whatsoever on Iran,” said Oliver Stuenkel, an expert on BRICS and an associate professor at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, a Brazilian university. “So the solution was this very inoffensive position.”

BRICS was founded in 2009 with the goal of increasing the influence of the world’s biggest emerging economies. The group has since grown to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Unlike NATO, where military cooperation is central, the group has focused on an economic and geopolitical agenda, though it has struggled to make significant strides on many of its concrete goals, serving so far as a mostly symbolic alliance.

Analysts expect Iran to use the upcoming summit as an opportunity to shore up more forceful support from the group, particularly in a communiqué expected to be issued at the end of the meeting.

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