BRICS summit may be the only place another Iran ceasefire can be built
Its members and partners have brokered every ceasefire so far and hold the relationships needed to build the next one.
Iranian missiles and drones came down on Kuwait on September 3, two days after American aircraft struck roughly a hundred positions along the Hormuz coast and across western Iran, including a strike that killed five people at a wedding party in Sirik. The confrontation has continued since, with US forces striking Iranian oil tankers and Iran targeting shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Brent is trading around $97 a barrel.
On September 12, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian lands in New Delhi for the BRICS summit. So do Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, along with at least eight of the eleven BRICS heads of state and government. The United Arab Emirates, which has spent six months under Iranian fire, will be in the same hall.
Western commentary has already filed the summit under photo opportunity, a bloc too broad to agree on anything. That reading skips an awkward fact about the past six months. Every ceasefire this war has produced was assembled by BRICS members and their partners. Not one was assembled in Washington.
The economic half of the summit is the same war by other means. Iranian inflation runs near 70 percent and the IMF expects a contraction above five percent this year. Bombs did some of it. Exclusion from dollar payment infrastructure did more, as it did to Russia, Venezuela and Afghanistan before it.