Two weeks into the war in the Persian Gulf, BRICS has issued no joint statement on the conflict. This has disappointed many BRICS enthusiasts in both the East and the West who imagined the grouping as a credible counterweight to U.S. power and a harbinger of a multipolar order. Yet the failure should not surprise anyone. It was foretold in the very structure of the grouping.

As a collective, BRICS has done little even for Russia during its yearslong confrontation with what Moscow calls the “collective West.” Now the problem has become sharper. When the United States and Israel launched a massive military attack on Iran—another BRICS member—the forum struggled to articulate a common response. Some members are working closely with Washington’s military operations; others, such as India, have developed strong partnerships with Israel.

Two weeks into the war in the Persian Gulf, BRICS has issued no joint statement on the conflict. This has disappointed many BRICS enthusiasts in both the East and the West who imagined the grouping as a credible counterweight to U.S. power and a harbinger of a multipolar order. Yet the failure should not surprise anyone. It was foretold in the very structure of the grouping.

As a collective, BRICS has done little even for Russia during its yearslong confrontation with what Moscow calls the “collective West.” Now the problem has become sharper. When the United States and Israel launched a massive military attack on Iran—another BRICS member—the forum struggled to articulate a common response. Some members are working closely with Washington’s military operations; others, such as India, have developed strong partnerships with Israel.

But the difficulty goes deeper than individual members’ ties with the United States or Israel. The problem lies within the grouping itself: the structural rivalry between Iran and the conservative Gulf monarchies such as the United Arab Emirates, which is also a BRICS member. The strategic divide between them is too deep. Iran has defined itself in opposition to the United States since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, while the UAE and its fellow monarchies have long been partners of Washington.

The expectation that BRICS could take a clear position on the conflict has little basis in reality. Even if India, which currently chairs the grouping, were able to craft a statement that was acceptable to both Tehran and Abu Dhabi, the result may not be worth the paper it is written on.

It is one thing to sign on to general declarations about common interests and shared grievances against the West. It is quite another to manage real conflicts among the members themselves. An organization conceived as a challenge to Western power now finds itself a passive spectator to both Washington’s bombing campaign against Iran and Tehran’s retaliation against the Gulf states.

Yet this outcome should not surprise us. The story of BRICS during the latest Middle Eastern war echoes a much older pattern in international politics. Over the past century, grand movements built on the promise of transnational solidarity—pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism, pan-Arabism, communist internationalism, and even the Non-Aligned Movement—have repeatedly encountered the same test. When solidarity collides with national interest, the latter prevails.

History’s great solidarity projects tend to follow a similar trajectory. They begin with the promise of transcending the nation-state through a shared identity—regional, religious, ideological, or geopolitical. They flourish in moments of collective grievance, when the rhetoric of unity is powerful and the costs of solidarity remain low. But they fracture once a real crisis forces governments to choose between the collective cause and their own national interests.

Consider the Communist International—the Comintern—set up in 1919 to coordinate a global revolution against capitalism. Its confusions came to the fore in August 1939, when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. Communist parties across the world were instructed overnight to treat fascism not as an enemy but as a neutral power.

Two years later, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Moscow abruptly reversed course and joined forces with the United States and Britain. Soviet policy revealed a simple truth: The doctrine of “socialism in one country” meant that Soviet national interest would ultimately override international working-class solidarity. The Comintern itself, already hollowed out by this reality, was formally dissolved by Stalin in 1943.

Pan-Asianism did not produce a common regional response against imperialism. During World War II, China was locked in a fight against Imperial Japan, Indian nationalists against Britain, Indonesians against the Dutch, and Indo-Chinese against both the French and Japanese. Some were ready to take Japanese and even German support against the European colonial powers. Other nationalists sought Western support against Japan.

Pan-Arabism followed a similar arc. Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s vision of a united Arab nation reached its high point in the creation of the United Arab Republic, which joined Egypt and Syria into a single centralized state in 1958. The union collapsed after barely three years. The cause of its failure was not external pressure but Syrian resentment of Egyptian dominance.

Arab governments also struggled to act collectively on the issue that supposedly defined their solidarity: Palestine. The 1973 oil embargo remains the most consequential act of Arab cooperation, yet even that unity proved fleeting. Within months, the coalition that had come together to support the Egyptian-Syrian invasion of Israel began to unravel under the pressure of divergent national interests.

Another major blow to the idea of Arab political unity came in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. One Arab state attacked another, and the Arab world split sharply in response. Since then, the Arab League has largely remained a bystander to the region’s crises.

Recent events have reinforced the same pattern. There was no collective Arab response to Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following Hamas’ horrible attack on Israel in October 2023. Egypt and Jordan maintained their peace treaties with Israel. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which had normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, sustained those ties. Arab solidarity with Palestine has remained a strong political sentiment but rarely translated into decisive actions.

Pan-Islamism has fared little better. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation brings together 57 Muslim-majority states and produces communiqués filled with expressions of unity. Yet the political reality of the Muslim world tells a different story. Iran and Iraq fought one of the 20th century’s longest and bloodiest wars. Libya and Sudan are battlegrounds for rival Muslim-majority powers. Saudi Arabia and Iran have conducted a prolonged rivalry through proxies across the region. Today, that conflict has entered yet another phase as Iran’s confrontation with the Gulf monarchies intensifies.

Regional organizations built on pragmatic cooperation have faced similar limits. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), widely seen as one of the more successful regional groupings, operates on the principle of consensus. Yet this very rule often paralyzes the organization. The Philippines, one of the founding members of ASEAN and its current chair, has been facing intense Chinese pressure in the South China Sea over the past decade. But ASEAN cannot collectively condemn Beijing because of the region’s deep economic interdependence with China and the latter’s close strategic ties with two of the group’s members, Cambodia and Laos.

Latin America offers another recent illustration. When the United States intervened in Venezuela and seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States convened an emergency meeting. It ended without agreement. Argentine President Javier Milei and several right-leaning governments opposed any condemnation of Washington’s action.

BRICS now appears to be following the same trajectory. India, the chair, has spoken frequently with Iran’s foreign minister during the crisis—not to organize a collective response but to ensure the safety of Indian shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The global system remains a collection of sovereign nation-states. Governments are accountable to domestic constituencies with concrete interests: security and prosperity. Transnational solidarity may inspire rhetoric, but it is hard to sacrifice national interests for collective security built around the idea of “all for one and one for all.”

The Arab League, ASEAN, BRICS, Comintern, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, and the Organization of Islamic Countries all built on common aspirations defined in the broadest possible terms. That is not good enough to produce unified action in a major conflict.