BRICS summit may be the only place another Iran ceasefire can be built

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.

Look at the sequence. On March 31, Beijing and Islamabad issued a five-point initiative calling for an immediate ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. A week later, Iran accepted a two-week truce. Direct American and Iranian delegations then sat down in Islamabad on April 11, the highest-level contact of the war, in talks run by Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, with his army chief Asim Munir shuttling to Tehran twice. What came out of it was the Islamabad Memorandum, signed on June 17 by Trump at Versailles and Pezeshkian in Tehran, with Qatar, Oman, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Egypt carrying pieces of it. Fourteen points. Sixty days of toll-free passage. A pledge to lift the naval blockade within 30 days. A plan for at least $300 billion in reconstruction and economic development. It expired on August 17 after the two sides read Articles 1 and 5 differently and no mediator could force a common text.

The document failed. The machinery that built it did not. It is the only machinery this war has produced and most of it will be inside one building in Delhi on September 12.

China’s share of that record deserves more than the shrug it usually gets. Beijing buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s exported crude. It also buys heavily from the Gulf states Iran has been shelling and its Gulf imports fell 25 percent year on year in March. No other major power is losing money on both sides of this war at once. That exposure is what made its proposals legible in Tehran and tolerable in Abu Dhabi.

None of which makes Beijing clean. Chinese firms have supplied Iran with dual-use components, radar and navigation equipment, and a commercial reconnaissance satellite; Washington says the list runs longer and Beijing denies the sharper items. China has also said almost nothing about the Kuwaiti and Bahraini civilians killed and Qatari civilians injured by Iranian missiles, which is a real cost to its standing in the Gulf and one the Gulf has noticed. The argument is not that China has behaved well. It is that a mediator with commercial skin on every side and no interest in regime change is more usable than a mediator with none. Opportunism that produces a signed ceasefire outperforms conviction that produces nothing.

And Washington now produces nothing by choice. The United States has burned through nearly 80 percent of its THAAD interceptors and virtually all of its ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, and Trump says he prefers near-total control of the strait to any agreement. Six months in, that is attrition with no terminal point and the states absorbing it are not American. Kuwait has taken strikes on its airport, its refineries and its bases since the first day of the war. Oman drew the compromise shipping lanes. Qatar kept a channel open after being hit itself. These are not spectators to be arranged around a Chinese or Russian argument and any Delhi text that treats them that way will die the way May’s did.

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.

That exclusion is now repricing itself in public. China’s cross-border payment system posted a single-day record of 1.22 trillion yuan, about $178.5bn, and March average daily volumes ran 50 percent above February. Standard Chartered’s chief economist for Greater China put the war down as a likely catalyst, mostly through oil settlement. As chair, India is pushing links between members’ fast-payment systems, including UPI and Pix, alongside work on central bank digital currencies. Sanjay Malhotra, who runs India’s central bank, calls it cost reduction rather than confrontation, which is both accurate and shrewd.

Be honest about scale. The yuan still accounts for less than three percent of global payments through SWIFT, against 51 percent for the dollar, and CIPS has 1,791 participating institutions against SWIFT’s 11,000. Nobody displaces anything this decade. What has moved is the demand curve. Governments from Jakarta to Pretoria have now watched a country get bombed in the middle of live nuclear talks while cut off from the rails that would let it sell oil to willing buyers. They are not debating whether an alternative appeals. They are pricing what it costs.

India’s own year makes the point. In February, facing a 50 percent tariff wall, New Delhi agreed to stop buying Russian crude and Washington dropped the rate to 18 percent. Bilateral pressure worked, as it always does against one country at a time. Shared infrastructure is the only reply to that arithmetic, and Narendra Modi, chairing under a banner about building for resilience, needs to show the bloc delivers something a tariff cannot take back.

When the foreign ministers met in May, they broke up without a joint statement, because Abbas Araghchi wanted the bloc to name American and Israeli aggression and the Emiratis would not sign it. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation had no such trouble at Bishkek on September 1, where a declaration condemning the strikes on Iran passed unanimously. Bishkek was easy because nobody in the room sat on the other side. Delhi is hard for the same reason it is worth something.

So set the bar where it belongs. A navigation understanding Iran initials alongside the UAE and Oman would do more for war-risk premiums than another month of strikes on Larak Island. Reconstruction money lifted out of the dead memorandum and carried by a grouping representing 40 percent of world output at purchasing power parity is harder to wave away as Kremlin messaging than the same offer from Moscow alone. A dated timetable on payment linkage would tell the Global South that the alternative is under construction rather than under discussion.

Washington has stated its terms: the strait, on its own conditions, indefinitely. Delhi is where everyone else gets a turn to answer.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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