Brazil Faces a Conflict It Did Not Ask to Be Drawn Into

The U.S. and Israeli offensive against Iran exposes the contradictions of Brazil’s role on the world stage: a country with ambitions to act as a mediator, but without the tools to make that role effective

Originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique

By Sávia Lorena Barreto Carvalho de Sousa and Isabela Rocha

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched an offensive against Iran without a formal declaration of war, without a coalition of allies, and without any attempt at multilateral framing. President Donald Trump had publicly declared that the United States could attack Kharg Island a few more times just for fun. This phrase, by its deliberate brutality, deserves to be read with analytical seriousness: it signals the replacement of legitimacy as an operational category of US foreign policy with the naked demonstration of coercive capacity.

It is the end of an era, and Brazil, like the rest of the Global South, was caught unprepared. What the war in Iran exposes is not merely the crisis of multilateralism or the decay of a liberal order that had already been eroding for years. It exposes, in an accelerated manner, the specific contradictions of Brazil's international insertion: a country that for decades cultivated a reputation as a peaceful and universalist mediator, but that never converted this reputation into real capacity to influence the behavior of major actors.

Autophagy of Hegemony

There is a paradox in US behavior that international relations theory helps to name with precision. US hegemony after 1945 was not built solely on tanks and aircraft carriers, but on the capacity to make other countries accept the rules of the game as legitimate, not merely as imposed. American political scientist Joseph Nye called this smart power: the combination of coercion that compels and attraction that convinces.

The normative rupture operated by the Trump administration is a measurable reduction in US long-term influence capacity, because it replaces attraction with coercion in a system where pure coercion raises costs without producing adherence. However, this normative rupture is also strategic precisely because it reflects a realistic adaptation to a scenario of relative decline and internal crisis. When the traditional sources of hegemony—such as uncontested economic leadership, absolute technological superiority, ideological attractiveness, and institutional legitimacy—suffer erosion, what remains as a decisive comparative asset is unmatched military might. The normative rupture, in this sense, is not an accident or an ideological whim; it is a calculated choice to convert military supremacy into a currency of immediate influence, even at the cost of long-term capital.

Even if this strategy of normative erosion has worked in other operations—nominally the abduction of Maduro—it is structurally limited when transposed to conflicts of high strategic density, such as the Iranian case. In contexts where the target possesses material autonomy, retaliation capacity, and external backing—whether through alliances or economic ties vital to third parties—coercion ceases to be an instrument of imposition and begins to operate as a catalyst for counter-alignments.

For example, the US attempt to recruit allies to guarantee passage through the Strait of Hormuz failed due to the refusal of NATO members themselves. The UN Security Council, convened in an emergency session after the first attacks on Kharg Island, recorded fourteen of its fifteen members in a position contrary to Washington. Chinese strategist Sun Tzu warned that he who does not know the reality of neighboring states cannot make timely alliances. Exactly what happened to the United States, which went to the battlefield without having built the alliances its strategy presupposed.

By subverting the multilateral system that historically amplified its power, Washington is not practicing an alternative form of hegemony. It is practicing autophagy. The question that imposes itself—and that Brazil would need to answer with instruments it does not yet possess—is what to do with the leadership vacuum that this process is producing.

Iran and the Cost That Is Not Paid Alone

The death of Ayatollah Khamenei in the first wave of US attacks removed the gravitational center of the Iranian decision-making system and precipitated a rupture that no controlled escalation model had anticipated. Iran shifted from a calibrated containment strategy—based on proxy networks, nuclear threshold diplomacy, and asymmetric signaling—to a qualitative escalation that reconfigurated the conflict itself. Again, Sun Tzu teaches that war is won when one knows the enemy and oneself, and here the lack of knowledge of the enemy culminated in a strategic error of cultural and symbolic calculation that transformed the nature of the conflict. The United States knew its own destruction capacity and the Iranian order of battle deeply, but failed to understand Iran's political psychology and identity resilience, as well as its role as a regional leader.

Subsequently, the attack on the Ras Laffan complex in Qatar—the world's largest producer of liquefied natural gas, responsible for about one-fifth of global LNG consumption—was the most consequential expression of this reconfiguration. The International Energy Agency reported that the damage to the liquefaction infrastructure was difficult to repair in the short term, with equipment whose manufacturing time is estimated at between two and four years.

Iran demonstrated that its conventional military disadvantage can be compensated by economic warfare actions capable of imposing permanent costs not only on the immediate adversary, but on the entire global energy architecture. By shifting the focus from the battlefield to the control of oil flows, maritime insurance, and trade routes, Tehran showed it can transform the Strait of Hormuz into a political choke point. For example, by offering passage through the Strait of Hormuz only to Arab and European countries that expelled US and Israeli ambassadors from their territories, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard converted a vital maritime route into an explicit instrument of conditioned political alignment.

There is, in this movement, a Clausewitzian logic that it would be wrong to read as loss of control. War, as Clausewitz warned, tends to escape the control of those who initiate it. But what Iran did was deliberate: by redistributing the cost of the conflict across multiple actors, Tehran expanded the pressure points on Washington and forced a regional recalibration. The problem is that this redistribution of costs does not choose its recipients carefully. Brazil is among them.

Within the Iranian political tradition, there is a dimension that US policymakers systematically underestimated. Khamenei's death was read by broad sectors of Iranian society through the parallel with the Battle of Karbala and the figure of Imam Hussein, who died surrounded, in absolute minority, refusing to swear allegiance to an illegitimate enemy. Khamenei died during the holy month of Ramadan, under rubble produced by a US and Israeli airstrike, which reinforced the martyrdom narrative. By transforming a tactical operation into an event of high symbolic content, Washington converted the elimination of a leadership into a vector of adversary cohesion. What was intended as neutralization produced rearticulation.

What the Conflict Does to Brazil

Brazil is practically self-sufficient in oil. But this certainly does not protect it entirely. The Brazilian logistics matrix is predominantly road-based, and any increase in diesel prices is immediately transmitted to freight costs and the final price of the entire distribution chain. The second channel is fertilizers: the country imports a substantial portion of the inputs used by agribusiness, a sector that represents approximately one-fifth of GDP. The National Confederation of Agriculture estimated, in a technical note from March 2026, an impact of 12% to 18% on agricultural production costs for the next harvest, if the rise in fertilizer prices persisted for more than three months. The third channel is monetary: imported inflationary pressure reduces room for Selic rate cuts, limiting domestic economic policy based on decisions made in Tehran, Ras Laffan, and Washington.

This transmission chain is the most concrete evidence of something that the Brazilian foreign policy debate often avoids naming: the international system has reached a degree of interdependence where geographic distance does not neutralize exposure. A conflict in the Persian Gulf determines the basic interest rate, the price of fertilizer for the Cerrado farmer, and the future of diplomatic alliances built over decades. The question is not whether Brazil will be affected: it is whether Brazil has the instruments to respond.

Credit: Agência Brasil

The Tehran Declaration as a Mirror

In a hearing at the Chamber of Deputies in March 2026, Chancellor Mauro Vieira invoked the 2010 Tehran Declaration as proof that Brazil had come close to a diplomatic solution that could have avoided the current conflict. The argument deserves to be taken seriously, and then subjected to the criticism it itself demands.

In May 2010, Brazil and Turkey articulated an agreement that provided for the shipment of 1,200 kilograms of lightly enriched Iranian uranium to Turkish territory in exchange for nuclear fuel, under IAEA supervision. The agreement was rejected by the permanent members of the Security Council, and Resolution 1929, approved in June of that year with contrary votes from Brazil and Turkey, imposed new sanctions on Iran. The great powers understood that the Tehran Declaration did not limit continuous enrichment, did not provide for effective inspections, and lacked enforcement mechanisms.

The 2010 episode demonstrated two things at once. That Brazil possesses sufficient diplomatic capital to be accepted as an intermediary in high-intensity conflicts. And that this capital is not enough to guarantee compliance with agreements nor to impose costs for non-compliance. Without autonomous strategic pressure capacity—military, economic, or technological—Brazil can facilitate communication between parties, but cannot anchor any result.

In Joseph Nye's language, the Tehran Declaration was a soft power initiative successful in its symbolic dimension and failed in its practical dimension, because Brazil lacked the hard power elements that would have made adherence by other actors rationally obligatory.

Soft power is the capacity of an actor to influence the behavior of others not by force or purchase, but by attraction, by the credibility of its values, by the legitimacy of its positions, by the reputation accumulated over time. Those who exercise soft power do not compel: they convince, inspire, or simply occupy a space of trust that other actors recognize and respect.

Hard power, in turn, is the capacity to coerce or induce through the use or threat of military force and economic pressure—that is, sanctions, tariffs, blockades, arsenals. It is the power that says: if you don't do this, there will be a concrete and immediate cost to you.

In the case of the Tehran Declaration, Brazil came to the negotiating table with a great deal of soft power: it had a reputation as a peaceful country, without atomic bombs, without a history of interference, without a colonial agenda in the region, with functional relations with both Tehran and Washington at the same time. This gave it access: it was accepted as an intermediary where larger powers could not enter without cost. In this sense, the initiative was successful.

The problem appeared later. For an agreement to be fulfilled, it is not enough for the parties to agree at the moment of signing. Non-compliance must have a price. And to impose that price, hard power is necessary: military capacity, economic weight, strategic technology, presence in bodies capable of applying sanctions. Brazil had none of this regarding the Iranian nuclear program. If Iran violated the agreement, Brasília could do absolutely nothing but protest—and everyone knew that, including Iran and the Western powers that rejected the declaration.

In summary: soft power opens doors, builds trust, and enables conversations impossible for others. But it does not sustain agreements alone. When what is at stake is sufficiently large, like a nuclear program, actors calculate whether there is anything to lose if they fail to comply. And if the answer is no, the agreement has no real weight, no matter how well-intentioned its mediator may be.

Returning to the 2026 crisis, it poses the problem on a larger scale. Brazil's simultaneous position as a member of BRICS—which incorporated Iran at the 2024 Kazan Summit—and as a strategic partner of the United States creates an ambiguity that, in moments of high polarization, can be interpreted by both sides as complicity with the adversary. The indecision over Lula's visit to Trump, kept in suspense by the Planalto Palace, exemplifies a foreign policy that reacts to circumstances rather than anticipating them.

BRICS and the Illusion of a Cohesive Bloc

The US-Israel-Iran conflict is also a test of institutional coherence for BRICS, and the result, so far, is the confirmation that the bloc has not yet developed mechanisms to manage conflicts when the agendas and economic and political objectives of its members diverge acutely.

Russia, an exporter of hydrocarbons, benefits directly from rising energy prices. China suffers from volatility, although its ships enjoy passage through the Strait of Hormuz. India, with privileged access to the Iranian port of Chabahar and simultaneous partnerships with Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran, is forced into choices that the BRICS format offers no mechanisms to mediate. The bloc that incorporated Iran in Kazan is the same one that includes a power that maintains strategic relations with Israel and another that depends on the financial system that sanctions Tehran.

The Brazilian presidency of BRICS in 2025 could have served as a moment of strategic affirmation. It ended up marked by a restrained conduct, which reduced emphasis on issues such as de-dollarization and prioritized less controversial agendas. It preserved relations with actors outside the bloc, but at the cost of limiting BRICS' capacity to act as an autonomous pole. The legacy was a protocol leadership that, in the face of the current escalation, left Brazil without instruments to manage what it had superficially helped stabilize.

What Brazil Could Do—and What It Lacks to Do It

The crisis creates opportunities that Brazil has the structural conditions to identify, even if it does not yet have the instruments to fully seize them. Humanitarian mediation—the condemnation of attacks on civilian infrastructure, the defense of humanitarian corridors—is a position that Itamaraty can sustain with normative credibility, without high diplomatic cost vis-à-vis any of the conflict's poles.

The energy repositioning, with pre-salt reserves and renewable capacity, opens space for Brazil to present itself as a reliable alternative supplier to Asian and European partners affected by Gulf instability. The agenda for reforming the collective security architecture—in which the Brazilian proposal for Security Council reform obtained support from 126 countries in November 2024—gains urgency and legitimacy with the current conflict.

The problem is that all these opportunities presuppose conditions that Brazil does not yet satisfy. The deindustrialization of recent decades has reduced the economic base of the country's power. The underfunding of the Armed Forces limits regional projection. Technological dependence in critical sectors creates vulnerabilities that diplomatic activity does not compensate. The Ipea report on Brazilian international insertion, published in 2025, identified that the country's participation in global markets for medium and high-tech manufactured goods had fallen back to the 1995 level.

Machiavelli warned that mediation requires something more than the enunciation of principles: it demands the construction of sufficient power so that the parties' refusal of it is perceived as a real cost. Brazil enunciates the correct principles. But it has not yet built the power that would make them obligatory. This is the central contradiction that the US-Israel-Iran conflict urgently exposes.

The leadership vacuum created by US strategic autophagy is a given reality, and Brazil has the structural conditions to occupy it. But between having conditions and having capacity, there is a gap that cannot be closed with diplomatic speeches, no matter how well articulated. Closing it is the task that the conflict—by reaching the Cerrado through the price of fertilizer—has made impossible to postpone.

Sávia Lorena Barreto Carvalho de Sousa is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI). Master's in Communication from UFPI, journalist based in Brasília. Director of Communication for the BRICS+ Forum for Strategic Technology.

Isabela Rocha-Dashicheva is a Master's and PhD candidate in Political Science at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Brasília (IPOL UnB), coordinates the Strategy, Data, and Sovereignty Working Group of the Study and Research Group on International Security at the Institute of International Relations of the University of Brasília (GEPSI IREL UnB), and chairs the BRICS+ Forum for Strategic Technology, aiming at the development of integral and sovereign technological infrastructure in Brazil, in the Global South, in the BRICS+ countries, and worldwide.