The room in Nizhny Novgorod smelled of expensive stationery and cold air conditioning. It was a space designed for the curated harmony of the BRICS nations—a group that prides itself on being the new alternative to the old world order. But as the delegates from Iran and the United Arab Emirates took their seats, the air didn't feel harmonious. It felt heavy. It felt like a long-simmering domestic dispute brought into the home of a mutual friend.
Diplomacy is often described as a game of chess, but that is too clean a metaphor. It is more like an architectural struggle. You are trying to build a bridge while the person on the other side is trying to redefine where the river bank actually begins.
At the heart of the friction were three specks of land in the Persian Gulf: Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb, and Abu Musa. To a casual observer looking at a map, they are barely visible. To the sailors who navigate the Strait of Hormuz, they are strategic sentinels. But to the men sitting across from each other in Russia, they are symbols of national identity that cannot be traded, partitioned, or ignored.
Iran views these islands as an integral, non-negotiable part of its sovereign flesh. The UAE sees them as stolen property, occupied by Tehran since 1971, just as the British were packing their bags to leave the Gulf.
The tension started long before the meeting. It began with a joint statement—a piece of paper that seems harmless until you read the fine print. Russia, acting as the host, had signed a joint declaration with the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) that supported a peaceful solution to the island dispute. To the UAE, this was a standard call for international law. To Iran, it was a betrayal by a supposed ally.
Imagine standing in a room where everyone has agreed to be friends, but your best friend just whispered to your rival that your front yard might actually belong to them. That is the subtext of the clash.
The Iranian delegation did not come to Nizhny Novgorod to talk about trade routes or digital currencies alone. They came to draw a line in the sand. They made it clear that any mention of the islands in a multilateral forum was an "unacceptable interference." The UAE, conversely, sees the refusal to discuss the matter as a brick wall standing in the way of regional stability.
This isn't just about rocks and sand. It is about the soul of BRICS itself.
The bloc—originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—expanded to include Iran and the UAE, among others, to prove that the "Global South" could lead without Western oversight. But expansion brings the baggage of history. When you invite neighbors who haven't spoken for decades into the same club, the club ceases to be a monolith. It becomes a dinner party where the host is constantly worried about someone throwing the silverware.
Consider the irony of the setting. Here were two nations, both vital to the world’s energy supply, both seeking to escape the dominance of the US dollar, yet they were anchored to a dispute from the previous century. The "invisible stakes" are the viability of the BRICS expansion. If these two cannot sit in a room without the ghosts of 1971 hovering over the table, how can the bloc ever hope to coordinate a global reserve currency or a unified security front?
The friction shifted from polite disagreement to a cold, hard stare when the final communiqués were being drafted. Iran’s acting Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, had to balance the revolutionary pride of Tehran with the pragmatic need to keep Russia and China close. Meanwhile, the Emirati officials had to demonstrate that their entry into BRICS wouldn't mean softening their claim to what they view as their sovereign territory.
It is a exhausting dance.
One man leans forward. He speaks of "territorial integrity." Another man leans back. He speaks of "historical rights." They are using the same dictionary but speaking different languages. The "human element" here is the burden of the diplomat—the individual who must carry the weight of a thousand years of history in a briefcase and try to find a way to say "no" that sounds like "maybe later."
Behind the closed doors, the silence is often louder than the speeches. It is the silence of realization. The realization that even in a "new world order," the old problems don't evaporate. They just find new venues.
The UAE has been masterfully playing a multi-vector game. They host US bases, buy Chinese technology, and now, sit at the BRICS table with Iran. They want a world that is "seamless"—a word they might use, though the reality is anything but. They want trade to flow like water, but the islands are the dam.
Iran, squeezed by decades of sanctions, sees BRICS as a lifeline. For them, the islands are not a bargaining chip; they are a fortress. To give an inch on Abu Musa is, in their eyes, to invite the collapse of their entire defensive posture in the Gulf.
So, the clash happened. It wasn't a physical fight. There were no raised voices that could be heard in the hallway. It was a clash of ink. It was a struggle over which adjectives would be used in the final press release. It was the frantic whispering of aides in the ears of ministers, reminding them that every word uttered in Russia would be scrutinized back home in Dubai and Tehran.
The meeting ended, as these things do, with a photo. A group of men in dark suits, smiling for a camera, standing shoulder to shoulder. The photo suggests unity. The photo suggests a common goal of de-dollarization and a multipolar world.
But look closer at the eyes.
If you look past the handshakes, you see the exhaustion of a conflict that has no easy exit. You see the shadow of the three islands. The BRICS experiment is currently being tested not by Washington’s pressure, but by the internal gravity of its own members' histories.
The table in Nizhny Novgorod is gone now, folded away or polished for the next set of visitors. But the map remains. The islands remain. And the two neighbors who share a sea continue to look at those three small dots of land and see two entirely different worlds.
The tragedy of modern diplomacy is that we are very good at building bigger tables, but we are still using the same old chairs. We invite more people to the conversation, hoping the volume of the crowd will drown out the bitterness of the individual. It rarely works. The bitterness just waits for a lull in the conversation to make itself known.
As the delegates flew home, crossing over the very waters they had spent the day arguing about, the islands sat silent in the dark. They don't care about communiqués. They don't care about BRICS. They are just earth and stone, caught in the middle of a human story that hasn't found its ending yet.
