The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has presented Russia and China with a significant opportunity. Both Moscow and Beijing see the conflict as a chance to undermine U.S. interests in the Middle East and elsewhere. Both are keen to exploit the war to sap U.S. power, gain intelligence on U.S. military systems, and erode the U.S.-led order. Both see a wide variety of potential options for doing so, diplomatic and military, overt and covert. And so far, both countries are succeeding.
The quagmire endured by Russian forces in Ukraine offers a model for the sorts of damage Moscow and Beijing hope to inflict on the United States. The U.S. government has backed Kyiv since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 for reasons beyond supporting a smaller democracy against its bigger authoritarian neighbor. The war in Ukraine helps tie down a U.S. adversary, degrades Russian power, and costs the Kremlin tens of billions of dollars every year. Russia’s struggle to defeat a nominally weaker power also undermines perceptions of its military capabilities while forcing Moscow to devote more soldiers, munitions, and equipment just to maintain what has turned into a functional stalemate. Meanwhile, the United States can study the conflict to deepen its understanding of the Russian military’s tactics, techniques, and procedures. The Biden administration also saw support for Ukraine as a way to reaffirm Washington’s position as the leader of a rules-based international order. The widely held view that Russia had undertaken a war of aggression in Ukraine, combined with the fear that an emboldened Moscow would again engage in territorial acquisition in the future, allowed the United States to bring together like-minded powers to help isolate Russia.
In Iran, Russia and China see the possibility of turning the tables on the United States. Both countries believe that a U.S. government enmeshed in endless Middle Eastern wars is one that would make much less trouble for them. Indeed, China’s international position improved remarkably in the 20 years after the September 11 attacks, when the United States was preoccupied with wars in the Middle East. As Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar memorably noted: “[F]or two decades, China had been winning but not fighting [in the Middle East], while the U.S. was fighting without winning.”
Moscow and Beijing now want to reap the rewards of Washington’s entanglement in the region. The Russians and the Chinese have every interest in miring the United States in a simmering, low-intensity war that consumes U.S. resources and undermines its international standing. Both countries have tools to help achieve that end through their support for Iran. Washington can prevent this outcome by eschewing maximalist goals in the conflict. It must instead follow a pragmatic middle way that contains Iran’s disruptive potential while shoring up a path back to diplomacy and revitalizing American alliances. The Iran war may not produce a clear victor, but the United States can ensure that neither China nor Russia ends up claiming the win.
RECIPE FOR A QUAGMIRE
There is strong evidence that Russia and China have supplied Iran with imagery and signals intelligence to help it with both targeting and damage assessment. If that has indeed happened, they have helped a country with quite limited surveillance capacity destroy the military assets of a much more powerful country. Russia and China have also been monitoring American military operations, studying the U.S. military through the Iran war, just as the United States is assessing the Russian military through the war in Ukraine. Although the United States, alongside Israel, has been largely successful when it comes to destroying targets, Russia and China must take some comfort in how the U.S.-Israeli bombardment has still failed to cow Iran. Despite the successful assassination of various Iranian leaders and the pummeling of Iranian military facilities, anything resembling victory has so far proved elusive.
The war has benefited Russia in a number of ways. The Trump administration has waived sanctions on Russian oil in a bid to rein in rising oil prices, creating an economic windfall for Moscow. In addition, Iran’s Shahed drone has proved robust against U.S.-engineered defenses, thanks to lessons drawn from Russia’s battlefield experience. Moscow has upgraded the drone’s original Iranian design, improving its effectiveness for its own campaign, and U.S. and European officials say it is now sharing details of those enhancements with Tehran, strengthening military cooperation between the two countries. The United States undoubtedly has air superiority, and its intelligence agents have been able to penetrate the Iranian leadership, but the image of an all-powerful U.S. military has taken a serious hit. The Islamic Republic has absorbed a heavy battering and is still standing.
Moscow must be particularly happy about the damage the war is inflicting on U.S. alliances. The growing gap between the United States and its closest allies in Europe is the best news Russia has had in years. Europe’s deep reservations about the war in Iran (which several European states flatly declared to be illegal), exacerbated by Trump’s alarming threat on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” will leave an enduring scar in the transatlantic alliance—giving some European leaders a pretext to reject U.S. moral leadership now and in the future. Europe may unite to resist Russia in the coming years, but its connection to the world’s greatest economic and military power will never again be as close as it once was. In Russian eyes, a drawn-out Iran war will only deepen U.S.-European tensions and solidify this trend.
Moscow and Beijing see the Iran conflict as a chance to undermine U.S. interests.
The war has not delivered to China the kind of windfall it has handed to Russia—even if the energy shock precipitated by the war has led many states to take a greater interest in China’s carbon-free energy sector. Economically, China has focused on avoiding pain. Anticipating for years that the United States might seek to block its access to oil in the Middle East, it has long made strategic investments in the region to help protect itself from potential turmoil there. It has built up large oil reserves, blunting the effects of higher prices. It has electrified much of its economy, including more than half of its new car fleet, reducing its reliance on imported oil. It has also boosted its ability to produce petrochemicals from coal, further freeing it from Middle Eastern hydrocarbons.
The upside for China from the Iran conflict is mostly political and diplomatic. China has studiously portrayed itself as a responsible global power, pushing all sides toward negotiation and settlement. Its statements have been measured, and its diplomacy sure-footed. As European and Asian states reeled from the United States’ unpredictable moves, China embraced the tone and language of traditional diplomacy, to the relief of many.
China has increasingly pitched itself to U.S. allies as a level-headed partner for peace, building on its success three years ago, when it presided over an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement. In the current conflict, it has pushed its close partner Pakistan to mediate a temporary cease-fire between Iran and the United States, demonstrating its reliability as a global stakeholder, at a time when the United States is behaving like an erratic hegemon.
China has provided Iran with military assistance, including chemical components for its solid-fuel ballistic missiles, and might now move to ratchet up its support by providing advanced radar systems and supersonic antiship cruise missiles. Even so, it presents itself to Middle Eastern powers as distant from the region’s conflicts and as an alternative to an increasingly untrustworthy United States. For countries that are looking to rebalance relationships in order to reduce risk, China seems a remarkably good partner.
A HIT TO AMERICA’S REPUTATION
But perhaps the most damaging fallout from the Iran war, and the most important benefit to Russia and China, is the way in which it undermines the idea of a U.S.-led international order. Since the United States began portraying itself as the “leader of the free world” in the early days of the Cold War, building and enlarging that order has been a major priority of U.S. foreign policy. Time and time again, the United States was willing to be disproportionately generous to its allies and partners in exchange for their support. It did so with a belief that a more closely connected world of like-minded powers would boost prosperity and economic integration, make interstate wars less likely, and pay dividends that far exceeded any investment made.
It was the instinct to build and enlarge those partnerships that led the George H. W. Bush administration to lead a 41-country coalition that pushed Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. President George W. Bush followed suit by organizing a 51-country coalition to push the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001. His successor, Barack Obama, later brought 85 countries into the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS (the Islamic State), in a process beginning in 2014.
Coalition projects such as these are anathema to Moscow and Beijing. The Russians and the Chinese do not object only to NATO. What they dislike is the general idea of ready-made alliances with legal commitments to mutual defense. Both Russia and China are powerful countries without allies. They strongly prefer a more atomized world of bilateral relations in which they can be unconstrained and dominant powers. They believe that a world of alliances invariably disadvantages them in any conflict with the United States, since its allies will be able to hurt them in ways that their partners, such as they are, cannot hurt the United States.
The right U.S. strategy is neither maximalist war nor naive retrenchment.
Yet the U.S. war on Iran has now undermined the principle that has long served as the legitimizing rationale of American alliances: the United States’ role as the leader of a rules-based order. If Washington reserves the right to launch wars of choice without credible evidence of an imminent threat or other legitimate legal justification, it cannot credibly object to Russia’s assault on Ukraine or to China’s increasingly assertive pursuit of what it considers to be its vital national interests in the East China and South China Seas.
Because Russia and China have relationships with states around the Persian Gulf, neither country wants to see an all-out war that destroys Iran and results in ongoing damage to Gulf states. At the same time, an outcome that leaves the United States clearly triumphant in the region would undermine China’s and Russia’s standing there. The best outcome for them is a simmering, low-grade conflict that continues to consume U.S. resources and attention, that alarms much of the world, and that demonstrates the limits of American power.
Not coincidentally, that sort of outcome would suit the current Iranian government, too. The powers that be in Tehran probably assume that a resolution of tensions with the United States is unlikely. In that case, a low-level or cyclical conflict accompanied by drawn-out negotiations that allow Iran to extract economic concessions from the United States—either explicitly through sanctions relief or implicitly from maritime tolls—may represent success for the Iranian government. Such an outcome could also bring Iran more support from Russia and China, which want to see the United States mired in the Gulf and out of their own neighborhoods.
THE DIPLOMATIC EXIT
Against this backdrop, the right U.S. strategy is neither maximalist war nor naive retrenchment. Washington should aim for a hardheaded equilibrium: prevent Iran from taking hugely destabilizing actions, restore a credible path to diplomacy, and resist turning this conflict into the kind of open-ended regional struggle that Moscow and Beijing most desire. If the United States defines success as the humiliation of Iran or the collapse of the Islamic Republic, it will likely get the opposite of what it wants: a wounded and more aggressive Iran, more tightly bound to Russia and China, as well as enduring damage to the international legitimacy of the United States.
That means Washington should pair deterrence with a realistic diplomatic off-ramp. The United States should make clear that it is prepared to define a new and mutually beneficial modus vivendi with Iran. It could do so by taking a number of steps. One would be establishing a U.S.-led consortium for uranium enrichment on an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf, which would give Iran a face-saving way to preserve its nuclear capacity without the ability to weaponize it. Such a solution would also bind both sides of the Gulf in a collaborative effort.
Another is finding the terms for a nonaggression pact with Tehran. Hawks would criticize such an approach as weakness, because it does not demand Iran’s full capitulation. Doves would take it as evidence of the Trump administration’s failure to triumph through the use of force. In fact, it is the only strategy that matches the balance of power and the balance of interests. Iran is too weak to dominate the region but too important, too networked, and too resilient to be bombed into submission at an acceptable cost to the United States.
Washington must also repair the political foundations of its regional policy. That means closer alignment with European allies, steadier consultation with Gulf partners, and less inflammatory rhetoric that alienates the very coalition the United States must sustain.
The test of American statecraft is not whether it can destroy targets in Iran. It is whether it can shape an outcome in which Iran is reintegrated into the global economy and no longer poses a major threat to neighbors in the region, regional states feel less compelled to hedge toward Beijing, and Moscow is denied another geopolitical gift. The United States need not hand its rivals a win by committing to another long war that will drain its resources and credibility. It should pursue a limited, disciplined strategy that reduces political tensions in the Gulf, restores freedom of navigation, and leaves Tehran with a choice other than total dependence on Moscow and Beijing. In this contest, prudence need not be passivity—rather, it can be power exercised with intent.
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