Under Trump Pressure, Iran Finds Its Friends Are of Little Help
China and Russia have forged closer ties with Tehran but have shown little willingness to provide military aid in a conflict with the U.S.
Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward.
Russia and Iran conducted small-scale joint naval training in the Gulf of Oman, a show of force dwarfed by the U.S. firepower assembled in the region.
Beijing shares with Tehran a desire to counter U.S. power but fears that aligning too closely with the Islamic Republic could jeopardize its relations in the Persian Gulf region.
Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.
Russia and Iran conducted small-scale joint naval training in the Gulf of Oman this past week, a show of force dwarfed by the U.S. firepower assembled in the region at sea and on land. An exercise involving ships from China, as well as Russia and Iran, is planned to take place soon in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian state media.
Iran has also sought to rebuild its missile stockpile, air defenses and other capabilities with help from both China and Russia, according to analysts, after those elements of its military power were battered in a 12-day war against Israel and the U.S. in June.
But Beijing and Moscow have shown little willingness to provide direct military assistance if President Trump does order an attack on Iran, analysts said.
“They’re not going to sacrifice their own interests for the Iranian regime,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence official and now a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “They are hoping the regime will not be toppled, but they are definitely not going to counter the U.S. militarily.”
For Beijing, aligning too openly with Tehran risks damaging a critical relationship with Trump, who is scheduled to travel to China in March for a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
China is Iran’s biggest oil customer and an important market preventing its heavily sanctioned economy from collapsing. Beijing shares with Tehran a desire to counter U.S. power but fears that aligning too closely with the Islamic Republic could jeopardize its relations in the Persian Gulf region, according to analysts.
For Moscow, the calculation is similar but even more urgent: Not alienating Trump and driving him close to Ukraine takes precedence over helping Tehran.
When Trump in his first term exited the 2015 deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program negotiated by the Obama administration, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly endorsed closer relations with Moscow and Beijing. “We should look East, not West,” Khamenei told a group of academics in 2018.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which had emerged as an increasingly powerful voice within the Iranian leadership, saw Russia as a potential supplier of advanced arms and China as a source of technology. But the policy has yielded far fewer security benefits than Tehran had hoped for.
“The Iranians complain about it. They wish that the Chinese and the Russians would do more, but they also have no choice other than sticking with them because they don’t have better alternatives,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, a think tank based in Brussels.
The firepower that America has assembled in the Middle East gives Trump the option of carrying out a sustained, weekslong air war against Iran, instead of something like the one-and-done Midnight Hammer strike the U.S. carried out in June against three Iranian nuclear sites, U.S. officials said.
In contrast, a Russian navy helicopter carrier that participated in the recent drills departed when the exercise came to an end Thursday, according to Iran’s state-run news agency.
Iranian leaders have watched with alarm in recent decades as regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria toppled or nearly fell. It has seen its regional militia allies Hezbollah and Hamas decimated.
Trump is reportedly weighing an initial limited military strike on Iran to force it to meet his demands for a nuclear deal, a step aimed at pressuring Tehran into an agreement. It would fall short of a full-scale attack that could inspire a major retaliation.
If the Iranian regime collapses under U.S. attack, Beijing “will aim to secure uninterrupted oil flows” and “cultivate influence with the successor government, particularly to prevent a realignment toward the United States,” Ryan Hass and Allie Matthias with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, argued in a recent analysis.
Iran is an important partner for Moscow and one that it wouldn’t want to lose, especially after the U.S. deposed Nicolás Maduro, an ally of Russia, in Venezuela last month. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t likely to come to the aid of Khamenei if U.S. strikes appear on the verge of bringing him down.
“These relationships are highly pragmatic, highly transactional,” said Alexander Palmer, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, on Tehran’s security ties to Russia and Iran. “They don’t have a sufficient strategic interest in Iran to be willing to go to war with the United States over the country.”
Iran is flexing its military muscles as well as it can, sending the message that its armed forces have the capability of disrupting the global oil trade and of hitting U.S. interests across the Middle East, even without assistance from Beijing and Moscow.
Naval units of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard were deployed this past week to the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic waterway connects the Persian Gulf to the wider Indian Ocean. Around a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through it.
China has sold Iran ballistic-missile components in recent years as well as component chemicals for missile fuel, according to U.S. officials and analysts. Russia is helping Tehran with equipment for jamming communications, global-positioning satellites and radio signals.
Iran bought a Russian S-300 air-defense system in 2016, but Israel and the U.S. have disabled much of Iran’s missile-defense arsenal in strikes since 2024. There is little indication that Beijing or Moscow have been rushing military hardware to Iran ahead of a possible U.S. attack, analysts said.
“All of this is below the threshold that would tilt the military balance meaningfully in favor of Iran,” said Vaez. “Once the conflict starts, they’ve demonstrated that all they’re willing to do is send their thoughts and prayers.”