A Marriage of Convenience

The bond between Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing is forged not in shared cultural or political values, but in the crucible of shared opposition to American power.

• Shared Worldview: The central organizing principle of the triangle is a mutual desire to end U.S. global dominance and foster a "multipolar" world where power is more diffuse. Each sees the United States as the primary obstacle to its own regional and global ambitions. They view U.S.-led sanctions, military interventions, and the promotion of democracy as illegitimate tools of hegemony designed to maintain an inequitable world order. This shared perception of threat creates a powerful incentive for cooperation, forming what they see as a necessary counterbalance to the West.  

• Economic Lifelines: For Iran, which has been under severe U.S. sanctions for decades, Russia and China are indispensable economic partners. China is Iran's largest trading partner and the primary buyer of its oil, often purchasing it at a significant discount in defiance of U.S. sanctions. The landmark 25-year Cooperation Program signed in 2021 outlines a roadmap for up to $400 billion in Chinese investment in Iran's energy, transport, and technology sectors, aiming to fully integrate Iran into China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This provides Tehran with a critical source of revenue and technological development, blunting the impact of Western isolation. Similarly, the 2025 Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Russia focuses on boosting trade, energy cooperation, and creating financial mechanisms to bypass the U.S. dollar and Western banking systems.  

• Military-Technological Cooperation: This dimension of the partnership has accelerated dramatically, particularly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 left it isolated from Western military technology. Iran has emerged as a key military supplier to Russia, providing thousands of Shahed-series kamikaze drones that have been used extensively against Ukrainian targets. In exchange, Russia is believed to be providing Iran with advanced military technology, including modern air defense systems (like the S-300) and potentially advanced fighter jets like the Su-35, though the delivery of the latter remains a subject of debate. China has also reportedly supplied components and technology for Iran's ballistic missile program. This cooperation is publicly showcased through regular joint naval drills, codenamed "Maritime Security Belt," conducted in strategic waters like the Gulf of Oman. These exercises are designed to enhance military interoperability and send a clear signal of their collective challenge to Western naval dominance in the region.  

• Diplomatic Shielding: At the United Nations and other international forums, Russia and China act as Iran's diplomatic protectors. As permanent, veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, they consistently block or water down U.S.-led efforts to censure or impose further multilateral sanctions on Iran. They have voted against IAEA Board of Governors resolutions that find Iran in non-compliance with its nuclear obligations and have vehemently condemned unilateral U.S. sanctions, framing them as illegal and counterproductive. This diplomatic cover is invaluable to Tehran, allowing it to resist international pressure and pursue its controversial policies with a degree of impunity.  

Cracks in the Foundation: The Limits of a "No-Limits" Partnership

Despite their growing alignment, the partnership between Iran, Russia, and China is fraught with divergent interests and inherent limitations. It is a transactional relationship, not an ideological one, and is susceptible to significant friction.

• Nuclear Ambivalence: The most critical point of divergence is Iran's nuclear program. While Moscow and Beijing provide diplomatic cover for Iran's "peaceful" program, neither capital wants to see Tehran acquire a nuclear bomb. A nuclear-armed Iran would be a far more independent and unpredictable actor, reducing its reliance on them for security. It would also dramatically destabilize the Middle East, threatening their significant economic interests (especially China's oil imports from the Gulf Arab states) and potentially sparking a regional nuclear arms race. Finally, it would fatally undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a cornerstone of the international order that they, as recognized nuclear-weapon states, have an interest in preserving.  

• Economic Asymmetry and Distrust: The economic relationship is heavily lopsided. Iran is profoundly dependent on China as an economic lifeline, whereas Iran constitutes less than 1% of China's total trade. This gives Beijing immense leverage. Furthermore, China has proven to be a cautious investor, wary of Iran's internal instability and the risk of secondary sanctions. Consequently, the promised $400 billion in investment has been slow to materialize. Russia, while a political ally, is also a direct competitor with Iran in global energy markets and reportedly harbors doubts about Tehran's financial ability to follow through on large-scale purchases of advanced weaponry.  

• Strategic Hedging: Both Russia and China are careful not to burn their bridges with Iran's regional adversaries. China maintains robust trade and diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and famously brokered their diplomatic rapprochement with Iran in 2023. Russia has long maintained a delicate balancing act, cultivating a warm relationship with Israel even while allied with Iran and Syria. This strategic hedging means that in a direct confrontation between Iran and its rivals, neither Moscow nor Beijing is willing to fully and exclusively commit to Tehran's side. Their support has clear limits.  

• Not a Military Alliance: It is crucial to reiterate that the strategic partnership treaties signed between these countries are not mutual defense pacts. They contain no Article 5-style commitment to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. In the event of the 2025 war, their support for Iran was telling: it was limited to harsh condemnations of Israel and the U.S., diplomatic maneuvering at the UN, and likely some covert intelligence and weapons resupply—not direct military intervention on Iran's behalf.  

The strength of the Iran-Russia-China axis is, therefore, not an intrinsic quality but a reactive one. Its cohesion is directly proportional to the degree of pressure exerted by the United States. The more Washington pursues a policy of confrontation and isolation, the more these three disparate powers are driven into a huddle of mutual support. Iran's "Look to the East" policy, for example, only became a central tenet of its foreign policy after the collapse of the JCPOA and the reimposition of U.S. sanctions closed off avenues to the West. The dramatic deepening of Russo-Iranian military cooperation was a direct consequence of Russia's isolation following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This suggests that U.S. policy is the key variable; a strategy of maximum confrontation serves to solidify the very axis it aims to counter, while a policy of diplomatic engagement could create opportunities to exploit their divergent interests and pry them apart.  

Furthermore, the three partners operate on different strategic timelines and with different appetites for risk, creating another source of friction. China is playing a patient, long-term game of economic statecraft. Its primary goal is stability, which is necessary to protect its massive BRI investments and secure the flow of energy. Russia's strategy is more opportunistic and disruptive; it seeks to exploit crises to enhance its own influence, challenge U.S. credibility, and sell arms, often employing strategic ambiguity and nuclear signaling to keep adversaries off-balance. Iran is the most ideologically-driven and risk-tolerant of the three. Facing what it perceives as an imminent existential threat, its policies are geared toward regime survival at all costs, relying on high-risk strategies like proxy warfare and nuclear brinkmanship. In a major crisis like the 2025 war, these goals can conflict: China's priority is de-escalation to protect the global economy, Russia's is to leverage the chaos to weaken the U.S., and Iran's is to survive and inflict a painful cost on its attackers. This fundamental divergence in strategic temperament ensures that their "no-limits" partnership will always have, in practice, very clear limits.  

Previous Strategies & Patterns

The actions of each nation in the current crisis are not random; they are expressions of deeply ingrained strategic doctrines and playbooks developed over decades of conflict and competition. Understanding these patterns is key to anticipating future moves.

Iran’s Playbook: Asymmetric Resistance and Nuclear Brinkmanship

Facing conventionally superior adversaries in the United States and Israel, Iran has perfected a doctrine of asymmetric warfare designed to exploit vulnerabilities, project power cheaply, and deter attack without engaging in a direct, state-on-state conflict. This strategy rests on three pillars:  

• Proxy Warfare: The cornerstone of Iran's military doctrine is its network of non-state partners and proxies, the "Axis of Resistance". Managed by the IRGC's elite Quds Force, this network includes heavily armed groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Palestine, various militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran provides these groups with funding, advanced weapons (including rockets, drones, and anti-ship missiles), and training. This strategy allows Iran to wage war by proxy, bogging down its enemies in costly, low-intensity conflicts, threatening their borders and strategic assets, and maintaining plausible deniability, all while keeping the fighting far from Iranian soil. This network was Iran's primary deterrent against an Israeli or U.S. attack.  

• Ballistic Missiles and Drones: Unable to maintain a modern air force under sanctions, Iran has invested heavily in a large and increasingly sophisticated arsenal of ballistic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These systems provide a long-range strike capability intended to hold Israeli and U.S. regional bases at risk, forming a key component of its conventional deterrent.  

• Nuclear Brinkmanship: Iran's nuclear program is the ultimate insurance policy for the regime. While publicly insisting the program is for peaceful purposes, Iran has pursued it in a manner that maximizes strategic ambiguity and leverage. By developing all the necessary components for a weapon and shrinking its "breakout time" to a matter of weeks, Iran engages in nuclear brinkmanship. The strategy is to get close enough to the nuclear threshold to deter a major attack, believing its adversaries will deem the risks of striking a near-nuclear state too high. This turns the program itself into a powerful coercive tool, used to extract concessions and force negotiations on terms more favorable to Tehran.  

• Public Defiance: The regime complements its hard power with a posture of unyielding public defiance. Slogans like "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," along with grand pronouncements of resistance, serve to reinforce its revolutionary identity for a domestic audience and project an image of strength and resolve to its regional supporters.  

Israel’s Playbook: Preemptive Strikes and Technological Dominance

Israel's security doctrine is proactive and offense-oriented, designed to compensate for its lack of strategic depth (a small, narrow territory) and the perception of being surrounded by enemies.

• Preemptive Strikes (The Begin Doctrine): The core principle of Israeli strategy is preemption. Israel will not wait to absorb a first strike if it believes an existential threat is imminent. This policy was formally articulated as the "Begin Doctrine" in 1981, when Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in a surprise airstrike. Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared that Israel would "on no account shall we permit an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against the people of Israel". This doctrine was applied again in 2007 with the destruction of a Syrian nuclear facility (Operation Orchard) and forms the explicit justification for its actions against Iran's nuclear program.  

• Intelligence Operations: Clandestine operations are a central tool of Israeli statecraft. The Mossad is renowned for its global intelligence gathering, covert actions, and targeted assassinations. These operations, from the capture of Adolf Eichmann to the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, are used to neutralize threats far from Israel's borders with precision and deniability.  

• Qualitative Military Edge (QME) and Cyber Warfare: Israel seeks to maintain a decisive technological and military advantage over any combination of regional adversaries. This is achieved through a world-class domestic defense industry, close military-technological cooperation with the United States, and pioneering new domains of warfare. The Stuxnet attack demonstrated its sophisticated cyber-offensive capabilities, while its use of AI-assisted targeting and advanced air defense systems like the Iron Dome and Arrow reflect its commitment to technological supremacy.  

• Regional Alliances (The Reverse Periphery Doctrine): Recognizing the limits of going it alone, Israel has shifted from its original "periphery doctrine" to a "reverse periphery doctrine". This involves building alliances with moderate Sunni Arab states, like the UAE and Bahrain, who share Israel's fear of Iranian regional hegemony. The Abraham Accords are the primary manifestation of this strategy, creating a de facto anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East.  

USA’s Playbook: The Sanctions-and-Strikes Pendulum

U.S. strategy, particularly towards Iran, has been characterized by an oscillation between two primary approaches, often employed in tandem.

• Economic Sanctions: The U.S. leverages its dominance of the global financial system to impose crippling economic sanctions. This is a tool of "first resort". These can be comprehensive, targeting entire sectors of a country's economy (like Iran's oil and banking), or "smart" sanctions targeting specific individuals, entities, or illicit activities. The goal is to inflict enough economic pain to coerce a change in behavior, as was the intent with the sanctions that led to the JCPOA, or to destabilize a regime, as was the goal of the "maximum pressure" campaign.  

• Military Pressure and Deterrence: The U.S. maintains a massive military presence in the Middle East, with bases across the Gulf and a powerful naval fleet, to protect its interests and allies. It uses this forward presence to deter aggression, conduct surveillance, and, when deemed necessary, carry out limited military strikes. These strikes can be overt, like the attack on Qasem Soleimani, or covert, like cyber operations.  

• Regime Change Threats (Implicit and Explicit): While often officially denied, the threat of regime change has been a persistent undercurrent in U.S. policy toward adversarial states like Iran. This ranges from supporting opposition groups and pro-democracy movements to the overt military action seen in Iraq in 2003. The 1953 coup in Iran remains the most salient example for Tehran. While recent administrations have publicly stated regime change is not the goal, actions like the 2025 strikes are perceived by Tehran as existential threats aimed at toppling the Islamic Republic.  

• Oscillating Diplomacy: U.S. policy swings like a pendulum between periods of intense diplomatic engagement (the JCPOA negotiations) and periods of hardline confrontation (the "maximum pressure" campaign). This inconsistency, often driven by changes in presidential administrations, creates confusion for both allies and adversaries and undermines the long-term credibility of U.S. commitments.  

Russia and China’s Playbook: Strategic Ambiguity and Economic Statecraft

Russia and China, while aligned in their opposition to the U.S., employ different but complementary strategies to advance their interests and support allies like Iran.

• Strategic Ambiguity: This is a core feature of both Russian and Chinese foreign policy, though practiced differently. Russia employs it in a military context, making explicit nuclear threats and declaring "red lines" but then deliberately avoiding a specific, automatic response when they are crossed. This manipulates fear and uncertainty to deter adversaries without committing Moscow to a costly, high-risk confrontation. China practices strategic ambiguity primarily in the diplomatic and political realm, for example, regarding its commitment to defending Taiwan. The goal is to maintain flexibility, deter provocations from all sides, and avoid being drawn into unwanted conflicts.  

• Arms Deals and Diplomatic Protection: Russia, in particular, uses arms sales as a key tool of foreign policy, creating dependencies and gaining influence. Both Russia and China use their positions on the UN Security Council to provide a diplomatic shield for Iran, vetoing sanctions and condemning U.S. and Israeli actions, thereby legitimizing Iran's position on the world stage.  

• Economic Partnerships: This is China's primary tool. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and strategic investment, China builds economic partnerships that create dependency and integrate countries like Iran into a Sino-centric economic order. This provides a powerful alternative to the Western-led economic system and gives Beijing immense long-term leverage without firing a shot. Russia also pursues economic partnerships, but on a much smaller scale, primarily focused on energy and circumventing sanctions.