It has been more than two centuries since Napoleon Bonaparte offered one of history’s most cutting observations of geopolitical strategy: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” For policymakers in Moscow and Beijing, this maxim has guided their response to the recent weeks-long U.S. war in Iran, and even with a 14-day ceasefire now holding between Tehran and Washington – both sides have publicly declared victory – the two great power rivals continue to reap strategic benefits from what many analysts have labeled Washington’s latest strategic blunder in the Middle East.
Over the course of the conflict, China and Russia have navigated a carefully calibrated diplomatic balancing act. Neither country has thrown its full public support behind Iran – a partner that both nations count as an ally to varying degrees – nor have they committed substantial resources to the war effort. Instead, they have limited their backing to small-scale intelligence sharing and targeted diplomatic support.
As a scholar of international security and great power politics, I argue this restrained approach is rooted in clear strategic logic. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow have long recognized that Iran cannot achieve a decisive military victory against the combined military strength of the United States and Israel. For their own geopolitical interests, however, Iran does not need to win – it only needs to survive the conflict to weaken Washington’s global standing. The 2025 Iran war has eroded U.S. influence in four key ways that play directly into the hands of China and Russia.
### 1. A Reverse of Washington’s Push to Counter Great Power Influence in the Middle East
As outlined in my book *Defending Frenemies*, the United States has struggled for decades to reconcile competing strategic objectives in the Middle East. During the Cold War, Washington’s core priority was blocking Soviet expansion in the region, even as it navigated the nuclear ambitions of two problematic allies: Israel and Pakistan. By the 2020s, U.S. regional strategy has shifted to limiting the expanding influence of its great power rivals – China first, and Russia second.
Under President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both China and Russia have worked steadily to expand their regional footprints through a mix of formal partnerships and informal outreach. For Russia, this has meant deepening alignment with Iran, including joint efforts to prop up former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime throughout the Syrian civil war. For China, influence growth has come largely through diplomatic diplomacy, most notably its successful 2023 mediation of a deal restoring diplomatic ties between historic rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The irony of the 2025 Iran war is that it broke out just after a string of setbacks for Russian and Chinese influence expansion. The December 2024 fall of Assad’s regime stripped Russia of its most reliable regional ally, while U.S. President Donald Trump’s May 2025 tour of Gulf states secured major new technology and economic agreements with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, explicitly designed to roll back China’s growing economic and diplomatic clout in the region.
Now, however, the war has shifted perceptions dramatically. As the United States grows increasingly seen as an unreliable security partner, Gulf nations are far more likely to pursue deeper security and economic cooperation with Beijing and Moscow to hedge their bets.
### 2. The War Pulls U.S. Focus Away From Its Core Stated Strategic Priorities
Over the past two decades, China and Russia have expanded their economic, diplomatic and military ties across the Middle East by exploiting a deliberate U.S. shift: after the costly decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington had signaled it planned to reorient its assets and strategic attention away from the region toward higher-priority theaters.
Trump’s decision to launch a full war against Iran directly contradicts the U.S. national security strategy his own administration released just months earlier, in November 2025. That document explicitly identified the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific as Washington’s top priorities, declaring that the Middle East’s strategic importance “will recede” in U.S. planning.
By launching the war in Iran alongside Israel without prior consultation with U.S. allies, Trump has openly dismissed the strategic and economic concerns of partner nations. Already fractured by Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw from NATO and his unilateral designs on Greenland, the alliance has seen new, deep rifts open over the Iran conflict – divisions that China and Russia have long worked to exploit for their own gain.
Again, irony abounds: the Iran war comes at a moment when Trump’s agenda of consolidating U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere was actually making progress. Putting aside questions of international law and legitimacy, Washington had recently removed the Maduro regime in Venezuela, a longstanding thorn in its side, and installed a far more compliant government.
### 3. The Conflict Creates Disproportionate Economic Benefits for U.S. Rivals
When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz – the chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s global oil supplies pass – the move was as predictable as it was damaging to U.S. interests. For Russia, however, the closure has driven up global oil prices, providing a major boost to its war-focused economy. It has also led to a temporary but ongoing easing of U.S. sanctions on Moscow, a critical economic lifeline after years of punishing pressure tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
While a prolonged closure of the strait and widespread damage to oil and gas infrastructure across Iran and the Gulf would harm China’s energy security and economic growth, Chinese leaders have signaled they are willing to accept these short-term risks. Years of investment in strategic petroleum reserves, and a push to diversify energy supplies to include solar power, battery storage and domestic coal production, have left China far better positioned to weather a global energy crisis than the United States. Beijing has also spent years reorienting its economy to rely more on domestic consumption for growth, rather than overreliance on global trade, buffering it from the global economic shock triggered by the war.
As the United States struggles to reassert control over traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, particularly as Iran enforces targeted restrictions on vessels from unfriendly nations, its regional influence erodes further.
### 4. The Conflict Accelerates the Transfer of Global Soft Power Leadership From the U.S. to China
Trump’s choice to abandon diplomatic talks in favor of immediate war, paired with the contradictory rhetoric his administration has deployed throughout the conflict, has severely damaged the global perception of the United States as a neutral, credible global leader. That shift has delivered a massive soft power windfall for Beijing.
It was China that pressured Iran to accept the 14-day ceasefire proposal brokered by Pakistan, marking the latest step in Beijing’s slow erosion of the United States’ longstanding status as the global mediator of first resort. China has already successfully mediated high-stakes diplomacy between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and has launched similar mediation efforts for the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
More broadly, the Iran war reinforces Beijing’s core narrative that the U.S.-led liberal international order has collapsed. Even though China benefited from the continuation of the conflict, its role in brokering the ceasefire demonstrates it is increasingly stepping into the global leadership vacuum that the United States once filled.
For Russia, the war offers a different, equally valuable benefit: by splitting NATO and drawing U.S. strategic attention back to the Middle East, it shifts global focus and U.S. involvement away from the ongoing war in Ukraine, easing pressure on Moscow.
This analysis is by Jeffrey Taliaferro, professor of political science at Tufts University, republished under a Creative Commons license from The Conversation.
