By Leon Aron
Sunday, June 29, 2025
As Israel and then the United States battered Iran this
month, the reaction from China and Russia was surprisingly muted. For years,
shared antagonism toward the U.S. has been pushing China, Russia, and Iran
together. All three benefit from embarrassing the West in Ukraine and the
Middle East, and widening the gaps between Washington and Europe. So after
Israel’s first strike, on June 13, China—the strongest partner in the
anti-America triad—could have been expected to rush short-range missiles and
other air-defense equipment to Iran. Surely, Beijing would use its growing
diplomatic muscle to isolate Israel and the U.S., demand an emergency session
of the United Nations Security Council, and introduce a resolution deploring
the two governments that were attacking China’s ally.
Instead, recent events in Iran have revealed that
anti-Americanism can bind an alliance together only so much.
After ritually denouncing Israel’s first strike as “brazen” and a “violation
of Iran’s sovereignty,”
Beijing proceeded cautiously, emphasizing the need for diplomacy instead of
further assigning blame. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi refrained
from condemning Israel’s actions, in a call with his Israeli counterpart on
June 14, and President Xi Jinping waited four days before calling for “de-escalation” and declaring
that “China stands ready to work with all parties to play a constructive role
in restoring peace and stability in the Middle East.”
After Iran’s parliament voted to close the Strait of
Hormuz, Beijing’s foreign-affairs spokesperson stressed—in what looked like a
warning to Iran—that the Persian Gulf is a crucial global trade route for
goods and energy, and called for partners to “prevent the regional turmoil from
having a greater impact on global economic growth.”
In calmer times, China, like Russia, is happy to use Iran
as a battering ram against the U.S. and its allies. But when tensions turn into
military confrontation and global stability is at risk, backing Iran looks like
a far less sensible investment to Beijing than preserving its own economic and
diplomatic relations with the West. China’s mild reaction isn’t just a blow to
Iran; it may also suggest that the much ballyhooed “no
limits” partnership between Xi and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin might
not be as sturdy as Moscow and Beijing advertise.
Iran, Russia, and China have different ideologies,
political regimes, and strategic aims. Iran’s relations with its two larger
partners are wildly asymmetric.
China, for example, is Iran’s lifeline. It buys about 90
percent of Iran’s oil and supplies materials
and technologies central to Iran’s weapons development. Yet the trading
relationship matters less to China, which gets only about 10
percent of its oil from Iran. Plus, China has an economy more than 40 times as large, and
it does far more business with the U.S. and the European Union.
Russia has interests that similarly diverge from Iran’s,
and it, too, has conspicuously
refrained from coming to the Islamic Republic’s aid. But China following a
similar approach toward Iran likely does not please Moscow. Although Moscow’s
relations with Beijing are less lopsided than Tehran’s are, Russia’s economy is
still less than one-eighth
the size of China’s. One-third of Russia’s state budget comes from oil sales,
and China is the largest
customer by
far. Russia also depends on Chinese supplies for its war machine. This past
March, the G7 foreign ministers called China a “decisive
enabler”
of Russia’s war in Ukraine. But should the Kremlin begin to run out of money or
soldiers, China’s willingness to bail out its ally is very much in doubt.
Even among authoritarian regimes, differences in values
can limit cooperation. In 2023, Xi
called Russia’s 1917 October Revolution a “cannon blast” that “brought
Marxism-Leninism to China, demonstrating the way forward and offering a new
choice for the Chinese people who were seeking a way to save China from
subjugation.” Putin, despite his formative years in the Soviet-era KGB, now
laments the fall of the Russian empire and describes Vladimir Lenin’s coup as
the deed of “political
adventurists and foreign forces” who “divided the country and tore it apart
for selfish benefit.” The head of China’s Communist Party may resent Putin’s
reduction of its Russian counterpart—the country’s second-largest party—to the
status of another bit player in Russia’s rubber-stamping parliament.
Since World War II, leaders of Western democracies have
successfully collaborated in part because they have shared a common worldview.
Whether Iran’s Islamic theocrats can say the same about Xi, the leader of an
avowedly atheist state, or Putin, who now positions himself as the champion of
Orthodox Christianity, is another question entirely.
Beijing’s response to Iran’s predicament ought to make
the West feel cautiously optimistic. If Donald Trump finally learns to
distinguish the aggressor from the victim—or at least realizes that Putin has
been playing him—the U.S. president could support Ukraine in earnest without
worrying much about China expanding its assistance to Russia. As long as both
Iran and Russia keep providing cheap oil and antagonizing the West and its
allies, they are serving China’s purposes. But at least for now, Beijing looks
unlikely to back either of its supposed partners if they jeopardize China’s
interest in stability or its extensive and profitable relations with the West.
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