Russian and Chinese Support for Iran Is a Testament to the War’s High Stakes

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

The two U.S. service members who were killed in an Iranian missile attack on an American base in Jordan were reportedly victims of Iran’s battlefield adaptations, some of which are attributable to America’s foremost geostrategic adversaries, Russia and China.

 

“Iran has adapted to U.S. defenses, firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. “Iran’s ability to hit sensitive targets also has raised concerns that the regime is getting targeting help from China or Russia, the officials said.”

 

It was an unnerving aside in an equally disturbing report, but the Journal did not dwell on the nature of the support Iran is receiving from Moscow and Beijing. The analysts at Defense Security Asia, however, provided more detail.

 

“This is the ‘eyes and fist’ problem now defining the conflict,” its report read. “Chinese commercial satellite constellations and Russian reconnaissance platforms increasingly supply the targeting layer, while Iranian solid-fuel missiles and one-way attack drones supply the kinetic layer.”

 

“For Indo-Pacific planners watching from Taipei to Manila,” the piece continued, “the Iran theater is functioning as a live-fire preview of how a peer or near-peer adversary might fuse commercial space intelligence with saturation missile doctrine to defeat American forward basing in a future contingency.”

 

The dispatch explains in granular detail how a “combined Sino-Russian support architecture” has helped the Iranian regime withstand the American onslaught and why Tehran is likely benefiting from “real-time” targeting intelligence. It notes, though, that even though America’s adversaries are using the Iran war to refine their understanding of American capabilities, Moscow and Beijing are also exposing their own “targeting-support tradecraft” that both would otherwise conceal.

 

The risk America’s enemies are taking in facilitating American combat deaths is also a testament to the importance of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to wrest control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian hands.

 

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently illustrated the stakes by focusing on how America’s allies in the Philippines are adjusting to the necessities imposed on them as a result of the Iran War. There, “the Marcos administration has sought to increase Russian crude access and expanded discussions over long-term energy cooperation.” That’s a warning sign for Washington and, possibly, a leading indicator of the compromises other Asian economies might be willing to make with America’s adversaries.

 

“If Russia successfully reorients its economy eastward,” one energy industry analyst told RFE/RL, “Western sanctions become structurally less effective.” China, too, will benefit from a status quo in which the strait remains contested. “China doesn’t really need to do anything but wait,” a Filipino defense analyst observed.

 

If the U.S. successfully weakens Iran’s capabilities in the strait to the point that de facto American control is established, if not acknowledged, the investments America’s enemies are making in this conflict will seem short-sighted in retrospect. If, however, America comes up short, events today set the table for bigger conflicts to come.

 

As Defense Security Asia’s analysts note, “this episode establishes a precedent in which commercial space-imagery firms function as deniable intelligence-sharing conduits, a model that could be replicated in a Taiwan Strait or South China Sea contingency involving different state and proxy actors.”

 

In short, America had better get this right. The consequences of failure could be serious.