Tehran Bets That More Escalation Can Force Its Survival

It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Iran emerges from the war without having suffered grave damage. Israel, not only its government, but also its major political parties and much of its public opinion, sees the present moment as a crucible from which the future of the region will be shaped for decades to come. What raises the stakes further is that this moment is the product of the first war in which the American and Israeli military machines have operated in such close concert since the founding of the Israeli state.

There is no need to wait for the outcome of the war to argue that the future of the Middle East will change. That will happen regardless of the result, whether it takes the form of the destruction of the Iranian state or its survival through the hell now being prepared for it. Indeed, the outcome of the war may affect the international order as a whole. It could restore the existing, already fraying order; it could lead to a total breakdown of the restraints established after World War II; it could entrench a new form of American-Israeli hegemony, more bloody and predatory than before; or it could produce an international balance that serves neither Washington nor Tel Aviv.

Roughly a week before the war, a classified report was issued by the National Intelligence Council, which provides periodic assessments to the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. The report, later leaked, concluded that a large-scale American attack on Iran would likely fail to topple its military and religious institutions. The report did not address the possibility of deploying U.S. ground forces. It also predicted that the Iranian regime, in the event of the supreme leader’s assassination, would respond by following protocols designed to preserve continuity of authority, and it dismissed the likelihood that Iran’s fragmented opposition could replace the regime.

So far, the report appears to have been accurate in anticipating the course of events, though nothing yet confirms that events will ultimately move against the wishes of Washington and Tel Aviv. John Mearsheimer, the well-known international relations theorist, has argued, for instance, that “the Americans and Israelis will be frustrated by the absence of a clear strategy.” In a recent interview, he compared the current military campaign to the one targeting the Houthis in Yemen, which ended with an American retreat. Yet he also cautioned that Iran is different: escalation is still unfolding, and the nature of the war is far more existential for the parties involved.

Russia and China in the Background

In the background of this scene stand both Russia and China. Anyone following the American media will notice that most published analyses emphasize the limits of what can be expected from these two “allies” of Iran.

There are several reasons why China would hesitate to embark openly on the risky adventure of supporting Iran. Officially, China halted arms sales to Iran in 2005, after the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution imposing restrictions on the export and import of materials and technologies that could be linked to nuclear weapons, to and from Iran. Yet Chinese entities have, over the past several years, circumvented export controls, prompting Washington months ago to place nearly 100 of them on sanctions lists.

The relationship between the two countries has seen several pivotal moments. Among them was the 1989 visit to Beijing by the late Ali Khamenei. Khamenei was then president of Iran, before becoming supreme leader of the republic after Khomeini’s death a few weeks later. It was his last official trip abroad.

The relationship later deepened with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Iran after the lifting of Western sanctions in 2016, before Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear agreement. The two countries then signed a strategic partnership agreement under which China pledged to invest $400 billion in Iran over 25 years in exchange for the continued flow of Iranian oil. In practice, however, only a small fraction of those investments has materialized. And while China has become the main buyer of Iranian oil — purchasing roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports — those imports account for only about 12 percent of China’s total oil imports. In other words, the dependency has been far more one-sided than mutual.

This imbalance is not the only factor reducing the likelihood that Beijing would become entangled in such a dangerous war. China’s attention today is largely directed inward. The five-year plan recently prepared by the National People’s Congress calls for deploying the country’s resources to achieve technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy research, 6G networks, and other fields.

Yet despite its enduring focus on domestic development and investment-led growth, China has previously shown a willingness to supply Iran with much of what it needs to develop its military industries. The Pentagon noted in a report last year that the military relationship between the two countries has focused on the sale by Chinese companies of dual-use components for Iran’s ballistic missile and drone programs.

China, which continues to modernize its military and increase its defense spending for the coming year, is also deeply uneasy with the United States’ growing assertiveness and its transformation into a power more ambiguous and dangerous than at any previous point. During the war on Iran, it was striking that the Chinese military published an infographic on social media outlining five lessons drawn from the American-Israeli strikes on Iran. The most notable among them were the need not to be lulled into a false sense of security when entering negotiations with Washington, and not to assume that adversaries will “play by the rules.”

For this reason, some argue that China, even if not eager to support Iran, is unlikely to remain idle if it concludes that U.S. policy is shifting from waging conflicts against states to strangling Chinese commercial interests and sacrificing them.

Iran’s relationship with Russia, by contrast, is more intertwined, despite its many flaws. Militarily, cooperation was evident in the Russia-Ukraine war, most notably in the license granted to Russia to produce a version of Iran’s Shahed drones, which have played an effective role in Moscow’s military operations.

But this relationship is constrained by many ceilings and calculations. It differs, for example, from the 2024 mutual defense treaty between Russia and North Korea, which represents a more binding form of military support. The Russian agreement with Iran, by contrast, stipulates only that each side refrain from hostile actions if the other becomes involved in a conflict.

Just as Tehran has strengthened its ties with Beijing in recent years, it also signed a partnership treaty with Moscow in early 2025 covering military and intelligence cooperation, alongside trade, science, culture, and education.

Russia is now accused of providing Iran with intelligence on the positions and movements of American forces, ships, and aircraft. Media outlets have attributed these reports to sources familiar with U.S. intelligence assessments. This was the first indication that Moscow may be seeking to intervene in the war in a meaningful way. When Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was later asked about the matter, he avoided giving a direct answer more than once, while stressing that coordination between the two sides takes many forms. His response was widely understood to suggest that such cooperation was entirely plausible.

What do interests and calculations say?

Thousands of Communist Party delegates gathered in Beijing at the beginning of this war to discuss a roadmap for the Chinese economy amid declining consumption, a real estate crisis, and mounting local debt, as Chinese authorities lower their economic growth expectations for the first time since 1991.

Later , the Chinese president is set to receive his American counterpart, Donald Trump, to extend a fragile “trade truce.” He will do so with the knowledge that raw American power has just targeted Khamenei and Maduro, the leaders of two states partnered with China.

Meanwhile, more than 46 million barrels of Iranian oil were floating off southern China, alongside larger quantities stored in bonded warehouses at Chinese ports. These barrels are a reminder of what China could lose if the war continues for a long time, or if it leads to the fall of Iran or its regime.

The intensification of the war also highlights its consequences across the globe, especially in China’s neighborhood. U.S. military movements from that neighborhood over the past two years have been exceptional. In 2024, when American air defense forces were transferred from Japan to help intercept Iranian missiles, it marked the first time missile batteries had been moved from the Pacific to the Middle East. In 2025, when crews from South Korea and Japan were transferred to Qatar to intercept the Iranian attack, it became the largest Patriot missile engagement operation in U.S. history.

The course of the war on Iran also affects Russia’s interests and calculations. Moscow was supposed, for example, to resume negotiations with Kyiv in Abu Dhabi before the meeting venue became unavailable because of the outbreak of war and the inflammation of the Gulf.

Amid this turmoil, there are indications that the war on Iran may allow Ukraine to strengthen its political leverage in Washington. The United States is seeking Kyiv’s help in countering Iranian Shahed drones, which Ukraine has developed effective and low-cost methods to intercept during its war with Russia. Yet a prolonged war, by contrast, would have negative consequences for Kyiv, as it threatens to deplete American stockpiles of munitions that Ukraine needs.

It is therefore not in Russia’s interest for Iran to be subdued or broken, whether the war is long or short. If that happens, it could encourage Trump to exert further pressure on Moscow. Conversely, if the United States runs into difficulties in Iran, it may push Trump to strike a deal with Russia over Ukraine and seek some form of “victory” elsewhere in the world.

Does escalation offer a path to survival?

Marc Lynch, director of POMEPS, one of the leading research initiatives on the Middle East, argues that Gulf leaders have “good reasons to believe that the United States and Israel have launched a war not only against their interests, but against their survival.” They are, he says, “deeply alarmed by Israel’s strategy of regime change” in Iran, which involves the destruction of Iranian state institutions, because they understand that they are not immune to its catastrophic consequences. Lynch adds that the Iranian regime, whether it survives or is replaced by a similar one, “will remember very well the leverage it gained by attacking the Gulf and the movement of oil shipping.” But if it falls and the state collapses, Gulf states will face refugee flows, disruptions to navigation, extremism, and the fallout of armed violence, and they will no longer trust their ability to rely on the United States for their defense.

Iran understands all of this. It also understands that its options were extremely narrow unless it moved toward total surrender. It has acted on this basis, even if with a degree of randomness. Indeed, perhaps some of that randomness was intentional, designed to show that Iran’s capacity to act as a destabilizing force in the region has not yet reached its peak, and that its peak would come precisely with its collapse.

Still, many questions about the war and its “day after” are directed at Iran as well. When can a ceasefire be considered in its interest without exposing it to one round of war after another until it collapses? Has Iran begun to formulate a set of conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities? Could that include a package of settlements involving the lifting of sanctions and access to frozen funds? Would such a package include its allies, foremost among them Hezbollah in Lebanon, to prevent Israel from isolating and targeting them one by one? Is Iran capable of securing its demands in the first place? Can the widening gap with Gulf states be bridged in the “day after”? And do Russia or China have the ability to mediate toward satisfactory solutions? If so, with which of the many actors involved?

The shifts in international positions toward the war, especially from China and Russia, appear to depend to a large extent on Iran’s ability to withstand the storm. Tehran’s calculation is that the higher the cost of the war rises, regionally and internationally, the better its chances of reaching a more sustainable ceasefire that takes its demands into account. More than that, it believes that the cost of the war can impose recognition of its very existence — an existence that has been, and remains, under threat. Anything short of that, in its view, would amount to slow suicide, one that never offered real prospects of survival in the first place.

* This article was originally published on Awan Media on March 10, 2026.