Why Russia, China, and North Korea Abandoned Iran

For years, it was billed as one of the West’s greatest geostrategic nightmares. The emergence of the so-called Axis of Upheaval was meant to change everything. Comprising China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, this slowly coalescing bloc of anti-Western, authoritarian regimes spent much of the early-2020s growing ever closer. Spurred on by the war in Ukraine, their alignment, at least from the outside, seemed to signal a dangerous new force capable of rivaling the American-led order.

But notice the hedging words: seemed to signal, meant to change everything. The worry about the Axis of Upheaval was always that its component parts would back one another, and that, with their reach across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang would be able to escalate any regional conflict into a third world war. Well, that regional conflict has now happened. On 13 June, Israel launched audacious strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and leadership. Days later, America joined the fray, directly bombing the Islamic Republic.

And in the face of this attack on one of its members, the Axis of Upheaval did nothing. There were stern words condemning the strikes, but beyond that, Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang effectively whistled and looked the other way as American and Israeli bombs devastated their close partner. The collapse of so much breathless commentary into a single moment of inaction raises one stark question: why did Iran’s most powerful friends leave it to fight alone?

Key Takeaways

When Israel struck Iran on 13 June and the United States joined days later, none of Iran’s Axis of Upheaval partners, Russia, China, or North Korea, provided meaningful military assistance, offering only rhetorical condemnation.
None of the three capitals held a mutual defense pact with Tehran; even the strategic partnership Russia and Iran signed in January contained no mutual defense clause.
Iran propped up Russia’s war in Ukraine with Shahed drones, artillery ammunition, and possibly ballistic missiles, yet Moscow repeatedly refused Iranian requests for S-400 systems, Su-35 fighters, and Mi-28 helicopters, supplying only Yak-130 trainers.
Russia’s approach to alliances is transactional, a pattern visible in its abandonment of Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and of Transnistria after Gazprom cut its gas.
China is Iran’s largest trading partner and oil importer, but Beijing values its ties to Saudi Arabia and the UAE and has no history of foreign intervention, leaving its support for Tehran strictly rhetorical.
North Korea could in theory offer nuclear or missile help, but Iran does not want a bomb today, an air war offered no role for North Korean manpower, and 4,000 miles separate the two states.
The episode underscores a deeper truth: America’s network of alliances has no military equal, even as fraying commitments to NATO and East Asian allies raise questions about how long that will hold.

A Partnership That Promised More Than It Delivered

Some observers will object that the Axis was always oversold. After all, none of the three capitals held a mutual defense pact with Tehran, and none were bound to the Islamic Republic by formal military alliance. Were the connections ever as solid as a thousand think pieces claimed? The answer lies in the rhetoric coming out of these capitals only months earlier, in the ways Tehran had been helping its partners in their own hours of need, and in the clear expectations on the Iranian side.

By those measures, it is hard to imagine Iran’s leadership feeling anything but betrayed.

Consider that it was only in January that Russia and Iran signed a new strategic partnership amid considerable fanfare. The agreement may not have contained a mutual defense clause, but it was plainly meant to signal a deepening bond between the two nations. When crunch time arrived, that bond proved about as durable as a schoolyard vow of eternal friendship. To understand why, it helps to take the three partners one at a time, beginning with the country that put its name to that January pact: Russia.

Russia: A Debt Never Repaid

From the Iranian perspective, the expectation that Moscow would step in was entirely reasonable. Ever since Russian aircraft began reducing Syrian cities to rubble in 2015, the Kremlin and the Islamic Republic had worked together to expand their influence. Their initial shared goal was keeping Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria. But once Russian armor rolled over the border into Ukraine, the partnership moved to a different level entirely.

With Moscow’s forces now grinding slowly forward in Donbas, it is easy to forget what a catastrophe the opening months of the invasion were for the Kremlin. Caught off guard by stiff Ukrainian resistance, Russia was reduced to begging its friends for help, and Iran was among the first to oblige. First appearing in the summer of 2022, Iranian Shahed drones have since become a fixture of the war, sowing death and destruction in cities across Ukraine. They proved so useful that the Kremlin began manufacturing them domestically, turning out 2,700 Shaheds a month.

Tehran did not stop at drones. The Islamic Republic also supplied artillery ammunition and may even have sent ballistic missiles. Arriving at Russia’s greatest point of weakness, these Iranian deliveries were crucial. One need not claim they alone kept Moscow in the fight to recognize that they certainly did not hurt.

None of this came free; Iran received good cash from a desperate Kremlin. Even so, the Iranians had grounds to expect gratitude. As Iran researcher Mahnaz Shirali put it to ABC: “Russia has never truly helped Iran. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic has helped Russia a great deal, providing them with missiles and drones.”

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The Weapons Iran Asked For, and Never Got

If the Axis of Upheaval were truly the geopolitical bogeyman so often described, the relationship would have run in both directions. Yet even before the war with Israel erupted, Russia had been giving Iran the cold shoulder. Back in November 2023, Iran, likely sensing that conflict with Israel was approaching, asked Moscow for everything from additional S-400 air-defense systems to Mi-28 attack helicopters and Sukhoi Su-35 jet fighters. Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia-Iran relations, described to the New York Times what followed: “Iran has been asking Russia for weapons for the last few years.

It has been asking for aircraft, it has been asking for air defense systems. Russia has given practically nothing.”

That refusal continued even after Israel destroyed Iran’s pre-existing air defenses the previous year. As the Wall Street Journal observed, “In the months that followed, Russia was either unable or unwilling to replace them.” The Journal also reports that the only jets Moscow ever supplied Tehran were Yak-130 training aircraft. The reason was diplomatic pressure from the Gulf states, which did not want Iran acquiring anything more capable.

Here the outline of Russia’s broader posture toward the Axis comes into focus, the same posture that has doomed so many Kremlin allies to disappointment.

Putin’s Transactional World

For all the talk of mutual interest, the reality is that Vladimir Putin’s approach to alliances is purely transactional, and the record of abandoned partners is long. In 2023, Azerbaijan’s forces overran the ethnically Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, despite the presence of Russian peacekeepers whom Putin had personally said would guarantee the safety of the Karabakhis. In skirmishes the year before, Azerbaijan had shelled across the border into Armenia itself.

Moscow took no action, even though it held a mutual defense treaty with Yerevan. The Kremlin tried to spin the abandonment as just deserts for Armenia flirting with the West, but Yerevan only began looking to France and America once it became clear that Russia could not, or would not, defend it.

The fate of Bashar al-Assad was even more dispiriting for those who relied on Russian backing. When a coalition of rebel groups marched on Damascus in late 2024, Putin failed to intervene to save the ally he had spent a decade propping up, and Assad was overthrown. Just weeks later, in early 2025, the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria experienced its own taste of abandonment when Moscow cut off its gas.

A de facto Russian client state since 1992, Transnistria had survived on gigantic flows of free gas, but Gazprom halted deliveries in January to pressure Moldova. While Moldova suffered an energy shock, Transnistria nearly collapsed, and the statelet has been in a rolling state of emergency ever since.

A Reach That No Longer Stretches

With the events of recent days, Iran has simply become the latest Russian friend to discover that the partnership ran mostly one way. By the best available count, it has now been over three years since Moscow last successfully intervened to help an ally, when the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization helped put down riots in Kazakhstan in early 2022. That date hints at a likely cause of the Kremlin’s faltering reach. Since becoming bogged down in the Ukrainian quagmire, Russia has lacked the strength to manage any additional crises.

A decade ago, Moscow could simultaneously wage an air war in Syria, a hybrid war in eastern Donbas, and peacekeeping operations in the frozen conflicts of the Caucasus, all while propping up dictators in places such as Belarus. Today, Russia can sustain only its land war in Ukraine. Yet that tidy explanation overlooks the specific texture of the relationship between Moscow and Tehran, a relationship laced with revealing complications. Perhaps the most surprising of these is Russia’s relationship with Iran’s greatest enemy: Israel.

Why Moscow Would Rather Keep Iran Weak

Moscow and Jerusalem are not exactly friends, yet there is more cooperation between them than one might expect given Israel’s nominal place in the Western camp. Israel has not joined sanctions on Russia, has not sent Ukraine advanced weapons, and, back in February, joined the United States in voting against a UN resolution condemning Moscow’s invasion of its neighbor. The full reasons behind this semi-friendship could fill an analysis of their own, but the central point is that Putin is very eager to keep relations with the Israelis cordial. For him, the upside of a positive relationship with Jerusalem outweighs the downside of Iran being humiliated.

Israel is not the only Middle Eastern friend Russia wishes to preserve. Both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have maintained partnerships with Moscow, with the UAE becoming a key destination for Russian oligarchs fleeing sanctions. Neither country would be impressed if the Kremlin began arming Tehran with advanced weapons. There is also the matter of nuclear ambition.

Assuming the ceasefire holds, the Iran-Israel War appears to have been limited in scope; Israel assassinated leadership figures but stopped short of pushing for regime change, focusing most of its operations on halting Iran’s nuclear program.

That outcome may suit the Kremlin just fine, not only because a nuclear-armed Iran could destabilize the entire region, but because, as the Atlantic put it, “Moscow knows that it would lose leverage over a nuclear Iran.” This points to a final theory: perhaps Russia withheld help simply because a weaker partner serves Putin’s interests. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Tino Sanandaji of the Stockholm School of Economics noted, “A common complaint in Iran is that China and Russia, rather than being true friends, exploit Iran’s isolation to get cheap natural resources while selling Iran second-rate military hardware at inflated prices, sometimes never even delivering the promised equipment.” Tehran’s weakness means it cannot be choosy about who buys its weapons and oil, and it cannot do much when those buyers give little in return.

China: Big Talk, Superficial Bonds

These dynamics help explain why Moscow did effectively nothing for its strategic partner when the moment came. But Russia is not the only member of the Axis from which Tehran might have hoped for support. Just as important, and with far greater economic power at its disposal, is China. As it turns out, Beijing proved just as reluctant to come off the sidelines as Russia did.

Iran depends on China far more heavily than it depends on Russia. China is Iran’s largest trading partner and the largest importer of its oil. Since 2021, China has earmarked the equivalent of nearly half a trillion US dollars to invest in Iran, and in return has enjoyed sharply discounted oil and a measure of consistent energy access in the event of war with the West.

But, much like Russia, China’s interests in the Middle East extend well beyond Iran. In fact, Beijing is far closer to the other Gulf nations, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both of which have notably hostile relationships with Tehran. Unlike many of China’s partners, Iran can be belligerent, even demanding that China pay more for oil in 2023 and briefly halting the flow when Beijing refused.

Chinese weapons, meanwhile, have yet to flow into Iran in large quantities, despite China’s push to become a major exporter of modern military equipment. Beijing supported America’s first nuclear deal with Iran, the JCPOA, even while helping Iran’s rivals in Riyadh develop a civil nuclear program. And when it suited Beijing, as recently as 2024, to reject Iran’s claims in a territorial dispute with the Emirates, it did so unapologetically and with little regard for Iranian backlash.

In public, China talks a big game; in 2024, Xi Jinping spoke of his desire to “unswervingly develop friendly cooperation with Iran.” But beneath the rhetoric, the relationship is relatively superficial. Beijing is willing to compromise almost none of its other interests to make life easier for Tehran, and its leaders know full well that Tehran needs them more than they need Tehran.

The Strait of Hormuz and China’s Bottom Line

So when Iran and Israel entered direct confrontation, in which Iran might have threatened to rapidly develop a nuclear weapon or to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and choke off the flow of oil from the Gulf states, neither option carried any benefit for China. On the contrary, both threatened real risk to China’s bottom line. Had Beijing supported Iran’s war effort, it would be hard to identify any tangible reward it could have reaped.

In a hypothetical world where Iran could hand Israel and the United States a major strategic defeat, embarrass their militaries on the world stage, and force them into submission, that might have been a future China wished to usher in. But in the real world, the gap in military capability between the US and Israel on one side and Iran on the other was simply too vast for Chinese assistance to bridge.

Unlike Russia, where the Kremlin hands out security guarantees even when it cannot follow through, China has never made a habit of guaranteeing protection to its allies. That is simply not its way. China has no real history of foreign intervention and no desire to take part in somebody else’s regional war. So when fighting broke out between Israel and Iran, it would have been highly uncharacteristic for Beijing to get involved, not least because the faster Iran was defeated, the sooner China could be assured that its regional oil interests were safe from harm.

Condemnation as Strategy

Instead, China kept its support strictly rhetorical, tut-tutting and berating the United States from the sidelines while showing zero interest in actually doing anything. When the US struck Iran directly, China accused Washington of severe violations of the UN Charter and called on the UN Security Council, where the US holds veto power, to intervene. Beijing joined Russia and Pakistan in calling for a ceasefire and condemned Israel’s “violation of Iran’s sovereignty.”

There was logic in this. In a moment when the United States and one of its closest allies could be accused of flagrantly ignoring international norms, calling that out served China’s interests. Beijing could sit on the sidelines, condemn warmongering Americans, and present itself as a picture of diplomatic restraint, even a natural peacemaker, urging the rest of the world to follow China’s example instead.

But China’s ability to serve its domestic interests in this conflict ended there. If there is one consistent lens through which to understand Chinese behavior, it is the assumption that China will protect its own interests above all else.

North Korea: Willing but Unequipped

That leaves the fourth nation of the Axis: North Korea. In some respects, it is the regime in Pyongyang that would seem best suited to help the theocracy in Tehran, rogue-state collaboration at its finest. North Korea has already proved willing to help Russia at war, sending over ten thousand troops to do so. And if Iran wants a nuclear weapon so badly, North Korea would be the obvious candidate to provide one.

The two are already suspected of collaborating on missile designs and underground bunker construction, so surely Pyongyang could be persuaded to send a warhead.

In truth, Iran does not want a nuclear weapon, at least not now. It may well be Tehran’s long-term ambition to build an arsenal one day, despite insisting it seeks only a civilian program. But Iran understands as well as anyone that if it constructed a bomb today, it would be attacked by Israel and America with even greater force than it has already endured.

Nor would North Korean troops be of much use. Israel and Iran are fighting an air war, and while North Korea has plenty of bodies and ammunition to spare, it cannot rapidly transfer medium-range ballistic missiles across the four thousand miles separating Pyongyang and Tehran.

Put simply, North Korea and Iran are not equipped for any real military partnership. Their economies are in chronic disrepair, they lack the logistics to move personnel or weapons at scale, and both already have enough problems without appearing to team up in an alliance that would send the Western world into a violent panic. Across all three partners, then, the explanations are relatively simple and clear-cut, a tidy account of why the Axis of Upheaval was missing in action across these twelve days.

The Deeper Truth About Alliances

Straightforward as these reasons are, they point to something larger. For all the talk of a multipolar world, the only nations capable of challenging America are simply not very good at building durable military alliances. On the economic front, groupings such as the European Union or even BRICS might be said to wield clout comparable to the US. But when it comes to hard power, the guns, the bombs, and the missiles of force projection, there is literally nothing on Earth that can match the network of alliances America has built across the globe.

At least, for now. Washington remains top dog today not merely because it operates the most powerful army in existence, but because nations around the world can watch how America stepped into this war to help its ally Israel, watch how the Axis of Upheaval ignored its friend Iran, and draw their own conclusions. When it appears that Washington extends that same protection to allies from Poland to South Korea, joining Team America looks like a pretty good bet.

Yet in this era of fraying bonds, it is worth asking how long that will remain true. As US commitment to NATO is called into question, as allies in East Asia are hit with tariffs and subjected to defense-spending shakedowns, the American web of alliances suddenly seems less unbreakable than it once appeared. The Axis of Upheaval may have been humiliated by its inability to protect Iran. But unless something changes soon, it may one day be the collective West that is left to whistle and look the other way, as one of its own members is hung out to dry.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Axis of Upheaval, and did it ever have a mutual defense obligation?

The Axis of Upheaval is the label for the loosely coalescing bloc of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that drew closer in the early 2020s, deepening ties especially as the Ukraine war progressed. Crucially, no two members of the group were bound by a formal mutual defense pact. Even the new strategic partnership Russia and Iran signed in January contained no mutual defense clause, meaning none of the partners were legally obligated to defend Iran when it came under attack.

How had Iran helped Russia before Israel and America struck?

Iran supplied Russia’s war in Ukraine with Shahed drones that became so useful the Kremlin began manufacturing 2,700 of them per month domestically. Tehran also provided artillery ammunition and may have sent ballistic missiles, arriving at Russia’s greatest point of weakness in the early phase of the invasion. Despite this, Russia paid only cash in return and repeatedly refused Iranian requests for S-400 air-defense systems, Su-35 fighters, and Mi-28 helicopters, supplying only Yak-130 trainer jets.

Why did Russia refuse to intervene when Iran was attacked?

Russia lacked both the will and the capacity. Since becoming bogged down in Ukraine, Russia has been unable to manage any additional crises, having already abandoned partners in Armenia, Syria, and Transnistria. Beyond capacity, Putin had strategic reasons to stay out: he wanted to preserve cordial ties with Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and a weaker Iran serves Russian interests by keeping Tehran dependent and unable to become a nuclear power that Moscow could no longer leverage.

Why did China limit its support to rhetorical condemnation?

China is Iran’s largest trading partner and oil importer, but it is even closer to Iran’s rivals, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Beijing has no tradition of foreign military intervention and saw no benefit in Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz or accelerating its nuclear program — both outcomes would directly threaten China’s regional oil interests. By condemning Washington and calling for a ceasefire, China could present itself as a diplomatic peacemaker without risking anything tangible.

What does the episode reveal about the limits of the multipolar world?

The episode shows that while rival blocs may hold economic weight comparable to the United States, none can match America’s network of durable military alliances when it comes to hard power. Russia, China, and North Korea all had reasons to help Iran and chose not to, whereas the US joined Israel’s campaign directly. The article cautions, however, that fraying US commitments to NATO and East Asian allies could eventually erode that advantage.