October 16, 2026

The Axis of Upheaval Goes to War

By: Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine

This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.

On July 17, an Iranian missile struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing three American soldiers and wounding four others. The strike was unusually precise. In the weeks that followed, U.S. officials discovered that before the attack, Tehran had received high-resolution satellite images of the base that could aid its targeting. Afterward, Iran obtained more imagery, potentially helping it assess the damage and hone future attacks. The images came from Chinese entities.

China is not alone in assisting Iran. Russia, too, has helped Tehran find and hit American and allied targets. Two days before the March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia that wounded 12 American personnel, 14 Russian spy satellites passed overhead. U.S. officials later concluded that Moscow had fed Iran satellite intelligence that aided Iranian precision strikes. Moscow has also provided Iran with weapons and military expertise, including upgraded versions of Iranian drones refined on the battlefield in Ukraine, and Russian engineers are helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles that could evade U.S. and Israeli air defenses.

They are fine-tuning their cooperation to make their partners more resilient—and more dangerous to the United States—while limiting costs and risks.

Neither Russia nor China has directly entered Iran’s war with the United States. They haven’t needed to. By providing intelligence on American targets, military technology and components, and economic and diplomatic support, they can give Iran what it needs without joining its war.

The United States entered the conflict with advantages its adversaries lacked: a vast network of formal allies, military bases, intelligence-sharing arrangements, defense partnerships, and interoperable forces spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet many of Washington’s traditional partners were reluctant to associate themselves with the campaign, and some denied the United States specific forms of military access, at least for a time. Others publicly resisted U.S. calls to help secure the Strait of Hormuz.

Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.

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