Foreign Affairs
SEPTEMBER 17, 2025
Iran’s Perilous Path Back to Power
Tehran Has Few Options, but the Best OneDepends on China
AFSHON OSTOVAR
A year of sustained losses has left Iran’s grand strategy in ruins.
near destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the evisceration of the
Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and the collapse of Bashar
al-Assad’s regime in Syria deprived Iran of the proxies it had long relied on to threaten Israel. As a result, in June, Israel was able to conduct its 12 day war against Iran unencumbered by worries about regional escalation.
at war demolished a long-held assumption about Iranian deterrence—
the belief that Tehran could retaliate effectively against overt, directattacks on its territory. More practically, it destroyed the country’s main air defenses, degraded its ballistic missile capabilities, and set back its nuclear ambitions.
The Iran’s regime will certainly attempt to claw back its lost power. But
regional developments since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s persistently assertive military footing have made it much harder for Tehran to take steps that could shore up its in uence, such as rearming Hezbollah. Until Iran can defend its own territory, it may be impossible for it to rebuild its proxies or sprint for a nuclear bomb in a way that does not put the theocratic regime at further risk of collapse. In the near term, Iran is likeliest to try to rebuild its military defenses by expanding its partnership with China. Until recently, Beijing has resistedbacking one faction over another in the Middle East. But China’s calculus could be changing, too. It may well see fresh opportunities in assisting Iran to regain some of its diminished strength, given the rising tensions between Israel and Arab states—especially following Israel’s early September strikes on Hamas’s leadership in Qatar.
OBSTACLE COURSE
The Assad regime’s ouster last December—and the anti-Iranian stance adopted by Damascus’s new rulers—constitutes an underappreciated obstacle to Tehran’s ability to reconstruct its regional proxy strategy. For decades, Syria directly provided rockets and missiles to Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network; Assad also allowed Iran to smuggle weapons to Lebanon through Syrian territory. Although that effort met resistance after the outbreak of Syria’s civil war as Israel began to regularly conduct strikes on weapons storehouses in Syria and on convoys facilitated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran still managed to keep Hezbollah armed.
Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s new president, has made it clear that Iranian influence is no longer welcome in his country. He has sought partnerships with Iran’s rivals, particularly Turkey, and blamed Iranian-backed militias for fueling instability in Syria, arguing in a February 2025 interview on state television that Iranian proxies posed a threat to the Syrian people and “the entire region.” Yet despite some early successes, Shara’s government has struggled to unify the country. Iran could exploit the latent sociopolitical divisions in Syria by clandestinely aiding factions dissatis fied with the new regime or open to nancial inducements, just as it has leveraged divisions in Iraq and Yemen.
Iran could have even greater opportunities to interfere in Syrian politics if the U.S. military completes its withdrawal. Iran already boasts relationships with some Syrian Sunni tribal networks, having worked with them to move weapons into the West Bank through Jordan. It could try to incentivize those networks to move arms to the Lebanese border if Damascus’s authority over southern Syria dwindles.
Without access to Syrian transit networks, however, Iran will be leftwith only two ways to send signi cant weapons shipments to Lebanon: by air or by sea. Both of these methods are vulnerable to Israeli interception,and the degree to which Israeli intelligence has penetrated Iran’s military establishment makes it even less likely that Iranian weapons could successfully reach Lebanon. After Israel’s 2024 attacks on Hezbollah, the group’s leadership structure is in a shambles, and it faces extraordinary pressure to disarm. It may have no choice but to pull back or even abandon its military efforts.
ON THE DEFENSIVE
Iran may eventually nd a way to reconstitute its supply lines to
Hezbollah, but the conditions under which it could do so don’t yet exist.
This means that Iran has lost—perhaps permanently—the one proxy
militia whose power had discouraged Israeli attacks on Iranian territory.
The Houthis in Yemen have successfully used Iranian weaponry to target shipping in the Red Sea, but they have not helped shield Iran against Israeli aggression. Hezbollah’s rockets posed a direct threat to Israeli cities, but the Houthis’ arsenal—as well as that of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq—constitutes a lesser and more distant threat.
Iran could, of course, pivot from its proxy strategy and try to restore its deterrence by racing for a nuclear weapon. Despite the Israeli and U.S. assaults on its nuclear facilities in June, Iran already possesses enough highly enriched uranium to construct several nuclear weapons and is
believed to have the know-how to build them. If Iran could repair or
rebuild adequate enrichment facilities (or if it already has such secret facilities), it could re ne that uranium to a weapons-grade level relatively quickly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.
But even if Iran’s leaders want to pursue nuclear weaponization, taking the necessary steps to do so would be extremely dangerous for the ruling regime. Given Israel’s steep intelligence advantage, any moves to further Iran has a pressing need to bolster its air defenses.
enrich uranium would risk alerting Iran’s adversaries and triggering a new and more destructive round of strikes led by Israel, the United States, or both. And even if Iran succeeded in testing a nuclear device and developing a small weapons arsenal uninterrupted, its current inability to defend its skies would render that arsenal tremendously vulnerable.
Developing a nuclear weapon, on its own, therefore cannot restore Iranian deterrence. Without strong conventional defenses or proxies to deter foreign aggression, nuclear weapons could simply create a new liability.
Before Iran can even begin to restore deterrence,
much less recoup some of its regional power, it
must address the shortcomings in its conventional
military capabilities. Iran did nd ways to impose
costs on Israel during the 12-day war, particularly
by targeting Israeli population centers. But Israel’s
air defense systems’ high intercept rate rendered Iran’s missiles an
insufficient deterrent; they could not destroy or even reliably hit serious strategic and military targets. And after it eliminated Iran’s air defense systems, Israel was able to strike Iranian missile launchers, which further eroded Iran’s ability to launch effective counterstrikes.
How Iran chooses to rebuild its arsenal will depend on the lessons its military took from the 12-day war. Much remains unknown about how effective di erent Iranian missiles systems were in the con ict, but Iraniancommanders will have undoubtedly acquired a greater understanding of which systems performed best and which operational tactics were most effective, even if Israel’s attacks on Iran were always more potent. Those lessons will guide how Iran’s military focuses its energies. It may, for instance, invest even more in domestically produced hypersonic or otheradvanced weapons (such as the Fattah and the Khorramshahr-4 missiles), as well as longer-range systems that could be red from eastern Iran, a harder target for Israel to hit.
Iran’s need to bolster its air defenses is even more pressing. In June,Israel destroyed the bulk of Iran’s air defenses in the central and western parts of the country, including all of its Russian-made S-300 surface-to air missile systems, which had been the most advanced systems that Iranpossessed. Israel also destroyed a number of Iranian military aircraft.
Even before the war, Iran could not eld an air force that could defend its skies against a stronger adversary, and it is weaker now.
Iran lacks the industrial capacity to produce the platforms it needs to bolster its air defense and will have to seek outside assistance. Moscow has long been Tehran’s closest defense partner, but Russia’s complicated relationship with Israel limits the defense assistance it has been willing to provide; its war on Ukraine has also diminished its ability to sell weaponry to outside buyers. In 2023, for instance, Iran announced a deal to purchase Sukhoi Su-35 fighter planes from Russia. To date, however, Russia has delivered only two of the reported 50 aircraft that Tehran has ordered. Moscow may yet make good on the deal, but given the delay and the constraints on Russia’s defense industry, Iran may choose to look elsewhere.
LAST RESORT
That leaves China as Iran’s best source of additional military equipment.
China has traditionally sought to balance its relationships in the Middle East. It has helped Iran evade oil sanctions and offered limited military assistance, such as by aiding Iran’s development of antiship ballisticmissiles. But Beijing has not assisted Tehran enough to give it a clear advantage over its Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, itstraditional regional rival. China has reaped some bene ts from Iran’srelative isolation—most important, by exploiting Western sanctions to purchase Iranian oil at a steep discount.
But China’s balancing act may no longer be necessary. In March 2023,Iran began normalizing diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia—a move brokered by China that fundamentally changed a prior driver of Beijing’s Middle East policy. And as tensions grow between Beijing and Washington, so does Tehran’s potential strategic utility for Beijing.
Linking Iran more closely to Chinese interests and support could prove advantageous in, for example, a crisis scenario involving Taiwan, during which Beijing could split the focus of the U.S. Navy and its allies by incentivizing Tehran and its proxies to target civilian shipping in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Oman.
Air defense is a crucial gap that China could help Iran ll. China’s HQ 9 mobile air defense system is similar to Russia’s more advanced S-400 platform. If Beijing sold this system to Tehran, that could help Iranrestore some protection of its skies. Iran could also pursue a deal with China to modernize its air force, such as by purchasing Chinese Chengdu J-10 aircraft, which performed well for Pakistan in its brief military escalation with India in May.
In the short run, neither better air defenses nor an improved fleet offighter jets can drastically change Iran’s relative disadvantage with respect to Israel and the United States. But in the medium term, these improvements could make further strikes on Iran harder and costlier for adversaries to pursue and discourage episodic escalations. At the very least,they could buy Iran some time to replenish and re ne its domestically produced missile stockpile and better prepare for another conflict. The more temporally distant the threat of war becomes for Iran, the more immediate risk it can shoulder.
Regardless of how China responds to its predicament, Iran is in acrunch. Its leaders may yet choose to muddle along in a state of insecurity,hoping simply to survive this period of crisis without further compromise.
Or they may opt for the even more dangerous path of nuclear weaponization. But the sca olding that had preserved Iran’s security for the last two decades has collapsed, and the country will remain fundamentally vulnerable and insecure until its conventional military shortcomings are addressed.
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