I don't wish to be alarmist. I really don't. But with wars raging in both the Middle East and eastern Europe, I can't offer much optimism. The real downer right now is how simple it is to connect the two conflicts into one larger conflagration.
The ties between Russia and Iran have intensified over recent years. It is their relationship, rather than the China–Russia relationship, that is the biggest source of risk to global security and the current international order right now for four reasons.
Joining the dots
The first concern is the two countries' deepening military cooperation. It has long been known that Iran has been supplying Russia with 'suicide drones' for use in Ukraine. Documents leaked earlier this year suggested that Iran has sold 6,000 Shahed drones to Russia, which is producing them under licence at facilities in Russia and Belarus.
Last month the United States said that Iran had supplied ballistic missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine. Earlier reports had already suggested that Russian soldiers were being trained in Iran to use the short-range Fath-360 missile. It is suspected that around 200 of the missiles have been transferred to Russia. That's a significant number but not game-changing (for context, Russia has fired upwards of 10,000 missiles at targets in Ukraine since its February 2022 invasion). But as NATO members have stepped up the munitions support they have given to Ukraine – from personnel carriers to tanks to fighter jets – so is Iran stepping up the kinds of lethal support it is providing to Russia.
Russia and Iran may not have established any formal alliance agreement that commits them to fighting alongside one another, but their military ties are clearly intensifying. This excerpt from an article in War on the Rocks sums up the two states' military cooperation effectively:
From the 1990s to 2022, Russia provided, off and on, important military assistance to Iran across the ground, aerospace, and naval domains, largely focused on hardware instead of technology transfers... this assistance included the provision of tanks, armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles, combat aircraft, helicopters and surface-to-air missiles...