Despite long being treated as a pariah by the West and isolated by US sanctions, Iran’s revolutionary Islamic government maintained diplomatic, commercial and military ties with a range of countries.
Turkey and India engaged with it on trade and security. China looked to it for cheap oil. North Korea, Venezuela and Russia considered it an ally in their struggle against the West and conspired with it to develop military technology and subvert sanctions.
Now that Iran finds itself under attack by the United States and Israel, those friends, neighbors and partners have little more than words to offer the Islamic Republic. They, in turn, could become targets. Turkey on Wednesday said NATO shot down a ballistic missile fired from Iran that was headed for Turkish airspace. On Thursday, Iran denied it had targeted Turkey.
Without true allies, it is a lonely war for Iran.
That is a product, experts say, of Iran’s foreign policy, which has shied away from commitments to other countries while investing in militias that share its religiously-fueled hatred of the United States and Israel.
Those militias can’t help Iran now. The most formidable of them, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, have been ground down by wars with Israel. The Houthi militia in Yemen and Iraqi armed groups backed by Iran can target ships in the Red Sea or U.S. forces in Iraq. But such attacks are unlikely to change the course of a war inside Iran.
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Nor have Iran’s relationships with other states resulted in concrete support, even from those united by their animosity toward what they consider Western imperialism.
“It is a rude wake-up call for those who believed that there was an emergent anti-West axis,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and the director of EDAM, an Istanbul-based think tank.
Referring to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, he said, “Now you see that it means nothing for one of those four countries when they are under siege by the West.”
Most countries that maintain ties with Iran do so out of strategic, geographic or economic necessity, giving them little reason to sacrifice when Iran comes under fire, experts said.
Now, those relationships may not protect them.
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Turkey’s Defense Ministry did not specify the target of the ballistic missile from Iran that NATO defenses shot down Wednesday. But a senior U.S. military official and a Western official said it was aimed at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, which houses a U.S. Air Force contingent and other NATO forces. Debris from the munitions that brought the missile down fell about 30 miles from the base. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to journalists.
The Iranian military denied in a statement Thursday that it had fired a missile at Turkey, saying it respected Turkey’s sovereignty.
Turkey shares a 300-mile border with Iran, has long-standing standing diplomatic and trade ties and also tried to fend off the war.
Ulgen characterised Turkey’s approach to Iran as rooted in history and driven by proximity and “grudging respect.”
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“We are not friends with Iran, we don’t agree on much, but we have to coexist in this geographical space,” he said.
Despite his warm ties with President Donald Trump, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran a “clear violation of international law.” On Monday, he said on social media that he was “saddened” by the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Turkish officials are working to stop the war, not because they love Iran’s leaders but because they fear that instability in Iran could spill into Turkey, as happened during past conflicts in Iraq and Syria, which also border Turkey.
The fall of the government in Tehran could be even worse, Ulgen said.
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“The type of instability that regime change could create could be an order of magnitude bigger than what we saw in Syria and Iraq,” he said.
India, too, engaged with Iran as an important player in its region and to seek economic advantages, according to Kabir Taneja, the executive director of the Observer Research Foundation Middle East based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
“There was definitely no overlap as far as worldview is concerned,” he said. “It was always a very transactional relationship, but a functional and a useful one as far as New Delhi was concerned.”
India exports rice, produce and pharmaceuticals to Iran and invested heavily in the Chabahar Port on Iran’s southern coast to give itself an export pathway to Central Asia that circumvented Pakistan, its top rival.
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Ties with Iran did not stop India from becoming Israel’s largest arms customer, with Indian purchases making up 34% of Israel’s total sales between 2020 and 2024, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Visiting Israel just days before the war, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India addressed the Israeli Knesset, received a parliamentary honor and signed trade deals with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu.
India’s balancing act between Israel, Iran and other countries meant it would steer clear of the war in Iran, Taneja said.
“Indian foreign policy is clear in that matter, that it does not enter into other people’s business,” he said.
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Other countries that have relationships with Iran and also host the US military have found themselves targets as Iran strikes back.
Iran has fired drones and missiles at Qatar, with which it shares an offshore gas field; the UAE, a major trade partner; and Oman, a key mediator in talks with the United States that sought to prevent the war.
Iran has received little support from partner countries that share its hostility to the West.
North Korea condemned the war but has done little else, and Venezuela’s posture has changed since the United States ousted President Nicolás Maduro in January.
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China remains Iran’s largest trading partner, mostly because it buys more than three-quarters of Iran’s oil, which it gets at a significant discount because of US sanctions.
China has called for restraint, criticised the killing of Khamenei as “unacceptable” and appointed an envoy to mediate. It is unlikely to directly challenge the United States, analysts said, so as not to upset a fragile détente before Trump’s expected visit to China in April.
Russia has been Iran’s closest state ally in pushing back against the West for more than a decade.
“You have this growing alignment and grievance over the global order and the U.S. alliance system,” said Hanna Notte, the Eurasia program director at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Military cooperation between Russia and Iran grew during the conflict in Syria, where both countries propped up President Bashar Assad before he was ousted in December 2024.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine further solidified the relationship because Russia needed Iranian drone technology, which it deployed against Ukraine.
In January 2025, Russia and Iran signed a major cooperation treaty that deepened their defense ties but did not include a requirement to come to each other’s defense in case of a military attack.
Russia has given Iran some military equipment but its support has been limited, Notte said, in part because Russia did not want to complicate its relationship with Israel.
Now that Iran is at war, Russia will likely stick to its policy of avoiding direct military conflict with Israel and the United States in the Middle East, Notte said.
That will likely confine Russia’s contribution to standing up for Iran at the United Nations and in other international forums.
“The Russians have defended the Iranians quite aggressively,” Notte said of Russia’s diplomacy. “But that does not do much for Iran in this situation.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
