Only China, India, and Russia Can End the Iran War

Only China, India, and Russia Can End the Iran War for the United States

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Argument:

Only China, India, and Russia Can End the Iran War

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Argument

An expert’s point of view on a current event.

Only China, India, and Russia Can End the Iran War

Washington needs its rivals to create peace on its behalf.

By **Amir Handjani**, a board member at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

!Russia's President Vladimir Putin, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, China's President Xi Jinping, South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pose for a family photo during the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi.

*Russia's President Vladimir Putin, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, China's President Xi Jinping, South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pose for a family photo during the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi.*

Russia's President Vladimir Putin, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, China's President Xi Jinping, South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed pose for a family photo during the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi. Alexander KAZAKOV / POOL / AFP

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September 15, 2026, 2:57 AM

This weekend, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to Bharat Mandapam for the 18th BRICS summit, the assembled leaders spent most of their public remarks on trade corridors and the usual grievances about a Western-led order that no longer reflects the distribution of global power. Iran barely made the formal agenda. But in the private meetings that matter more than the joint communiqué, the U.S. war in Iran was almost certainly a subject of conversation.

With good reason. The country that convened this summit, and the two great powers that anchored it, may hold the key to ending a war that Washington started and can no longer finish.

This weekend, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to Bharat Mandapam for the 18th BRICS summit, the assembled leaders spent most of their public remarks on trade corridors and the usual grievances about a Western-led order that no longer reflects the distribution of global power. Iran barely made the formal agenda. But in the private meetings that matter more than the joint communiqué, the U.S. war in Iran was almost certainly a subject of conversation.

With good reason. The country that convened this summit, and the two great powers that anchored it, may hold the key to ending a war that Washington started and can no longer finish.

The war has not gone the way anyone in the Trump administration expected. U.S. and Israeli strikes in June 2025 set back Iran’s nuclear program but did not end it and did not topple the regime, either. A negotiating window opened and closed this summer without a deal. U.S. President Donald Trump has now taken to telling reporters that the war will conclude after the November midterms, something that reads less like a strategic timeline than a political one. He needs the conflict resolved in a way that lets him claim he denied Iran a bomb and forced Tehran to its knees. What he does not have is a credible path to that outcome that does not involve either an extended and unpopular military campaign or a negotiation that looks, to his own base and to Israel, like capitulation.

Iran, for its part, needs something the United States is structurally incapable of offering: a security guarantee it can believe. Whatever assurances an American administration extends today can be reversed by the next one, or by the same one three months later, as Iranian officials have been saying publicly since the beginning of the war. Tehran also needs sanctions relief that is not dependent on the American financial system, since any relief contingent on Washington’s goodwill is relief that can be switched off. These two requirements—reliable security backing and dollar-independent economic lifelines—are exactly what Russia, China, and increasingly India can supply, and what the United States cannot.

Russia’s utility here is mostly about security architecture. Moscow has spent two decades building a defense relationship with Tehran that includes air defense systems, training, and a formal comprehensive strategic partnership treaty signed last year. Russia cannot physically defend Iran against another U.S. or Israeli strike, and Ukraine has consumed the bulk of its military resources. Moscow can still offer something narrower and still valuable: a diplomatic guarantor role, a seat at any verification regime, and a channel through which Iran can claim its sovereignty was respected. For a regime that has built its legitimacy partly on resisting American power, having Russia in the room changes the optics of any deal from surrender to negotiated settlement.

China’s contribution is almost entirely economic. Beijing buys the majority of Iran’s exported oil, much of it through intermediaries outside formal dollar clearing systems, and has done so through years of sanctions with only modest disruption. A settlement that allows expanded, formalized Chinese investment, perhaps folded into the 25-year cooperation agreement the two countries signed in 2021, gives Iran an economic future independent of American sanctions relief. Prolonged conflict also di