What Iran Gets by Helping Russia (War in Ukraine)

Russia's stockpiles of drones and missiles are running dangerously low - one recent estimate put Russia's cruise missile stockpile as low as 120 out of the 2,000 it began the war with. But Iran is now coming to the rescue, supplying Russia with all the drones and missiles it needs to hit every civilian target in Ukraine. But what exactly does Iran get out of helping Russia? Iran and Russia are both countries with few real friends. While there's several countries who tolerate or feign close relations with Russia - none of them were willing to offer more than token support for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Similarly, Iran is also a country with few friends. It may have some legitimate political beef with the United States after decades of it propping up a dictatorship in the country, but Iran is sort of like the most hated kid in school, because it's pissed off every single one of its neighbors. Israel tops the list of Iranian enemies, but while the rest of the middle east has gradually gotten off the "death to Israel" bandwagon that was so popular up until the 80s, Iran refuses to let old fads die. To this day, Iran remains the only major power in the region who seriously wishes to see Israel destroyed. But Iran's antagonism has worn thin on the nerves of its other neighbors too. Saudi Arabia and Iran have famously been, relationship status: frowny-face, with each other for decades, and it doesn't help that Saudi Arabia's favorite hobby is to antagonize Iran and then hide under America's skirts.

Jordan and numerous other countries are also pretty tired of Iran, and have threatened to pursue thir own nuclear programs should Iran get the bomb. The first and most obvious thing that Iran gets out of helping Russia take even longer to lose the war in Ukraine is making a friend. Russia and Iran, along with North Korea, are sort of like your high school's edge-lords, pretending they don't want anything to do with the cool kids while secretly all three would faint if Amreica the Prom King asked them to the big dance. Surprisingly though that doesn't mean that the're besties, despite it being very obvious that to survive they should stick together. For starters, Iran has had a very rocky relationship with the Soviet Union. On the one hand, both of them had the same favorite band: Death to America, with their self-titled smash hit, Death to America. But on the other, Iran was a religious fundamentalist autocratic tyranny, while the Soviet Union was an atheistic nationalist autocratic tyranny. Like star-crossed lovers, their similarities ran as deep as their dissimilarities.

This made things difficult for the religious fundamentalist Iranians, who thought it was sin to do business with atheists. There were more practical concerns for the Iranins though. The Soviet Union was an arms exporting power house during the Cold War - as long as a single citizen had even the faintest anit-American thought, the Soviet Union would be practically drowning your country in military hardware. Iran gladly bought up all the exports the Soviet Union would give it, but there was one huge sticking point between the two-would-be-BFFs. Like that guy all your friends warned you about, the Soviet Union was flirting with Iran's neighbor, and the very country Iran was fighting a decade long and extremely violent war against. By selling weapons to both Iran and Iraq, the Iranians were having trouble feeling much love to the Soviets. Iran, don't hate the player, hate the game. But that's all in the past now, and both Russia and Iran find themselves in even worse positions than they did during the Cold War.

Today, by supplying Russia with weapons, Iran is hoping to strengthen a bond between the two nations. The weapon shipments are likely also a different bit of diplomacy, a bit of a thank you from Iran to Russia. When the Syrian civil war started things didn't look good for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and they were looking even worse for Iran. The rebels had the backing of the United States of America and a lot of its allies and partners, while Bashar al-Assad had... well, Iran. Assad's days were numbered, his regime was on the verge of collapse - and this was bad for Iran.

A pro-western government would mean yet another American friend in its neighborhood. Then, Iran experienced a miracle, Russia decided to join the fight when Assad's regime was within weeks of collapse. Russian air power scored crippling victories against US-backed rebels, and for fear of launching a major war, the US couldn't protect its allies on the ground by blowing Russian planes out of the sky. See back then we all were still drinking the Russian kool-aid and thought the nation was a modern, capable military power instead of the dresser full of clown shoes it actually is. Russian intervention kept Assad in power which kept western influence from growing in the region. Iran basically owed Russia one, and throwing its weight behind it during the Ukraine war is one way of saying thank you and repaying that debt. Iranian assistance though may be going past saying "thank you" and going straight to "k, now you owe us."

It's no secret that Russia screwed the pooch invading Ukraine, and now its military is struggling with basic logitstics. Iranian assistance at this point is basically invaluable to Russia, and in return Iran may soon be asking for Russia to repay that favor back. To date, Russia has allowed Israel to operate with impurity inside of Syria, leading to air strikes against Iranian proxies and sometimes even Iranian targets in the country. This is why Israel has refused to publicly voice overt support for Ukraine. Iran will likely pressure Russia into no longer giving Israel unfettered access in Syria, which will take the heat off Iranian proxies and operatives working in the nation. But Iran may be trying to send other messages with its drones and missiles in Ukraine. For one, the Ukraine war has given Iran the perfect opportunity to showcase its honest-to-god very unimpressive drone technology. Its missiles are definitely better, but its drones are like the Hobbit trilogy - a poor adaptation of the source material and an even worse attempt to copy the success of its predecessor.

The cool thing about drones though is that even if you're ordering them off Wish.com, they can still be pretty deadly weapons - especially if you use them against undefended civilian targets. And that's really the entire point of giving Russia a bunch of its drones and missiles. Iran is sending a very loud message to America and its allies - try and start a war with us when we refuse to shut down our nuclear weapons program, and you're going to suffer for it. Iran wants America to know that a war against it won't be easy, and showcasing the incredibly moderate effectiveness of its weapons is one way of doing that. If Ukraine can be defeated though, Iran gets yet another prize. Right now the US is like the Prom King, and its allies and partners are like... the prom committee? Listen, we don't know how proms really work okay, we're all nerds and nobody ever invited us to one.

Our point though is that the US and its allies are all sitting pretty tall on the world stage, and such status affords the west a great amount of what's known as "soft power". That's the ability to influence nations into doing what you want them to do without actually having to coerce or threaten them. Perhaps you impress them with your refined culture, and they naturally want to do what you do. Or, perhaps you have eleven carrier strike groups with more firepower than most of the world's air forces combined. Either way, the point is that the west has status which affords it great influence. If Ukraine can be defeated though, then by proxy its NATO allies will also be defeated. This will be a huge propaganda victory for both Russia and Iran, who can then claim that despite the west's best effort, they were unable to save Ukraine. This could have some serious global ramifications, because if America and its European allies can't save a country right on Europe's doorstep, President Xi Jinping is suddenly going to start looking less like a tyrant and more like an adorable if misunderstood Pooh Bear to all of the people of Taiwan.

An obvious benefit to Iran supporting Russia though is that it gets to show the world what it weapons can do. There's nothing better for a struggling arms industry than a good war, and Iran is taking full advantage of this to show the world that its weapons actually work. Suffering under some pretty harsh sanctions, Iran needs to turn a buck wherever it can, and showing off the effectiveness of sophisticated systems such as drones and ballistic missiles is a good way to generate interest. Especially since Iranian weapons are going to be significantly cheaper than western weapons - and most people buying Iranian weapons are only doing so because they can't get western weapons. Iran itself is also getting the benefit of actually seeing these weapons in action.

While they aren't facing the type of threat that the United States presents, Iranian weapons in Ukraine are still being in effect tested under battlefield conditions. The US has repeatedly spoken about the lessons being learned in the Ukraine conflict, and Iran is no exception. Up until their debut in Ukraine, Iran hadn't had much occasion to use many of these weapon systems in anything approximating a modern battlefield, now it has reams of combat data. That data would no doubt be more useful if Russia wasn't almost exclusively using these drones to target largely undefended civilian areas. Then there's the most basic of reasons for Iran's support for Russia: money. Iran is a cash-strapped nation, it has big balla' dreams of crushing America but is operating off a 7-11 paycheck. Any extra money that Iran can mke is good news - but what if money isn't the only thing Iran is getting?

President Volodymyr Zelensky suspects that Iran is also getting another kind of repayment that is basically invaluable: assistance with its nuclear weapons program from Russian scientist. If true, and this is pure speculation, then Russia could leapfrog Iran's nuclear program ahead by years, dramatically shortening the amount of time to completion of a working nuclear weapons program. This is very important, known as "breakout", this is the amount of time it would take for Iran to go from detection of attempts to build a nuclear weapon to actually constructing one.

The Iranian nuclear deal greatly extended the length of this period, but then Donald Trump decided he didn't want to do what all the other cool kids were doing and ripped the deal up. Now Iran's breakout time is dramatically lowered as detection has become much more difficult. Iran's goal is thus to reduce the breakout time from detection to acquisition of a nuclear weapon to a length of time shorter than it would take for the US military to prepare to launch an invasion of the country. It took the US six months to stage troops and equipment and prepare to invade Iraq, thus with Russian assistance Iran could beat this clock and keep the west from ever interfering with its nuclear program and the authoritarian regime's sovereignty ever again by threatening nukes on invading forces.

By: Tannor Cannon | Dec 13, 2022

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