What is unfolding in Iran is not simply a war over the regional balance of power or nuclear containment. It is an attempt to rupture the geographic core of an emerging multipolar order designed to bypass Western dominance—by targeting the single state that links China’s and Russia’s ambitions across the entire Eurasian continent. The strikes on Iranian military installations, critical infrastructure, and political leadership—especially the initial assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—have effectively severed a central artery through which Beijing and Moscow project influence westward toward Europe and southward toward the Indian Ocean.
The war represents, in its geopolitical logic, a systematic “Eurasian siege”: an effort to dismantle the geographic foundation of a multipolar order that rising powers have spent two decades constructing. In this context, Iran functions as the cornerstone of an architecture linking China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s International North-South Transport Corridor. Removing Iran does not merely weaken the structure—it strains the coherence of the entire Eurasian project.
Iran as a Eurasian Node
Iran occupies a unique geographic position that makes it closer to a “continental hinge” than a conventional regional state. It is the only country that borders both the Caspian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, enabling it to link overland transport corridors running from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. Both Beijing and Moscow have built major connectivity projects around this geography, making Iran a foundational pillar in their grand designs for Eurasian integration.
Under the comprehensive strategic partnership signed in 2021—valued at $400 billion over 25 years—Beijing planned to transform Iranian ports into principal hubs linking railway lines running from the Chinese city of Xi’an through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan into the heart of the Middle East.
For Russia, Iran constitutes a southern gateway connecting Moscow to Indian markets via the Caspian Sea, Iranian railways, and the port of Bandar Abbas. With the launch of the first regular container trains directly linking the Moscow region to Bandar Abbas, traffic along this corridor reached a historic peak in January 2026—offering Moscow a vital alternative under the Western sanctions that had isolated Russia’s northern routes.
As such, targeting Iran militarily means severing the bridge that connects the Chinese and Russian axes at the heart of Eurasia, no matter the motives given by the United States and Israel. It is this bridge that gives what some analysts call the “CRINK”—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—whatever geographic coherence it possesses.
The Strait and the Paradox
The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s narrowest strategic waterways, is the most consequential chokepoint in the global economy. Roughly 20 million barrels pass through it daily, including approximately 70 percent of oil imports to China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Following the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ declaration that the strait was closed, tanker traffic dropped sharply, with commercial movement largely halting.
This exposes a core contradiction in the logic of Iran’s closure. Given China is the largest importer of oil transiting Hormuz, it finds itself facing a severe energy crisis threatening its industrial economy. Brent crude prices rose by more than 10 percent in the opening days of the conflict and crossed the $100 per barrel mark by mid-March. In effect, Iran’s defensive strategy is inflicting severe economic damage on the very states that claim to stand by its side, thereby revealing the structural tension within the alliances of the multipolar order.
The Limits of the Eurasian Axis
The first days of the war on Iran exposed a fundamental weakness in the so-called CRINK axis: the absence of any effective mechanism for collective defense.
Beijing and Moscow confined themselves to verbal condemnation without providing any tangible military or material support. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning declared that the assassination of the Supreme Leader constituted a “grave violation of Iran’s sovereignty and security.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for an immediate stop to the military operations. Russia’s Foreign Ministry described the strikes as a “preplanned and unprovoked act of armed aggression,” while President Vladimir Putin limited himself to a condolence message on Khamenei’s death, a conspicuously restrained response that analysts widely interpreted as the Kremlin’s determination not to jeopardize ongoing negotiations with Washington over Ukraine.
This disconnect between rhetoric and action reveals a structural dilemma within the multipolar Eurasian project: it is built on “comprehensive strategic partnerships” that remain confined to economic and political cooperation, but never rise to the level of binding military alliances. As a result, the security guarantees it offers remain uncertain—even when confronting an existential threat. For states considering alignment with this bloc, the message is clear: the alternative Eurasian camp lacks a credible security umbrella in the face of Western military power.
A War Beyond Iran
Recent global developments suggest a broader pattern at work. From the removal of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela in January 2026 to the military campaign initiated against the Iranian state weeks later, key nodes in China’s emerging non-dollar economic network are being systematically disrupted. These include Venezuelan oil exports being settled in yuan and the Iranian corridors underpinning the Belt and Road Initiative and financing emerging non-dollar trade arrangements.
Control over the Strait of Hormuz—whether through neutralizing Iran militarily or by maintaining long-term U.S. naval dominance—places Washington’s hand on the artery controlling up to forty percent of China’s Gulf oil imports. This, in turn, enhances U.S. leverage over Chinese energy security and complicates Beijing’s efforts to build a financial system outside the dollar. The ultimate outcome of this trajectory, if completed, is the coercive reintegration of China into the dollar-dominated international financial system from which it has spent two decades attempting to escape.
What is unfolding, then, is a fateful test of whether the multipolar international order can withstand direct American military force. The decisive question is whether Washington truly possesses the capacity to disrupt these interconnected corridors simultaneously without triggering counterreactions that accelerate the very fragmentation it seeks to prevent—or whether the attempt to strangle multipolarity by sheer force will drive Beijing and Moscow to pursue more radical, less containable alternatives?
