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.
Türkiye and India collaborated with him on trade and security. China came to him for cheap oil. North Korea, Venezuela and Russia considered him an ally in their fight against the West and conspired with him to develop military technology and subvert sanctions.
Now that Iran is under attack from 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. Türkiye said Wednesday that NATO shot down a ballistic missile fired from Iran that was headed into Turkish airspace. On Thursday, Iran denied attacking Turkey.
Without true allies, Iran is a lonely war.
That’s a product, experts say, of Iran’s foreign policy, which has avoided engagement with other countries while investing in militias that share its religiously fueled hatred of the United States and Israel.
Those militias cannot help Iran now. The most formidable of them, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, have been felled by wars with Israel. The Houthi militia in Yemen and Iranian-backed Iraqi armed groups may attack ships in the Red Sea or US forces in Iraq. But such attacks are unlikely to change the course of a war inside Iran.
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Iran’s relations with other states have also not resulted in concrete support, not even from those united by their animosity towards what they consider Western imperialism.
“It is a rude wake-up call to those who believed there was an emerging anti-Western axis,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and director of EDAM, an Istanbul-based think tank.
Referring to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, he said: “Now you see that for one of those four countries it means nothing to be 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 themselves when Iran is attacked, experts said.
Now, those relationships may not protect you.
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Turkey’s Defense Ministry did not specify the target of Iran’s ballistic missile that NATO defenses shot down on Wednesday. But a senior U.S. military official and a Western official said it targeted the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, which hosts a contingent of the U.S. Air Force and other NATO forces. The remains of the ammunition that brought down the missile fell about 30 miles from the base. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.
The Iranian military denied in a statement Thursday that it had fired a missile at Türkiye, saying it respected Türkiye’s sovereignty.
Türkiye shares a 300-mile border with Iran, has long-standing diplomatic and trade ties and also tried to defend itself from the war.
Ulgen characterized Türkiye’s approach toward Iran as rooted in history and driven by proximity and “reluctant respect.”
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“We are not friends of Iran, we do not agree on many things, but we have to coexist in this geographical space,” he said.
Despite his warm ties with President Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the US-Israeli attacks on Iran a “clear violation of international law.” On Monday, he said on social media that he was “saddened” by the assassination 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 spread to Turkey, as it did 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 a regime change could create could be an order of magnitude greater than what we saw in Syria and Iraq,” he said.
India also engaged with Iran as a major player in its region and to seek economic advantages, according to Kabir Taneja, executive director of the Observer Research Foundation Middle East based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
“There was definitely no overlap as far as worldview goes,” he said. “It was always a very transactional relationship, but functional and useful as far as New Delhi was concerned.”
India exports rice, agricultural products and pharmaceuticals to Iran and invested heavily in the port of Chabahar, on Iran’s southern coast, to have an export route to Central Asia that would bypass Pakistan, its main rival.
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Ties to Iran did not prevent India from becoming Israel’s largest arms customer: Indian purchases accounted for 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 agreements with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu.
India’s balancing act between Israel, Iran and other countries meant it would stay away from war in Iran, Taneja said.
“India’s foreign policy is clear in that sense: it does not interfere in other people’s affairs,” he said.
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Other countries that have relations with Iran and also host the US military have become targets as Iran counterattacks.
Iran has fired drones and missiles at Qatar, with which it shares an offshore gas field; the United Arab Emirates, a major trading partner; and Oman, a key mediator in talks with the United States seeking to avoid war.
Iran has received little support from partner countries that share its hostility toward the West.
North Korea condemned the war but has done little else, and Venezuela’s stance has changed since the United States overthrew President Nicolás Maduro in January.
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China remains Iran’s largest trading partner, mainly because it buys more than three-quarters of Iranian oil, which it gets at a significant discount due to US sanctions.
China called for restraint, criticized Khamenei’s assassination as “unacceptable” and appointed an envoy to mediate. He is unlikely to directly challenge the United States, analysts said, so as not to upset a fragile détente ahead of Trump’s expected visit to China in April.
Russia has been Iran’s closest state ally in its fight against the West for more than a decade.
“There is growing alignment and grievance about the global order and the US alliance system,” said Hanna Notte, director of the Eurasia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Military cooperation between Russia and Iran grew during the conflict in Syria, where both countries supported President Bashar Assad before he was overthrown 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 defend each other in the event 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 maintain its policy of avoiding direct military conflict with Israel and the United States in the Middle East, Notte said.
That will likely limit Russia’s contribution to defending Iran at the United Nations and other international forums.
“The Russians have defended the Iranians quite aggressively,” Notte said of Russian diplomacy. “But that doesn’t help Iran much in this situation.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
