The US-Israeli war against Iran has now escalated into a regional conflict, and consequences are already extending far beyond the Middle East. After asking our Mideast experts to assess the impacts of the war for nearby countries, we’ve turned to our global network to send us dispatches on how leaders in Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America are reacting to the spreading conflict. Here’s what they reported back to us.
Click to jump to an expert analysis:
China: A restrained response borne of a bind
Russia: Not riding to the rescue—again
United Kingdom: Trying to stay out of it
European Union: Caught between defending the rules-based order and aligning with Washington
Ukraine: A sense of schadenfreude—but also new risks
Canada: Calibrated, cautious, and aligned with allies
Argentina: A supportive response colored by a history of terror
China: A restrained response borne of a bind
While the war with Iran is not all about China, any analysis that neglects Beijing’s role in the war, or dismisses the great-power competition underlying it, is either incomplete or a deliberate red herring.
China’s own decisions have tied it to Middle Eastern geopolitics. In 2018, it proposed a new regional security architecture. In 2023, it brokered the Iran–Saudi rapprochement and hosted Hamas for mediation talks with its rival Palestinian faction Fatah. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative is presented explicitly as an alternative to the US-led order. Iran has received an economic lifeline from Beijing, secured a berth in the bloc of emerging economies knows as BRICS, and had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operate within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Today China is the largest trading partner, the largest importer, and one of the largest foreign investors across much of the Middle East and North Africa. There are over 400,000 Chinese nationals in the United Arab Emirates alone. Now that population is subjected to attacks from Iranian drones and missiles that are most likely made with China-sourced precursor chemicals and components.
Yet China’s public response to the war has been characteristically limp: evacuation advisories for citizens near conflict zones and formulaic condemnations of Israel and the United States.
Beneath that restraint lies an impossible bind. Iran is at its weakest, detested by its population at home and an exporter of radicalism abroad, yet it is also Beijing’s most reliable anti-Western bulwark and a source of deeply discounted oil. Meanwhile, China lacks the means to counterbalance US and Israeli military dominance. Oil prices rose by more than 5 percent on Monday and could spike toward one hundred dollars a barrel with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf states, which absorb much of China’s Belt and Road Initiative investment and supply roughly a third of China’s crude, are now coming under attack from Iranian missiles and drones.
The irony is acute. It was US military supremacy in the Iraq war and the shockwaves of the Arab Spring that first pushed Beijing toward a more proactive Middle East policy. Now it has gotten a possible regime change and another war in the region, and it is none the wiser.
The pivot point lies with the Gulf monarchies. If they enter the fight, China would face a situation it cannot finesse. But it would also present an opportunity that neither the United States nor Israel could generate alone: to make China a credible offer to stop propping up Tehran and allow for the development of a more stable and prosperous region in which to do business. Whether China is too blinkered by great-power ideology to recognize that opportunity remains the defining question.
—Tuvia Gering is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and a researcher at the Diane & Guilford Glazer Foundation Israel-China Policy Center at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
Russia: Not riding to the rescue—again
WASHINGTON, DC—One of the knock-on effects of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran is that they have exposed—yet again—that Russia is an unreliable ally.
Iran’s rulers are now absorbing the same bitter lesson learned by the autocrats of Syria and Venezuela before them. For all its talk of establishing a multipolar world, for all of its bluster about leading an anti-Western bloc of states, Moscow lacks the will and the capacity to come to the aid of its alleged partners.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the third Kremlin-backed autocrat to fall in the past fifteen months. When Syrian rebels ousted Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad from power in 2024, the Kremlin could only grant the deposed dictator asylum in Russia. Likewise, Moscow was helpless to aid Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro when the United States apprehended him in January.
And as Politico reports, when US and Israeli bombs were pounding Iran on Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “offered his Iranian counterpart sympathy and promised his—verbal—support.” And after Khamenei was killed, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered Tehran little more than condolences.
Beyond Latin America and the Middle East, the trend of the Kremlin abandoning allies and partners is also evident in the former Soviet space. When Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a military campaign to take Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 and 2023, Moscow failed to support its erstwhile ally Armenia.
The cold, hard reality is that the Putin regime is so consumed by its war of aggression against Ukraine that it lacks the bandwidth to defend its geopolitical interests elsewhere.
But while the Kremlin has yet again suffered reputational damage, Moscow still hopes to salvage some benefits from the war in Iran. The resulting higher oil prices will benefit Russia’s depleted war chest. Unrest in the Middle East will distract attention and media oxygen from Ukraine. And should the US-Israeli war against Iran turn into a quagmire, Moscow certainly hopes to be a beneficiary of the chaos. As Chatham House’s Grégoire Roos notes: “Until the situation in Iran is clarified, the keywords for Moscow will be ‘strategic hedging.’”
—Brian Whitmore is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and host of The Power Vertical Podcast.
United Kingdom: Trying to stay out of it
LONDON—The overwhelming view here is that military action taken by the United States and Israel on Saturday was not the right thing to do while negotiations were edging forward toward a deal. Comparisons are being made to US President George W. Bush’s catastrophic Iraq invasion and the lasting consequences for the region and interests of the United States and its closest ally, the United Kingdom.
In the United Kingdom, the stock of the Trump and Netanyahu administrations’ foreign policy in the Middle East is not high. The apparently premature abandonment of diplomacy for the military option will not have surprised many and has likely reinforced the view that both leaders are acting more for domestic political reasons and their own narrow interests. Military action does not—at least to British eyes—seem to have followed sufficient careful analysis of the US national interest and the broader interests of US allies.
The British political establishment, media, and public are highly critical and unsympathetic to the Islamic Republic of Iran. There was widespread outrage following the massacre of protesters in January. Nevertheless, what is likely to dominate public discourse in the coming days is the United States’ lack of clear, realizable objectives, a legal basis under international law, or new evidence to justify the rush to war and immediate regional destabilization. Those themes will overwhelm any attempt to justify action as a response to what happened in January and the despotic and brutal Islamic regime.
Some commentators, including former Conservative members of parliament and Reform leader Nigel Farage, have argued that the United Kingdom should prioritize supporting its closest ally, the United States, over debate on the legality of military action or how things reached this point. So far, that argument does not seem to have resonated widely.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Labour government are between a rock and a hard place given their championing of the primacy of international law. The lack of clarity from them on what the United Kingdom should do next adds to the general sense that this is not the United Kingdom’s conflict, and that the country would be wise to stay out of it. Of course, events on the ground (for example, Iran striking UK military assets defending allies in the region) may rapidly overtake this position. How Starmer and his government align over the coming days is likely to be highly significant for UK domestic politics.
—Nicholas Hopton is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a former British ambassador to Iran.
European Union: Caught between defending the rules-based order and aligning with Washington
BRUSSELS—Europe finds itself in a structurally uncomfortable position, partly because of events and partly because of its own past choices. For years, European Union (EU) policy toward Iran was centered on Tehran’s nuclear program and anchored in diplomacy backed by incremental pressure. The priority was containment through negotiation and de-escalation. That approach has long run its course. A coherent new strategy has yet to emerge.
The current crisis exposes both this strategic vacuum and the EU’s internal divisions. Competing logics are at play throughout the bloc.
Some leaders are prioritizing international law, condemning the US-Israeli strikes as a war of choice. Failing to mention international law risks eroding Europe’s credibility as a defender of the rules-based order, particularly in the Global South where accusations of double standards resonate.
Another logic prioritizes transatlantic cohesion. Openly confronting Washington could carry risks at a moment of geopolitical volatility. Europe was just able to avoid US President Donald Trump’s grab for Greenland. Restraint on the Iran issue therefore seems prudent for some.
A third logic concerns Iran itself. Many quietly hope that the strikes weaken a repressive regime, reduce nuclear-proliferation risks, and curb proxy warfare. At the same time, there is concern that escalation or spillover could produce something worse.
Europe is trying hard to reconcile these three concerns, but finding common ground is difficult. Some, such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, have attempted to bridge the divide by shifting the debate toward the “day after,” urging coordination with Washington and European partners on what follows. This forward-looking framing may paper over intra-European tensions. But it also risks bypassing the unresolved question of principle at the heart of the debate.
—Roderick Kefferpütz is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. The views expressed in this article are his own.
Ukraine: A sense of schadenfreude—but also new risks
KYIV—Iran’s Shahed drones have menaced Ukrainians for more than four years, striking our homes and murdering civilians far from the battlefield. So there was a certain amount of schadenfreude across Ukraine as the United States and Israel hobbled the Iranian regime with airstrikes of their own over the weekend. The display of decisive US force against a key Russian ally may have also applied some psychological pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was once again reminded how devastating US military power can be and may be reflecting on potential scenarios for how that could play out if his own regime came under direct attack. Iran’s response—drone and missile attacks across the Middle East—may also provide an opportunity to showcase Ukrainian anti-drone technology, which may be even more effective than some air defenses currently in the region.
The Iran strikes do pose some risks to Ukraine, too. Russian propagandists will likely have no problem warping the attacks on Iran into a justification for Moscow’s so-called “special military operation” against Ukraine. And retaliatory strikes by Iran place a premium on air-defense interceptors, which are already in short supply and which Ukraine desperately needs for its own defense. Finally, any increase in global oil prices means more revenue for the Kremlin to use to continue its war on Ukraine.
—Major General (ret.) Volodymyr Havrylov is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former Ukrainian deputy minister of defense.
Canada: Calibrated, cautious, and aligned with allies
CALGARY—Ottawa’s response to the US–Israeli strikes on Iran and escalating regional tensions has been cautious, calibrated, and aligned with allies.
Speaking to media from a trade mission to India over the weekend, Prime Minister Mark Carney stated that “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” while emphasizing that Canada is not militarily engaged. He coupled that support with a call for civilian protection and renewed diplomacy, signaling continuity in Canada’s position that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are destabilizing.
The Canadian Armed Forces are not participating in combat operations but maintain a regional footprint through liaison and intelligence roles under Operation FOUNDATION in Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has heightened vigilance amid concerns about potential Iranian cyber or proxy activity, though no specific domestic threat has been identified.
Domestically, the conflict resonates deeply. Canada is home to approximately 280,000 Iranian-Canadians, ranking fifth globally among Iranian diaspora populations after the United States, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany. The community’s response reflects both fear for relatives abroad and apprehension about regional spillover. For Ottawa, the challenge is strategic balance: uphold alliance commitments, safeguard domestic cohesion, and preserve diplomatic space in a volatile Middle East.
—Marcy Grossman is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs, and a former Canadian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.
Argentina: A supportive response colored by a history of terror
WASHINGTON, DC—It’s no surprise that Argentinian President Javier Milei has been the most vocal supporter in Latin America of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Since the attacks began, his foreign ministry has voiced strong support for the actions, calling Iran a “threat” to “long-term international stability and security.” After the killing of Khamenei, Milei put out a presidential statement commending the operation, calling the ruthless Iranian leader “one of the most evil, violent, and cruel individuals that human history has ever seen.”
Much of the rest of the region called for restraint or respect for international law (Brazil and Mexico, for example) or outright condemned the US and Israeli airstrikes (Colombia). Paraguay (whose foreign minister spoke with his Israeli counterpart on Sunday) stands out for joining Argentina in explicitly being supportive of this past weekend’s actions. There has been wider agreement, however, on condemning Iran’s retaliatory attacks on Gulf countries, from Argentina and Brazil to Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama.
Argentina’s firm stance in support of the US and Israeli actions is due not only to Milei’s strong support of Israel but also to the fact that Argentina has experienced the scourge of the Iranian regime firsthand. In the early 1990s, Argentina fell victim to two Iran-linked terror attacks that shook the country. In 1992, Hezbollah detonated a truck packed with explosives at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine people and wounding more than two hundred others. Two years later, a car bomb detonated at the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association Jewish Community Center building in Buenos Aires. That day marked the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history, with eighty-five people killed and over three hundred wounded.
Thirty years later, Argentina’s highest criminal court found Iran responsible for this latter bombing. For Argentina, these heinous attacks will never be forgotten and are a constant reminder of the need to prevent Iran from continuing to pose threats to the world. Many of the people accused by the Argentine justice system of serving as the architects of the attacks have since risen through the ranks of Iran’s security and military services with impunity.
Since taking office, Milei has also made a point of aligning his foreign policy with Israel and the United States, marking them as Argentina’s twin examples to follow. Given Argentina’s increasing economic alignment with the United States, and the sentiments of many in Argentina when it comes to Iran, expect Milei to continue to lead the region in supporting actions to dismantle the Iranian regime.
—Jason Marczak is vice president and senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.