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