By Robbin Laird
The campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the culmination of a strategic trajectory that, if one had been paying close enough attention, was legible for decades.
I have been paying that attention through fieldwork, through analytical commissions, and through the kind of practitioner-driven research that rarely makes the front page until the bombs fall.
What follows is a look back at the structural forces that made Iran into the threat it became, drawn from my own earlier work, and an attempt to situate the current moment in that longer arc.
Two strands of that earlier work are particularly relevant.
The first is my econometric study of Soviet arms trade, prepared with Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates in 1983, which treated arms transfers as a problem in political economy rather than pure strategy.
The second is my work on the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, formally known as the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, where we examined how advanced states were transferring missile and WMD-related technologies to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in ways that compressed their developmental timelines far more rapidly than Western intelligence assessments had credited.
Together, these two vantage points define a consistent pattern, one that runs directly through to what China and Russia built inside Iran over the past decade, and that the current operation has now, in considerable measure, dismantled.
I. Arms Transfers as Political Economy: The Soviet Baseline
When I conducted the Wharton study in the early 1980s, the prevailing tendency in Western analysis was to treat Soviet arms sales as ideological instruments, expressions of Kremlin grand strategy dressed up in military hardware. My approach was different. I looked at the pricing structures, credit terms, debt management arrangements, and industrial logic that shaped Soviet export decisions, and what emerged was a portrait of the Soviet Union as something it was not supposed to be: a trading state in arms, embedded in the ordinary incentive structures of a defense-industrial complex that needed production runs, hard currency, and market relationships to survive.
Middle Eastern clients, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, were not passive recipients of Soviet largesse. They were customers whose oil-derived resources made them central to the Soviet military-industrial complex’s financial viability. The duality at the heart of Soviet arms policy was not ideological contradiction; it was a designed feature of the system. Moscow’s arms exports served geopolitical purposes and economic ones simultaneously, and the two were inseparable.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia inherited an underfunded but still sprawling defense-industrial base, this pattern intensified rather than receding. Russian arms exports to Middle Eastern and Asian clients became the principal mechanism for preserving high-end design bureaus and production capacity, and the financial logic of the Soviet period translated almost seamlessly into the post-Cold War Russian defense export apparatus. Contemporary analyses of Russian military diplomacy in the MENA region reach back explicitly to the debt-leverage and industrial-support mechanisms I identified in 1983. The continuity is striking, and it is not accidental.
The lesson I drew from that early work that one must understand the economic and industrial logic of arms transfers if one is to make sense of Russian behavior applies with equal force to China’s role in building Iranian military capability. Beijing’s sustained provisioning of rocket-fuel chemicals, drone components, navigation infrastructure, and dual-use electronics to Tehran was not primarily a diplomatic signal or an ideological gesture. It was the product of a systematic calculation about strategic interest and industrial advantage. Understanding it requires the same political-economy lens, not merely a strategic one.
II. The Rumsfeld Commission and the Compression Problem
The 1998 Commission was established by Congress to assess the ballistic missile threat to the United States, and we were given broad access to intelligence assessments that had, in our judgment, substantially underestimated the speed at which proliferant states were developing threatening capabilities. The Commission’s central conclusion that the threat was broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly than previous estimates had suggested was received with considerable skepticism in some quarters at the time.
The subsequent two decades validated it completely.
The mechanism we identified was what I would call the compression problem. Proliferant states, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, were not retracing the long, linear developmental path that had characterized early U.S. and Soviet ballistic missile programs. They were leapfrogging stages by importing complete systems, acquiring foreign designs and key components, and most critically drawing on the expertise of individual scientists and engineers from advanced states. Foreign assistance was compressing timelines in ways that existing intelligence frameworks were structurally ill-equipped to anticipate.
In Iraq’s case, the infrastructure we documented was built on Soviet and later Russian hardware and technical support, European industrial and engineering contributions, Chinese and North Korean systems, and the expertise of individuals willing to work outside the constraints of their own governments’ nonproliferation commitments. Baghdad’s missile and WMD programs were not indigenous achievements; they were assembled products of a global supply chain operating in the grey zones of commercial cover, front companies, and plausible deniability.
The Commission was also explicit about the limits of interdiction. Technology transfers, we wrote, cannot be stopped for long periods; they can only be slowed and made more costly. The post-Cold War availability of former Soviet nuclear, missile, and chemical weapons specialists, underpaid, underemployed, and in some cases actively seeking outside clients, represented a qualitatively new proliferation dynamic in which knowledge, not just hardware, had become a tradable commodity. U.S. initiatives like the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program were direct policy responses to that finding. They were not adequate to the full scope of the problem, but they acknowledged its nature honestly.
What we did not fully anticipate in 1998 was the degree to which Iran, having absorbed these lessons across two decades, would become not merely a passive beneficiary of foreign assistance but an active hub in a structured trilateral alignment with China and Russia, one capable of generating two-way technology flows and of projecting enhanced capabilities outward through a sophisticated proxy network.
That transition was the strategic surprise of the 2015–2025 decade, and it is the context within which the current campaign can be understood.
III. China and Russia Build a Precision-Strike State
By the time Operation Epic Fury was launched, Iran had undergone a transformation that neither the JCPOA framework nor the sanctions architecture that surrounded it was designed to address. The Islamic Republic of 2025 was not the sanctions-constrained actor of 2015, straining at the limits of its defense-industrial base. It was a networked, precision-capable state whose military reach extended from the Levant to the Gulf of Oman and whose capabilities had been built, systematically and deliberately, by Beijing and Moscow.
China’s contribution operated at the foundational level. Beijing had become Tehran’s principal sanctions-evasion and technology lifeline, moving rocket-fuel chemicals, dual-use electronics, and drone- and missile-relevant components into Iran through an elaborate architecture of front companies and financial intermediaries. The most consequential single dimension of this support was the transfer of sodium perchlorate and associated solid-rocket propellants, the chemical foundation of Iran’s ability to threaten Israel,
Gulf Arab states, and U.S. force projection infrastructure across a geographic arc of extraordinary breadth. Beijing had also granted Iran access to the BeiDou satellite navigation system, providing a resilient, non-U.S.-dependent positioning and timing backbone for Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. In a targeting environment where GPS jamming and spoofing had become standard tools in the Western and Israeli counter-drone playbook, BeiDou integration was a strategically significant capability upgrade.
Russia’s contribution was operational rather than industrial. The pivot point was Iran’s provision of Shahed-136 loitering munitions to Russia following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That transaction created a two-way technology loop of the first strategic importance. Russia received a cost-effective attrition tool for strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure; Iran received a combat laboratory operating at industrial scale.
Russia proceeded to localize Shahed production, upgrading range, electronic warfare resistance, and warhead effectiveness through thousands of operational sorties, and began sharing those improvements and associated swarm employment tactics back to Tehran. The result was that Iranian drone designs were being refined through the most intensive real-world testing environment available anywhere on the planet and the operational lessons were flowing directly into Iranian military planning.
At the high end of the capability spectrum, Russian transfers reportedly included components from the S-400 surface-to-air missile family and the Rezonans-NE over-the-horizon radar system, helping Iran build a layered air-defense and early-warning architecture explicitly oriented against Western airpower. Russian satellite imagery and tactical guidance were reportedly feeding Iranian targeting for drones and missiles, including the development of massed swarm tactics designed to saturate U.S. and Israeli integrated air and missile defense systems.
The strategic logic animating both partners was not the patron-client model that Western analysts defaulted to throughout the Cold War and its aftermath.
For China, a militarily viable Iran was inseparable from the security of Belt and Road energy routes and the International North-South Transport Corridor, the multimodal logistics spine Beijing views as a critical alternative to Western-dominated maritime chokepoints. For Russia, a capable Iran that could threaten Gulf energy infrastructure, pin down U.S. carrier strike groups in the region, and channel pressure through the Houthi movement and Hezbollah constrained American capacity to concentrate forces against Russian interests in Europe.
Iran was not a client. It was a forward bastion serving convergent geopolitical interests.
IV. What the Pattern Means: Continuity Across Four Decades
When I connect the Wharton study of 1983 to the Rumsfeld Commission of 1998 to the trilateral alignment that Operation Epic Fury has now engaged, what emerges is not a series of discrete episodes but a single, continuous structural pattern. Advanced states, the Soviet Union, Russia, China, have consistently used arms transfers and technology provision to Middle Eastern clients as instruments of both financial-industrial interest and geopolitical competition. The specific actors, mechanisms, and capability levels have evolved; the underlying logic has not.
What has changed, and changed decisively, is the integration of the system.
In the Soviet period, arms transfers to Middle Eastern clients were largely bilateral and transactional, shaped by competition with the United States and the industrial needs of the Soviet defense sector. In the post-Cold War period, as the Rumsfeld Commission documented, the pathways multiplied, commercial front companies, individual experts, covert government channels, and the compression of developmental timelines accelerated. In the current period, the China-Russia-Iran alignment represents something qualitatively different: an integrated system of systems in which Chinese navigation and rocket fuel, Russian sensors and combat lessons, and Iranian manufacturing and proxy networks are mutually reinforcing rather than additive.
Iranian missiles flying on BeiDou navigation, fueled by Chinese-supplied perchlorate, employing swarm tactics refined in Ukraine, and guided by Russian satellite imagery represent a capability that is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. The proxy dimension multiplies this further. Iran’s ability to diffuse Chinese- and Russian-enhanced capabilities downward into Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq, and allied Palestinian armed factions extended the reach of the trilateral alignment without attributing it directly to Tehran, Beijing, or Moscow. Political deniability was not an incidental feature of this system; it was an engineered characteristic.
For those who had been tracking these dynamics, none of this was analytically surprising.
The compression problem the Rumsfeld Commission identified in 1998 had been operating at scale and with great-power backing for twenty-five years. The economic and industrial logic of arms transfers I documented in 1983 had evolved into something far more sophisticated, a structured alignment in which technology provision served multiple strategic purposes simultaneously, but its essential character was recognizable.
The question was never whether Iran would acquire precision-strike capability. It was whether the West would acknowledge the structural forces enabling that acquisition and respond at a level commensurate with them.
V. Looking Forward from the Current Moment
Operation Epic Fury has degraded a significant portion of the military infrastructure that the China-Russia-Iran alignment built over the preceding decade. But degradation is not disaggregation. The structural forces that enabled Iran’s military modernization, the Chinese industrial and navigational backbone, the Russian operational architecture, the proxy distribution network, remain intact. The network endures beyond any single node.
This is precisely the lesson the Rumsfeld Commission tried to convey about technology transfer: it cannot be stopped for long periods; it can only be slowed and made more costly. A campaign that destroys Iranian missile inventory does not destroy the BeiDou navigation integration, the chemical propellant supply chains, the swarm employment doctrine absorbed from Russian operational experience in Ukraine, or Beijing’s strategic interest in maintaining Iranian military viability as a check on American coercive capacity in the region.
The analytical and policy task that follows is therefore the same one I have been advocating, in different forms, for four decades: to engage the problem at the level of its structural causes, not merely its operational manifestations. In 1983, that meant understanding the Soviet defense-industrial sector’s role in driving arms export behavior. In 1998, it meant acknowledging the compression effects of foreign assistance and the inadequacy of bilateral deterrence frameworks.
Today, it means treating the China-Russia-Iran alignment not as a crisis to be managed but as a strategic architecture to be understood, countered, and ultimately disaggregated.
Policymakers who continue to treat Iran as an isolated bilateral problem solvable through sanctions pressure and military deterrence alone will find themselves perpetually reactive to a challenge structurally designed to frustrate those tools. The trilateral alignment was built to outlast individual administrations’ policy priorities and to provide China and Russia with the strategic benefits of Iranian military capacity while maintaining their own deniability. That design has been partially disrupted by the current operation.
The question now is whether Western policy will evolve to match the complexity of what the past forty years have actually been building.
Conclusion
Looking back across four decades of work on arms transfers and technology proliferation, the Iran of 2025 is the predictable, if not inevitable, product of structural forces that were identifiable long before Operation Epic Fury became necessary. The Soviet model of arms-as-political-economy became the Russian model. The compression dynamics the Rumsfeld Commission documented became the trilateral architecture that Beijing and Moscow built in and through Iran. The proxies Iran developed became the distribution mechanism that multiplied the reach of great-power technology inputs across the regional security environment.
None of this was hidden.
The evidence was in the pricing structures and credit terms of Soviet arms deals, in the testimony before the Rumsfeld Commission, in the procurement patterns of front companies moving sodium perchlorate and BeiDou-compatible guidance modules through third-country intermediaries.
What was missing was not intelligence. It was the analytical will to engage the problem at the level of its actual complexity.
Bibliography
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For our look at the rise of the multi-polar authoritarian world:
The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024