This essay answers the question: Why does the Iranian question remain unresolved in an era often described as bipolar, and what does this persistence reveal about the limits of the “orbit” model of global order?
This essay interrogates the growing tendency to describe the contemporary international system as a bipolar order divided into American and Chinese “orbits,” and examines the limits of this metaphor when applied to the Iranian question. While the orbit framework captures real hierarchies of power and dependency, it obscures the functional role played by unresolved conflicts in sustaining systemic stability. Focusing on Iran, the essay argues that prolonged ambiguity—rather than definitive settlement—serves the strategic interests of a wide range of actors, including the United States, China, Russia, Israel, and Turkey.
Building on a Thucydidean understanding of Fear, Interest, and Honour, the analysis shows how repeated negotiations, partial agreements, and managed escalation operate as mechanisms of risk distribution rather than steps toward resolution. Iran emerges not merely as a test of Russian status or a bargaining chip between great powers, but as a structural hinge within a broader Rimland continuum linking the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indo-Pacific. The persistence of the Iranian standoff thus reflects a shared preference for suspended rivalry over closure. The essay concludes that the architecture of contemporary competition remains more fluid and incomplete than a rigid bipolar model suggests, with ambiguity functioning as a stabilising feature rather than a defect.
The metaphor of a planet divided into American and Chinese orbits is gaining traction, and it is a powerful one. It captures, in a single image, the anxiety of hierarchy and dependency in the present international system. Yet when this metaphor is applied to the Iranian question, and to the wider architecture of Eurasian rivalry, it risks obscuring precisely those dynamics that give the system its resilience: ambiguity, incompleteness, and the deliberate refusal of closure. In Thucydidean terms, this is not an aberration but a familiar condition of international life, where political actors often prefer an unstable equilibrium to a decisive outcome whose consequences cannot be controlled.
This essay continues the line of argument developed in “Iranian Talks: The Utility of Unresolved Conflict”, but now turns to a broader question: to what extent does the current configuration resemble a rigid dual order of orbits, and to what extent does it remain a managed contest in which unresolved problems — above all Iran — function as systemic stabilisers rather than anomalies awaiting resolution?
The “orbit” image suggests a world cleanly divided between two gravitational centres: in this case, the United States and China. Other actors — Russia, Iran, Turkey, the European Union, India — appear as secondary bodies, circling one or the other, their agency reduced to choosing a side and then adjusting to externally defined trajectories.
Such a picture contains an important truth. The strategic competition between Washington and Beijing increasingly shapes technological regimes, trade corridors, financial infrastructures, and security alignments across the globe. Smaller and medium powers do not enjoy unconstrained autonomy; their choices are bounded by this rivalry.
Yet when this metaphor is applied to the Iranian dossier, it becomes less illuminating. Iran is not merely a passive object of American and Chinese bargaining. Nor is Russia simply a provincial executor of Chinese design. The unresolved nature of the Iranian question, and the way it is embedded in a wider Rimland contest from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific, reveals a system that remains far more complex than a strict two-orbit universe. Managed ambiguity, not clean division, is still the operative logic.
In the orbit framing, Iran appears as a litmus test of hierarchy: if the United States launches a major operation and Russia cannot protect Tehran, this confirms Moscow’s relegation to a second tier under China. The key question becomes: who can guarantee whom, who sits at the table where decisions are made, and who merely receives the phone call afterward.
My earlier essay approached Iran differently. It drew a clear distinction between the nuclear file and the survival of the regime itself, arguing that a non-nuclear Islamic Republic would remain adversarial, revisionist, and structurally disruptive. From this perspective, the persistence of the Iranian issue is not primarily a test of Russian status, but a functional condition serving multiple actors — including the United States and China.
Seen through that lens, the repetitive cycle of indirect talks, partial understandings, sanctions relief, and renewed pressure is not simply evidence of peripheral impotence. It is evidence of a shared preference for suspended rivalry over decisive resolution. Thucydides describes a similar logic in the period following the Peace of Nicias, where formal agreements masked unresolved antagonisms, and peace functioned less as reconciliation than as a temporary arrest of escalation under conditions of mutual exhaustion and caution. In this sense, Iran is not so much the exam Russia is failing as the hinge through which a number of actors — Russia included — manage risk, distribute pressure, and keep other theatres from hardening into final alignments.
The orbit narrative rightly emphasises Russia’s diminished position. In terms of economic scale, demographic trends, and technological depth, Moscow no longer constitutes a structural peer to either Washington or Beijing. Its dependence on energy exports and its deepening asymmetry with China are real and consequential.
However, to present Russia as merely an “orbit” under China, especially in the Iranian theatre, is to flatten a more intricate reality. First, Russia remains a central actor in the Turkey–Russia–Iran triangle — a loose configuration I have previously described as a Thucydidean triangle in which rivalry, tactical cooperation, and mutual suspicion coexist (Papastavrou, 2025). In Syria, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and Central Asia, Moscow retains the ability to spoil, delay, or redirect regional trajectories. This ability does not restore its former status as a global pole, but it does make it more than a provincial satellite.
Second, the unresolved Iranian issue itself furnishes Russia with strategic utility. As long as Iran functions as a permanent problem in Western policy, Moscow can use energy coordination, arms transfers, and proxy coordination to multiply pressure on the Euro-Atlantic system at relatively low cost. A fully “resolved” Iran — normalised, integrated into markets, and less dependent on Russian support — would compress Russia’s leverage and narrow the number of theatres in which it can impose costs on Western actors.
Third, the very fact that Russia cannot decisively protect Iran is not unique to Moscow. No actor — not even China or the United States — is able to engineer a clean outcome in Tehran without accepting risks that all have so far declined: occupation, regime collapse, or an uncontrolled succession crisis. The inability to impose outcomes is not a Russian pathology; it is a structural feature of dealing with ideologically entrenched, elite-insulated regimes.
In that sense, Russia is indeed weaker than it imagines itself to be, but stronger than a pure “orbit” analogy allows.
If one takes Iran seriously as a regime, rather than merely a problem, a familiar pattern emerges. Short of total war, military strikes tend to reinforce the ideological core of fundamentalist systems. Broad sanctions harden elite insulation while transferring costs to the population. Both dynamics appear not only in Iran, but in actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
Within this environment, prolonged ambiguity becomes a rational choice for many players:
For the United States, ambiguity allows deterrence, alliance maintenance, and crisis management without the costs and risks of regime change.
For Israel, it preserves a framework of U.S. support and coordination anchored in a sustained Iranian threat, even as it constrains certain options.
For Turkey, it sustains Ankara’s role as a Sunni counterweight and indispensable mediator in a region defined by a continuing Shiite revolutionary pole.
For Russia, it keeps Western policy stretched and distracted along the southern flank of Europe.
For China, it offers an indirect instrument of pressure, a client for arms and technology, and a laboratory for contesting U.S. influence at one remove, with deniability.
This is not a world in which Washington and Beijing simply divide the planet and assign roles to lesser players. It is one in which a large number of actors find that an unresolved Iran is better than a settled one, precisely because settlement would redistribute risks and uncertainties in ways that are politically difficult to absorb.
Here, the orbit metaphor reaches its limits. It tells us who is “above” and who is “below,” but not why no one has an interest in moving from suspended rivalry to decisive outcome. It captures hierarchy, but not function.
Both the orbit essay and my own earlier piece converge on one important observation: the talks over Iran — whether in Oman or elsewhere — often resemble ritual rather than decisive negotiation. They are performances of seriousness, often accompanied by visible deployments and familiar rhetoric, yet they rarely cross the threshold into comprehensive settlement. Such diplomatic choreography recalls the recurrent embassies and conferences of the Peloponnesian War, where negotiation often served to signal resolve, preserve honour, and buy time, rather than to resolve the underlying causes of conflict.
Where I would gently diverge from the orbit framing is in the interpretation of what this choreography signifies. It is tempting to read it as a sign that Russia has been relegated to the status of a consulted province, waiting for instructions from Beijing and news from Washington. There is truth in the image of Moscow discovering that the multipolarity it proclaimed has left it orbiting someone else’s gravitational centre.
But the choreography in Oman is not only an expression of Russia’s weakness. It is also the expression of a broader strategic choice shared across capitals: to preserve ambiguity, to manage rivalry, and to keep open a margin of manoeuvre that full resolution would close. The very repetitiveness of the process — the pauses, resumptions, and partial arrangements — reveals how deeply embedded this preference has become.
Seen from a wider horizon, Iran is more than a test of Russia’s place in the hierarchy. It is a hinge in a continuous strategic belt linking Eastern Mediterranean naval access, Red Sea chokepoints, Indian Ocean routes, and the Indo-Pacific. Ambiguity in the Iranian theatre absorbs diplomatic attention, naval assets, and political capital that might otherwise be committed more fully to the consolidation of rival blocs further east.
In a strictly bipolar world, one would expect both Washington and Beijing to pursue closure: to settle the Iranian question, align the region cleanly, and concentrate on each other. The persistence of ambiguity instead suggests that neither is ready — or willing — to carry the costs and risks of such closure, and that both continue to exploit the flexibility that unresolved problems offer.
This is why the language of orbits, while evocative, is not yet an adequate description of the architecture we inhabit. The system is more fluid, more layered, and more dependent on managed incompleteness than the image of two planets dividing everything would suggest.
The orbit essay captures, with admirable clarity, the humiliation of a Russia that once sat at the head of its own camp and now discovers that it must ask Beijing what room for manoeuvre remains. This experience is real and analytically important. It reminds us that status, recognition, and hierarchy still matter in international politics.
At the same time, when we shift our focus from status to structure, from litmus tests to hinges, a different picture emerges. Iran is not simply the exam that Moscow fails; it is part of an architecture of managed rivalry in which ambiguity is cultivated rather than overcome — by Washington, by Beijing, by Moscow, and by the regional actors caught between them.
To understand this architecture, we need both metaphors: the orbit, which speaks to hierarchy and dependency, and the hinge, which speaks to function and connection. Thucydides would recognise this world not as one ordered by clear poles or final settlements, but as one governed by Fear, Interest, and Honour — where ambiguity is not a failure of politics, but one of its most enduring instruments. The task, for analysts and policymakers alike, is to move beyond the drama of who waits by the phone, and to confront the more uncomfortable question of why no one really wants the call that would finally close the Iranian file.
Papastavrou, A.-T. (2025). Thucydidean geopolitics for the educated layperson. Lulu.com (Publisher) https://www.lulu.com/shop/aias-theodoros-papastavrou/thucydidean-geopolitics/ebook/product-45j44mg.html?q=Aias-Theodoros&page=1&pageSize=4