MOSCOW – There was something almost clinical in the way Georgy Borisenko put it. Washington had not merely stumbled in Iran – it had lost. And in losing, it had shown the world something it could not un-show.
“As we see it, in a multipolar world, US influence will steadily decrease,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister said Monday, speaking at the VI International Expert Forum “Russia – Middle East” in Moscow. “We already see this now in the example of the conflict with Iran.”
Borisenko, who took the deputy minister post in February and now oversees Russia’s relations with the Middle East and Africa, did not invoke abstractions. His argument was mechanical: the United States entered a conflict with Iran, failed to achieve decisive victory, and therefore lost. “Washington had lost the conflict since it could not emerge victorious,” he told the forum, according to TASS.
Whether one finds that logic persuasive depends considerably on what outcome one was measuring. American and Israeli strikes, according to US intelligence assessments, destroyed or severely damaged as much as two-thirds of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal. Tehran signed no instrument of surrender. But it also did not break. The Islamic Republic emerged from the 2026 war battered, its military infrastructure degraded, its supreme leadership targeted – and still standing. That ambiguity is precisely the opening Russia is working.
The forum itself was a signal. Gathering regional analysts and diplomatic voices in Moscow on June 1, it offered the Kremlin a platform to restate a thesis it has pressed since long before the Iran conflict began: that the post-1991 order, built around American primacy, is dissolving. James Carden, a retired US diplomat and former advisor to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, has said the world order is now “undoubtedly multipolar” and that Trump administration policy in the Middle East is “only accelerating America’s isolation from the non-Western world,” TASS reported.
Moscow’s reading of the Iran war has been consistent throughout. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in May that US and Israeli aggression against Iran had sought to derail Tehran’s Arab rapprochement – a goal he said Washington failed to achieve, as Eastern Herald reported at the time. Russia and the United States failed to “break” Iran, and Tehran “retains solid military potential,” Moscow said in a separate statement that same week, per an earlier Eastern Herald report.
The Kremlin’s narrative has institutional backing – and strategic purpose. A joint Putin-Xi statement issued in Beijing last month explicitly called for a multipolar world in which the United States holds “less power and influence,” Al Jazeera reported. The 47-page declaration named China and Russia as co-anchors of that alternative order. Borisenko’s remarks Monday extended that framing into the specific military ledger of the Middle East.
Yet the argument carries real complications. Iran came out of the war with roughly a third of its missile arsenal definitively destroyed and another third assessed as damaged or buried – a degradation its military will take years to reverse. Chatham House noted in March that if the United States and Israel succeed in fundamentally degrading Iran’s strategic position, the narrative of a resilient multipolar order “loses ideological traction.” The research institute observed that the war had raised critical questions about stability on Russia’s southern flank – a region Moscow cannot treat as peripheral.
Foreign Affairs published a counterargument in March, contending that Russia, for all its rhetoric about multipolarity, possesses even fewer of the attributes required to shape the international system than the theory demands – citing a resource-dependent economy, technological lag in artificial intelligence and robotics, and a declining population. The piece described the multipolar framework as a delusion when tested against structural realities.
Borisenko made no concessions to those complications Monday. What he offered was a verdict, not an analysis: the United States tried, the United States did not win, therefore the United States lost. The forum audience was not a neutral one. But the argument will travel far beyond the room where it was made – into diplomatic cables, into Arabic-language media across the region, into the calculations of governments that have spent the past year watching Washington and wondering what exactly American power still guarantees.
What that question ultimately yields remains open. Borisenko did not say.
—Inputs from Sputnik.
