How do other countries view the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran?

CBS News asked its reporters and editors to gauge the local mood in foreign capital cities as the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, now nearing the two-week mark, leaves energy and stock markets in turmoil.

President Trump has said he intends to end the war soon, on his own timetable. But Iran says it’s prepared for a “long-term war of attrition” to destroy the global economy.

Below is a snapshot of international opinions and viewpoints on the conflict.

Russia 

A makeshift memorial was erected outside the Iranian embassy in Moscow last week. Residents of the Russian capital brought flowers, candles, and stuffed animals to express their solidarity with the Iranian people as Iranian officials said over 1,000 civilians had been killed by the U.S.-Israeli strikes.

“It’s so sad, so many children died, it’s simply inhumane. How can this be?” Natalia, a Moscovite who brought flowers, told state broadcaster MIR24. “Such a beautiful country, such mosques, how can they destroy it all?”

The overwhelming majority of Russians disapprove of the American-Israeli operation against Iran, at least according to Russia’s pro-Kremlin Channel 1.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences last week to his Iranian counterpart, President Masoud Pezeshkian, over the killing of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose son Mojtaba has since become the new supreme leader. The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly condemned the U.S.-Israeli campaign, calling it a “pre-planned and unprovoked act of armed aggression against a sovereign and independent UN member state.”

Outside the Iranian embassy, Tatiana Pluzhnikova, a Moscovite who said she had lived and worked in Iran for years, described it to local media as “the friendliest, most peace-loving country. To all Iranians — be strong,” she added. 

“No normal person could support such vile acts, such inhuman attacks.”

By Svetlana Berdnikova

Germany 

In the first days of the war, headlines in Germany were dominated by reports of as many as 30,000 German nationals being stranded in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries as airlines canceled thousands of flights. 

“Around half past midnight we suddenly heard sirens,” tourist Richard Grüttmöller told Der Spiegel last week, speaking from his hotel balcony. “We told the kids it was just thunder.”

“It’s very surreal,” René Lembke, who waited 12 hours in Dubai airport for a flight that never took off, told the magazine: “We’re here in a holiday paradise. … Something could happen at any moment … that’s the uncertainty you feel.”

At home, Germans have seemed increasingly concerned about the wider implications of the war. A “DeutschlandTrend” survey by public broadcaster ARD last week found that over half of respondents believed the war was unjustified, while three quarters voiced fear the conflict would spread to other countries.

Nearly nine in 10 Germans said international politics was increasingly shaped by the “law of the strongest.”

By Anna Noryskiewicz

Poland

Poles have been palpably uneasy since the war began. On a busy city street, passers-by stopped briefly for interviews last week with Polish news website WP. 

“I’m afraid,” said one elderly woman. “Wars are easy to start but hard to end.” 

“I think the war should have been prevented,” said a woman in her early 20s. “I understand the goal of a regime change in Iran, but now so many countries are affected by this war — even Cyprus.”

Broader European polling has also shown rising unease about U.S. policy: Around one in five respondents in Europe’s six largest countries — including Poland — said they now viewed the United States as a “major threat” to their security.

For some Poles, those concerns have been exacerbated by the Iran war, as they fear it could impact the conflict raging on their doorstep for four years already — the one they remain most worried about, Russia’s war on Ukraine.

By Anna Noryskiewicz  

Ukraine

On Ukrainian social media feeds, an AI-generated photo of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy holding an ace of spades with a drone at the center of the playing card has received thousands of likes over the last couple weeks. 

Following a request from the U.S. Defense Department, Ukraine sent drone interceptors and pilots to Jordan over the weekend to help defend U.S. military bases from Iranian drones. The plea for help from Washington led many Ukrainians to recall the Oval Office show-down a year earlier, when President Trump told Zelenskyy he had “no cards” to play, and Vice President JD Vance asked if the Ukrainian president would ever “say thank you” to the U.S.

“It seems like we have the cards now,” one soldier based in Kyiv told CBS News, adding that he was now waiting for Vance to thank Ukraine. 

But satisfaction over the tacit recognition of Ukraine’s air defense expertise has been tempered by dwindling Western interceptor stockpiles in the Middle East — supplies that many in Ukraine had hoped might eventually make their way to Kyiv.

Ukrainians hate the Iranian regime for supplying Russia with drones that have killed Ukrainians for four years. They would love to see the governments of both Iran and Russia fall, but some are concerned that the U.S. is focusing on the war in the Middle East at the expense of pressuring Russia and helping Ukraine.

“A free democratic Iran is a dream for Ukraine,” Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleg Dunda told CBS News. “If Iran joins the international order, oil prices would drop, undermining Russia’s budget and leading to fewer drones and missiles being sent into Ukraine.” 

“I do see a lot of risks for Ukraine in the current situation with Iran,” he added. “If American resources are expended in the Persian Gulf, there will be less to defend NATO’s eastern flank. And as long as oil prices continue to rise, Russia will use that money on rockets and drones for Ukraine.”

By Aidan Stretch

United Kingdom

The U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran have prompted serious questions here about the “special relationship” between the U.K. and U.S.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer had been seen as achieving a degree of success in fostering a positive relationship with President Trump as the U.S. leader had more contentious exchanges with other European leaders.

But when the U.K. declined U.S. requests to use its bases for offensive strikes against Iran, Mr. Trump lashed out at Starmer, triggering debate among lawmakers here about whether the prime minister had made the right decision for Britain’s national interests.

“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Mr. Trump said, mocking Starmer.

Some of Starmer’s critics — predominantly on the right wing of British politics — argue that maintaining a positive relationship with the U.S. should be the priority, but Starmer has stuck by his position that the U.K. prefers a negotiated settlement to the nuclear issue in Iran, and he has continued to urge a deescalation of the war.

Strarmer appears to have the backing of most British voters, with a majority of Britons telling the pollster YouGov that they do not support the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran and calling the justification for the strikes “unclear.”

The U.K. is allowing the U.S. to use its bases for what it deems to be defensive operations and is belatedly sending a warship to Cypriot waters to protect a British air force base, “But after all the effort invested into building up this relationship,” the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason wrote last week, “it has never been in a rockier place than it is now.”

By Haley Ott 

Ireland

In the Republic of Ireland, another American military intervention in the Middle East has proven deeply unpopular, reviving a decades-long debate over the U.S. military’s use of Ireland’s Shannon airport as a refueling base. 

“Most people in Ireland view the war as reckless and illegal,” Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s most prominent political commentators, told CBS News this week. “It is hard to find anyone who believes that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. or who understands exactly what the envisaged endgame is.”

“Israel’s war on Gaza has been deeply unpopular in Ireland and these attacks on Iran and Lebanon seem like an extension of it. Also, of course ordinary people have been badly affected by the immediate rise in fuel prices and don’t see anything good happening as a consequence,” he said. 

The Irish government has been a vocal critic of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and Dublin backed South Africa’s legal proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide in the Palestinian territory. 

Ireland’s President Catherine Connolly said Sunday that Ireland could not ignore the “catastrophic consequences of violating the U.N. charter,” with respect to the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, adding that “the violations of international law we are witnessing are shocking and numbing.” 

Some left-wing opposition politicians have recently called on the Irish government to ban the U.S. military from using Shannon airport, which has been a convenient transatlantic refuelling stop since it opened in 1945. 

By Emmet Lyons

India 

Inside the Iranian Embassy in New Delhi stands a long table draped in black cloth. On it lies an open book, overlooked by a portrait on the wall of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“I wrote what I was feeling,” Raza, a teacher from Uttar Pradesh, told The Indian Express. “I am deeply saddened.”

India has “a deep connection with the Iranian revolution,” Taslim Ahmed Rehmani, president of the Muslim Political Council of India, wrote in the condolence book. He was in his last year of high school in 1979 when Iran’s monarchy was overthrown by the Islamic theocracy that continues to rule over the country.

Rehmani, 63, called Khamenei’s killing in the opening hours of the U.S.-Israeli assault “an insult to Iran,” adding: “I condemn it.”

The strikes on Iran sparked protests in several parts of India, including the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir and the cities of Lucknow and Ranchi. Protesters held up posters of Khamenei and Iranian flags, and chanted against the U.S. and Israel, burning effigies of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Many Indians have come to see Mr. Trump as a sort of would-be supreme leader himself, engaging with India only in the interest of his own country. Their indignation over the war has been exacerbated by the equivocations of India’s government, which eventually banned the anti-U.S.-Israel protests. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has released nuanced, guarded statements of “concern” about the war, but has not condemned it.  

It took four days of mounting domestic political pressure after Khamenei was killed for India’s Foreign Minister to sign the condolence book at the Iranian embassy. 

“India’s silence on big issues has been a consistent pattern,” Shiv Shankar Menon, India’s former National Security Adviser and Foreign Secretary, who also served as an ambassador to several countries, including Israel, told Indian television on Tuesday. 

“We stayed silent on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and did not call it an invasion. We stayed silent on the slaughter in Gaza, now on the U.S.-Israel aggression in Iran,” he said. “If you stay silent all the time, you diminish your voice … the world stops listening to you.” 

By Arshad Zargar

Spain

“The position of the Spanish government can be summed up in four words,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said last Thursday. “No a la guerra.”

In English, it’s only three words: No to war.  

Sanchez spoke after President Trump threatened to “cut off all trade with Spain,” following the European Union’s fourth largest economy refusing to let the U.S. use jointly-run bases in Morón and Rota, in Spain’s south, to attack Iran.

“Spain has been terrible,” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

Sanchez’s refusal to back down reflects the views of most Spaniards, two thirds of whom oppose the war, according to a poll commissioned by the major newspaper El Pais. 

His stance may help to heal the betrayal many in the country felt when, in 2003, then-conservative Prime Minister José María Aznar backed the U.S.-led war in Iraq despite polls at the time showing around 90% of the population opposed the move, and as millions protested across the country against it.

Spain’s relations with Israel, the U.S.’ partner in the war on Iran, have been no better of late.

On Tuesday, Spain withdrew its ambassador to Israel, officially terminating the position as the diplomatic spat between the two countries deepened. Spain strongly opposed Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip and, in September, it temporarily recalled its ambassador to Israel and banned ships and planes carrying weapons for Israel from using its ports or airspace.

“Protecting your country and your society is one thing; bombing hospitals and starving children is another,” said Sanchez at the time, emphasising Spain’s responsibility to try to stop what he noted “the U.N. special rapporteur and many experts  consider a genocide.”

By Frank Andrews 

France 

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has positioned himself as a negotiator, offering to help deescalate the war in Iran.

Over the last week he has spoken with both President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, urging Iran to stop its strikes on Persian Gulf countries and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic. 

He has continually stressed diplomacy as the only way to end the war, and while blaming Tehran for the current conflict during a national televised address last week, he also described the U.S.-Israeli strikes as “outside international law,” saying Paris could not “approve of them.”

Macron ordered the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the eastern Mediterranean after Iranian strikes targeted the British sovereign air base on the island of Cyprus, but he has repeatedly stressed that France’s posture is entirely defensive.

“When Cyprus is attacked, Europe is attacked” he said, adding that France wanted to “contribute to regional deescalation.”

French public opinion is predominantly against any foreign military interventions and has been since the 2003 Iraq war. Israel’s war in Gaza was widely disapproved of by the French population, and the current war in Iran doesn’t seem any more popular.

While a large majority of the French say they’re concerned about the regime in Iran, only one in four believe France should join the war, according to a poll by Ifop.

Another poll conducted recently by the Elabe think tank showed, however, that a small majority (55%) said they were in favor of a French military intervention specifically to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, as part of an international “defensive” mission to escort commercial ships.

By Frank Andrews and Karine Barzegar