By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Fragile Axis of Upheaval

Even regional wars have geopolitical consequences, and when it comes to Russia’s war on Ukraine, the most important of these has been the formation of a loose entente among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some U.S. national security experts have taken to calling this group “the axis of upheaval” or “the axis of autocracy,” warning that the United States must center this entente in its foreign policy and focus on containing or defeating it. It is not only Washington policymakers who worry about a new, well-coordinated anti-American bloc: in a November 2024 U.S. public opinion poll by the Ronald Reagan Institute, 86 percent of respondents agreed that they were either “extremely” or “somewhat” concerned by the increased cooperation between these U.S. adversaries.

There is no question that these countries threaten U.S. interests, nor that their cooperation has strengthened lately. But the axis framing overstates the depth and permanence of their alignment. The coalition has been strengthened by the Ukraine war, but its members’ interests are less well fitted than they appear on the surface. Washington should not lump these countries together. Historically, when countries logroll separate threats into a monolithic one, it is a strategic mistake. U.S. leaders need to make a more nuanced and accurate analysis of the threats that they pose, or else the fear of an axis of autocracies could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the war ends, the United States and its allies should seize opportunities to loosen the coalition’s war-forged bonds.

 

Interim Order

Cooperation among these four countries is not entirely new. North Korea has been dependent on China for almost 75 years. Moscow’s relationships with both Beijing and Tehran were often rocky during the Cold War, but the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse opened the door to rapprochements. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, signs that China and Russia were deepening their partnership began emerging. Russia and Iran, meanwhile, found themselves on the same side of the Syrian civil war after Moscow intervened in 2015 to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The war in Ukraine, however, has poured high-octane accelerant on these embers of cooperation, and the resulting collaborations have damaged Western interests. There is no question that Russia’s recent cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea has helped the Kremlin resist the West’s military and economic pressures. Iran’s provision of drones and medium-range ballistic missiles in return for Russian intelligence and fighter aircraft allowed Russia to hammer Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure without depleting its stocks of other weapons and weakening its defenses against NATO. By contributing 11,000 troops as well as munitions, artillery, and missiles to Russia’s war effort, North Korea has helped Russia gradually push back the Ukrainian occupation of Kursk; Russia’s compensations of oil, fighter aircraft and potentially other weapons blunt the effect of international sanctions on North Korea and may embolden Pyongyang to further provoke Seoul. And Beijing’s decision to look the other way as Chinese firms supply Moscow with dual-use goods (in exchange for certain defense technologies and less expensive energy) has helped Russia produce advanced weaponry despite Western sanctions.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu, and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi in Beijing, March 2025

In June 2024, Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defense treaty. Iran and Russia have promised to strengthen their economic cooperation and, in January, signed their own defense agreement. China, Iran, and North Korea—like many other countries around the world—have also refused to join U.S.-led sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, Russia has blocked UN sanctions monitors from continuing their work in North Korea.

These four countries will no doubt continue to parrot one another’s criticisms of the United States well after the war in Ukraine ends. For the most part, however, the forms of cooperation that have most worried Washington have directly involved that war, and its end will attenuate the coalition’s most important new bonds. It is not at all uncommon for wartime coalitions to fall apart once a war ends, and after the war, the Kremlin is likely to renege on some of its wartime promises. Russia will have less need to pay off Iran, for example. Likewise, as the pressure to refill its depleted supply of troops dissipates, the Kremlin will become less keen to get entangled in North Korea’s conflicts in East Asia.

Beijing’s wartime support for Moscow was already restrained and conditional: going too far to back Russia’s war would have damaged China's relations with Europe and exposed it to secondary sanctions. China’s support has also been driven by fear that a Russian defeat could yield a Western-oriented Kremlin or chaos on the Russian-Chinese border. Once the war ends, however, that fear will recede, and with it, China’s enthusiasm for materially supporting Russia. If Russian energy begins to flow back toward Europe, that would also loosen the economic bond the war generated between these two powers.

 

Reverse Tides

When the wartime closeness of these countries is projected linearly into the future, their divergent national interests become obscured. China, for example, has long sought closer relations with the EU; deepening its partnership with Russia impedes this strategic objective. China and Ukraine once had a productive bilateral relationship, and both may wish to return to it once the war is over. Russia, meanwhile, is suspicious of China’s growing economic influence in Central Asia, which the Kremlin considers its own privileged sphere. These tensions are likely to resurface once the war is over. Notably, China almost certainly would prefer to be at the center of a reformed global order, not at the center of a coalition whose other three members are economic and political pariahs.

Some analysts claim that a common autocratic ideology will bind China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia together in the long term. But autocracy is not an ideology. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist allies were bound by a real ideology that not only called for revolution across the liberal capitalist world but also offered a utopian vision for a new global order. No such common cause binds Iran’s religious theocracy, Russia’s neo-imperialist nationalism, the hereditary despotism of North Korea’s regime, and the blend of nationalism, Confucianism, and Marxism-Leninism that animates the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, this coalition is bound by a fear of the United States and an objection to an international order that they believe reflects U.S. preferences. Although many other states share this critique of the international order, the varied ideologies of this coalition offer no positive vision that could replace the existing system.

Furthermore, although Washington has conceived of its autocratic adversaries as a cohesive unit, almost all of their cooperation has been through bilateral channels. If the war in Ukraine continues, some military institutionalization might grow out of it, but right now, the institutional foundations of the autocracies’ relationships are very weak. What has been cast as an axis is actually six overlapping bilateral relationships. Since 2019, for example, China, Iran, and Russia have occasionally conducted joint military exercises in a trilateral format, but these exercises had little strategic relevance. These states have not congealed into anything remotely resembling the Warsaw Pact. Absent new institutions, coordinated action will be much more difficult.

 

Divide and Neutralize

Even though the bonds that unite China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are currently weak, they could still strengthen with time. Western countries need to adopt a statecraft that reduces this risk. Their first step should be to focus on ending the war in Ukraine. Trump has initiated an ambitious and controversial opening to Moscow that may result in a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement. Trump has indulged in overly optimistic rhetoric about Moscow’s sincerity, and questions about his true aims linger. Nevertheless, a cease-fire would greatly reduce the pressures that bind the so-called axis of upheaval together. If U.S. leaders negotiate with Moscow, that would also signal to Beijing that they are willing to consider wider-ranging negotiations with it, and these could further disrupt the coalition.

Indeed, the second way to loosen the coalition’s bonds is for the United States to stabilize or improve its own relations with China, by far the most powerful member of the group. Steering the U.S.-Chinese relationship toward more stability will be hard, but—perhaps as part of a larger deal on trade and investment—Trump could reassure Beijing that the United States does not want outright economic decoupling or to change the status quo on Taiwan. China needs the other three coalition powers far less than they need China, which means it may be the most willing to make its own deal with the United States.

Stabilizing relations with Beijing is thus a more realistic near-term goal than trying to bring Russia swiftly back into the European fold. Too sudden and dramatic a U-turn in U.S.-Russian relations would alienate key U.S. allies in Europe and needlessly entrench a transatlantic rift. It would be similarly unwise for the United States to take Kremlin’s assurances about Ukraine or Europe at face value, given Russia’s deep grievances toward the West and its leaders’ proclivity for deception. With a cease-fire in place, however, the United States and Europe could consider making limited improvements to their economic relations with Russia, which would help attenuate Russia’s ties with China. And just as an end to the war in Ukraine would almost certainly weaken the coalition’s bonds, so would a new nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran that reduces the need to launch military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear program and allows the country to find outlets for its oil other than China.

 

Untie the Knot

If, however, the United States insists upon treating this new coalition’s emergence as if it were a revival of the Warsaw Pact, the putative axis of autocracies probably will coalesce and end up posing a much greater danger. Russia and China once supported international nonproliferation efforts, including attempts to prevent Iran and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons. China and Russia should not want a global nuclear cascade, but if the United States remains implacably hostile to them, that might lead Moscow to adopt an “if you can’t stop them, help them” approach and back Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s nuclear programs. Both Iran and North Korea could then use Russian nuclear and missile technology to develop advanced weapons that would hamper the U.S. military’s response options in East Asia and the Middle East—and even threaten the American homeland.

Of equal concern is the possibility that China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia will use their wartime cooperation as a model for opportunistic coordination in the future. In general, autocratic countries struggle to make the kind of credible commitments that joint military planning requires, but a coordinated attack on U.S. interests in multiple regions might still emerge through improvisation. For example, if China attacks Taiwan and the United States comes to the island’s defense, Russia could take advantage of Washington’s distraction to seize a slice of the Baltic states, and Iran could see an opportunity to attack Israel. Such a multifront assault on U.S. allies would stretch American resources to the maximum or beyond it.

These possibilities make it important for the United States to get its strategy right today. Bundling the threats the four so-called axis states pose is politically convenient in Washington, because it placates interest groups in the U.S. national security ecosphere that would otherwise compete for resources. But the hidden costs will be high.

Fear generates an impulse to fight back against U.S. adversaries on all possible fronts. But if a country gives in to the impulse to fight everywhere all at once it sows the seeds of its decline. Before World War I, for example, Germany tried to challenge the United Kingdom at sea while also dominating France and Russia on the European continent. It ended up fatally overstretched. Likewise, when Japan in the 1930s attempted to meet both its army’s aspirations for an Asian empire and its navy’s demands for a Pacific fleet, it ended up bogged down in China and at war with the world’s foremost industrial power, the United States. Instead of treating China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia as an inexorable bloc, the United States and its allies should work to loosen their ties by exploiting the fissures that the war in Ukraine has concealed.

 

 

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