The United States and the “Axis” of Its Enemies: Myths vs. Reality

The arrival of thousands of North Korean troops to fight alongside the Russian army in Kursk has added urgency to the prevailing narrative that a new “axis” of countries is banding together to oppose the United States. Some U.S. officials have labeled countries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran as a latter day “axis of evil.” The formulations used by outside observers are no less colorful: “the axis of upheaval,” “the Kleptocracy Club,” the “axis of revisionist powers,” or just CRINK.¹

Membership in this new axis is fluid. In addition to the four already mentioned countries, it occasionally includes Venezuela or sometimes even Zimbabwe. To be fair, all of these countries have a lot in common. They are autocratic and corrupt. They contribute to or welcome disorder in various corners of the world, often far beyond their borders. On plenty of occasions, they have sought to challenge the United States and to demonstrate their worry about alleged U.S. support for subverting or outright overthrowing their ruling regimes. They have even been accused of starting World War III against the United States. The July 2024 report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy warns that the United States “must be prepared to confront an axis of multiple adversaries.” But are they truly so aligned as to form an “axis”—a term that evokes the alliance among Germany, Italy, and Japan that the United States and its allies defeated in World War II?

The Axis That Was

The first problem with the revived “axis” concept is that the original tripartite alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan was never so unified as is commonly believed. Philip Zelikow offers an excellent analysis of the emergence and complicated history of the original “axis” in the tumultuous and complicated geopolitics of the 1930s. The implied quality of the “axis” as an alliance that endured throughout World War II belies the dizzying chronology of its origins and its brittle nature.

The authorship of the term belongs to Italy’s Benito Mussolini, who in a November 1936 speech described the Berlin-Rome “axis” as the new backbone of European security. Also in November 1936, Germany and Japan signed the anti-Soviet Anti-Comintern Pact, which Italy joined a year later. In May 1939, Rome and Berlin signed the Pact of Steel, a formal military alliance between them. But in August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed their nonaggression pact, which prompted Japan to withdraw immediately from the Anti-Comintern Pact. However, it joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact a year later, in September 1940. In that agreement, Japan pledged to “recognize and respect the leadership of Germany and Italy in establishment of a new order in Europe”; Germany and Italy promised to do the same for Japan’s leadership in greater East Asia, and all three committed “to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.” Finally, in April 1941, Japan signed its own nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union.

Germany broke its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union and invaded it on June 22, 1941. Japan observed its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union throughout the war. This enabled Stalin to commit all his armies to the Western front, to stop the German blitzkrieg at the gates of Moscow in late-1941, and to turn the tide of the war.

The second problem with drawing parallels between the original “axis” and its modern-day incarnation is that by comparison with the 1930s, the current period is remarkably stable. U.S.-North Korea relations have not been repaired since the end of the Korean war in 1953. The break in U.S.-Iran relations is nearly half a century old. Tensions and fundamental disagreements between the United States and Russia have been building since the 1990s. And notwithstanding numerous attempts by U.S. and Chinese leaders to repair and stabilize the relationship between their two countries, tensions over Taiwan have been a feature of the relationship since the 1970s and have only grown with time. The 1930s were a kaleidoscope of rapidly shifting relationships between and among the major powers of that era—the Soviet Union, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

This is an important point. On the one hand, the relative stability of the current period suggests that the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea alignment is likely to pose an enduring challenge to U.S. interests. On the other hand, it could point to the fundamental nature of the differences between the United States and each of the four countries aspiring to form a new “axis.” Viewed this way, the very idea of treating them as an “axis” could be rendered unproductive at best and counterproductive at worst. 

The third problem with the “axis” concept is that it was never really a global alliance in World War II. The three parties’ interests and ambitions were regional—Japan’s expansionist plans in Asia-Pacific, Germany’s quest for hegemony in Europe, and Italy’s ambitions in the Mediterranean. A combination of regional interests does not a global coalition make.

The Axis That Isn’t

More recent attempts to resurrect the “axis” concept have largely backfired and have hardly enhanced U.S. security. The “axis of evil” label that the George W. Bush administration used for Iraq, Iran, and North Korea was part of the justification for the Iraq War, which caused enormous destruction and dislocation throughout the Middle East. That war did nothing to advance the enduring U.S. goals of a stable Middle East, a nuclear weapons-free Iran, and a safe and secure Israel. Indeed, the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq possibly even reinforced Iran’s and North Korea’s resolve to continue their nuclear weapons programs as the only hedge against the threat posed to them by the United States.

Today, it is hard to make the case that Iran is part of a global coalition opposing the United States in the Pacific or that North Korea is acting as Iran’s ally in its standoff with the United States in the Middle East. Even the oft-cited “no limits” partnership between Russia and China clearly has real limits. One essential feature of that partnership is that notwithstanding their global ambitions, each country’s key interests are mostly confined to distinctly separate geographic theaters. For China, it is the Asia-Pacific. For Russia, it is Europe. Their priorities complement rather than compete with each other, which makes their partnership a true win-win. Their partnership is reinforced by the fact that in both theaters, their principal opponent is the United States, whom they see as seeking global military supremacy or hegemony. 

China indeed has been helping Russia wage its war against Ukraine but has hardly gone all in. It has provided Russia with “very substantial” assistance for its war machine and in exchange received Russian submarine and missile technology that it needs to compete with the United States. China has tried to navigate carefully, albeit not always successfully, to avoid getting hit with U.S. sanctions. And there has never been even a hint of China sending its troops to wage the war in Ukraine alongside Russia. Moreover, in the event of a confrontation between China and the United States in East Asia, Russia would likely follow a careful course designed to stay well clear of the conflict, let alone take part in it alongside China.

The fact that the war in Ukraine has distracted Washington from the “pacing challenge” of China continues to benefit Beijing. The “no limits” partnership between Beijing and Moscow appears to be a pragmatic, transactional relationship with strategic consequences for both sides, but one that is motivated by complementary rather than identical interests. By any measure, it falls well short of the Berlin-Rome World War II “axis.” Moreover, close observers of Chinese policy maintain that Beijing is “uneasy” with Moscow’s undisguised war of aggression. In private conversations, Chinese scholars do not criticize Russian policy overtly but do not endorse it either. Some Chinese scholars try to explain China’s help to the Russian defense industry as “normal” trade in dual-use goods indistinguishable from military-related hardware.

If having a shared adversary is enough to constitute an “axis,” as is the case presently with China and Russia, then was the U.S.-China relationship during much of the Cold War also an “axis”? The United States and China shared a common adversary then—the Soviet Union. Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China paved the way for security cooperation with China in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Western observers or policymakers have not commonly referred to that relationship as an “axis,” either at the time of Nixon’s historic opening with Beijing or retrospectively.

The Russia-Iran partnership belongs in the same transactional category. With a legacy of difficult, often adversarial relations marked by geopolitical tensions that erupted into wars on multiple occasions, the two former empires have in the past three decades found common cause in having adversarial relationships with the United States and pursuing shared opposition to U.S. policies in the Middle East. Russia and Iran had a shared interest in rescuing the regime of Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. Most recently, their relationship has been boosted by their intensified two-way arms trade with Iran supplying drones and short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, in exchange for assistance with ballistic missile technology, air defense systems, and advanced fighter aircraft. While Russia reportedly has received thousands of Iranian drones and other hardware, it has not gone all-in delivering its most advanced weapons to Iran.

Moreover, Russia has long tolerated and done little to discourage Israeli strikes against Iran or Iran-backed targets in Syria, where Russian and Iranian goals have at times diverged significantly. With its military fully committed to the war against Ukraine and only a small military footprint in the Middle East, Russia did not intervene when Israel carried out its air strikes against Iran in April and October 2024.

Nor is China likely to come to Iran’s rescue. It buys 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, but the scenario in which it would intervene in an Israeli-Iranian conflict seems highly improbable. And it is hardly worth even mentioning the possibility of Iran intervening in the Asia-Pacific theater alongside China or China intervening in a conflict between the United States and Iran. So much for another leg of the “axis.”

Perhaps the most credible argument in favor of the “axis” theory is the burgeoning military relationship between Russia and North Korea. The latter has sent millions of artillery shells to Russia and most recently has dispatched several thousand troops, to fight alongside the Russian army in Kursk. The two countries have signed a mutual defense treaty, and Russia has reportedly shared advanced military technology with North Korea. This new alliance can be best explained as a matter of necessity for Russia caused by the difficulty it is having waging its war against Ukraine and the opportunity it presents for North Korea to get access to technologies it cannot develop on its own. The only shared interest these two regimes have is their hostility toward the United States and fear of U.S. dominance. For its part, China has bristled at the deepening of Russia-North Korea ties. In China, whose goodwill and support is essential to both North Korea’s survival and to the sustainability of Russia’s war effort, news of the bromance between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un has been met not only without enthusiasm but also with concern about the consequences of this development for the stability and security of Northeast Asia and for its relationship with North Korea.

All Unhappy Families …

The “axis” concept oversimplifies U.S. interests in the “axis” countries and limits U.S. policy options.

It would be a mistake to ignore the confluence of interests of the “axis” countries. There’s no question, for example, that they perceive a heightened threat from the United States. Lumping them together as a global alliance, however, is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst, running the risk of reinforcing their perceptions of their capabilities and self-confidence. The “axis” approach leaves little room for strategic empathy—the ability to understand one’s adversaries’ perceptions and motivations. They do share a key feature—fear and more often than not loathing of the United States and its ambitions to be a global rules-maker, or as they see it, the preservation of U.S. global hegemony at a time when Chinese and Russian policymakers have convinced themselves that the United States is entering a period of inexorable decline.

Beyond that, their geography and histories, especially their histories of relations with the United States, and political cultures are simply too diverse to represent a cohesive global coalition. North Korea fought and came close to losing a brutal war with the United States, which ended only with an armistice, not a peace treaty. In the view of the North Korean regime, the United States poses an existential threat that can only be deterred with the help of a robust nuclear weapons program and arsenal. It is a paranoid worldview, but it is the one that the North Korean regime has embraced and shows no sign of giving up.

Iran’s rivalry with the United States—aside from the fact that it is largely confined to a distinct geographic theater rather than global in scale—carries the burdens of a long legacy that includes but is not limited to the U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, the 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taking of U.S. personnel as hostages, Iran’s long-standing campaign of direct and proxy terrorist attacks against U.S. targets and interests, U.S. opposition to Iran’s nuclear program and geopolitical encirclement, and the Iranian government’s hostility toward Israel. Iranian leaders, who no doubt remember U.S. intelligence and military assistance to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, perceive the United States as a source, perhaps the only source, of existential threat to their regime and country, which they consider to be one and the same.

The U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia relationships resemble conventional great power rivalries. During World War II, China and the United States shared a common adversary—Japan—and the United States provided significant military support to China’s National Government. The Soviet Union and the United States also shared a common adversary in World War II—Germany—and the United States provided the Soviet Union with vast amounts of weapons, equipment, and other assistance. But great power relationships are not static. Today, China and Russia have uniquely complicated relationships with the United States that have their own military, regional and global geopolitical, economic, and ideological dimensions. These are far more complicated relationships than the relationships that exist between the United States and North Korea or Iran. They are also more equally matched in terms of their capabilities, presenting a very different challenge for the United States. Lumping them together with Iran and North Korea makes little sense.

What Is (Not) to Be Done?

The relationship between the United States and the would-be “axis” countries is too burdened with hostility and far gone down the path of confrontation for there to be a meaningful conversation about fixes or solutions. It is a problem to be managed by U.S. foreign policy rather than solved.

Trying to manage, let alone fix a problem, based on a false or misleading understanding about its nature would violate the “do no harm” ideal of foreign policy. Trying to address the challenge of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as an “axis” would more likely than not aggravate the challenges they pose to U.S. interests and possibly create a self-fulfilling prophecy by driving these countries closer together. The first task therefore is to recognize that the United States is facing four distinct challenges that are different and unique, have their own origins, and will not succumb to one size fits all solutions. This is not to say that these countries pose no threat to the United States and/or its interests, or that they will not be opportunistic taking advantage of situations when they can harm or advance their interests at the expense of the United States. Nor is this to say that Russia acting as Iran’s or North Korea’s lawyer, defending them in international fora and shielding them from pressure and coercion, is not a problem for the United States and the international community. These countries do pose a threat to U.S. interests. But to deal with this threat, the United States has to come up with individual strategies tailored to each country’s specific conditions, instead of bringing them all to the same common denominator.

The second task in dealing with these countries is to review the record of U.S. policy toward them and to assess whether these approaches have worked, have produced positive results, and/or are worth pursuing in the future. Has U.S. insistence that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons or that Iran abandon its nuclear ambitions produced any positive results? Have U.S. attempts to promote democracy or to combat corruption in China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran led to better conditions in those countries? Does it make sense to keep doing the same thing and expect different results, or has the time come to change course?

The leaders of China and Russia view the United States as a threat to their stability and security because of U.S. policy of promoting democracy and using economic coercion to undermine the stability of their authoritarian domestic political systems. Their kleptocratic nature has also been cited as the predicate for U.S. sanctions against both countries. To be sure, corruption is a scourge of many societies, but it is also the glue autocratic leaders use to hold their regimes together, and in their view U.S. criticism of it comes dangerously close to regime change. It strikes them as hypocritical, as they observe the role of money in U.S. domestic politics and selective application of U.S. anti-corruption measures abroad. The insistence by a succession of U.S. administrations of both political parties that their differences are with the Chinese Communist Party, rather than the people of China, or the Putin regime, rather that the Russian people, leads Beijing and Moscow to conclude that Washington is committed to a policy of regime change that precludes stable and sustainable relations with it, let alone lasting reconciliation.

Changing course in these circumstances would mean identifying what is really important for U.S. interests and focusing on it to the detriment of other, less critical issues. During Barack Obama’s administration, the United States had to put aside concerns about Iran’s domestic politics in order to address a truly urgent and dangerous problem—Iran’s nuclear program. Successive U.S. administrations, including Joe Biden’s, have put aside their qualms about the nature of Saudi Arabia’s domestic politics and focused on its role as a global energy and financial superpower and a regional heavyweight.

This approach—of differentiation rather than aggregation—and cold-blooded focus on top U.S. priorities and interests does not guarantee success. In June 2021, President Joe Biden put aside his reservations about Putin, whom he had called a “killer,” and met with him to tackle key issues on the bilateral agenda. The meeting did not produce lasting results, and Putin launched his war against Ukraine anyway. But a one-size-fits-all policy that makes no effort to understand the motivations, interests, and perceptions of our adversaries and aims to bring a diverse group of countries with vastly different strategic cultures to the same—lowest—common ideological denominator is a sure recipe for failure. 

Notes