The Axis of Upheaval Goes to War

On July 17, an Iranian missile struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing three American soldiers and wounding four others. The strike was unusually precise. In the weeks that followed, U.S. officials discovered that before the attack, Tehran had received high-resolution satellite images of the base that could aid its targeting. Afterward, Iran obtained more imagery, potentially helping it assess the damage and hone future attacks. The images came from Chinese entities.

China is not alone in assisting Iran. Russia, too, has helped Tehran find and hit American and allied targets. Two days before the March 27 attack on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia that wounded 12 American personnel, 14 Russian spy satellites passed overhead. U.S. officials later concluded that Moscow had fed Iran satellite intelligence that aided Iranian precision strikes. Moscow has also provided Iran with weapons and military expertise, including upgraded versions of Iranian drones refined on the battlefield in Ukraine, and Russian engineers are helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles that could evade U.S. and Israeli air defenses.

Neither Russia nor China has directly entered Iran’s war with the United States. They haven’t needed to. By providing intelligence on American targets, military technology and components, and economic and diplomatic support, they can give Iran what it needs without joining its war.

The United States entered the conflict with advantages its adversaries lacked: a vast network of formal allies, military bases, intelligence-sharing arrangements, defense partnerships, and interoperable forces spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet many of Washington’s traditional partners were reluctant to associate themselves with the campaign, and some denied the United States specific forms of military access, at least for a time. Others publicly resisted U.S. calls to help secure the Strait of Hormuz.

The contrast illustrates a striking shift since we first described Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as an axis of upheaval in Foreign Affairs two years ago. The United States’ adversaries began this war with this weaker network, and Washington with the far stronger one. But after helping Russia fight its war in Ukraine over the past few years, members of the axis are now finding ways to make their network work in a new theater. They are fine-tuning their cooperation to make their partners more resilient—and more dangerous to the United States—while limiting costs and risks. Washington, for its part, is creating friction in many of its partnerships instead of deepening them, and risks squandering its network just as its adversaries are learning to make more of theirs.

SOURCES OF UPHEAVAL

Much has changed since 2024. Most obviously, the United States itself has become a source of upheaval in the international system. The Trump administration has challenged international institutions, strained traditional alliances, and adopted a more transactional approach to foreign policy. It has upended trade agreements, threatened the sovereignty of allies such as Canada and Denmark, and embraced unpredictability. It has also pursued improved relations with China, North Korea, and Russia while seeking to weaken Iran. None of this has loosened the ties among the United States’ adversaries.

Early in the Trump administration, U.S. officials expressed hope that normalizing relations with Moscow might peel Russia away from the group. Yet President Donald Trump’s oft-expressed bonhomie toward the Kremlin has opened no gaps with the other three. As seen from Moscow, the administration has been unable to deliver a deal on Ukraine, and any Trump-driven rapprochement with Washington is unlikely to endure: Congress continues to pressure Russia, and a future administration may well adopt a tougher approach.

More fundamentally, attempts to weaken the axis misunderstand what holds it together. Its members object to an international order that they see as enshrining Western dominance at their expense. But more pointedly, they oppose the United States’ extraordinary power to constrain, isolate, and punish them, and potentially to threaten their regimes. Recent U.S. actions have only rekindled those concerns. The United States’ capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei reinforce long-standing fears in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran about U.S. intervention and regime security.

The axis countries may moderate their anti-American rhetoric when doing so is tactically useful, but their motivation to reduce their vulnerability to American power remains. The Trump administration’s own skepticism about international order will not ease minds in axis capitals. On the contrary, Trump’s efforts to create a more transactional and coercive world may increase the value of their partnerships. As rules and institutions constrain less and brute power matters more, countries will seek partners to help them blunt sanctions, access critical technologies, compensate for military weaknesses, expand their room for maneuver, and resist isolation. Axis cooperation is evolving to meet the moment.

NEW REGIONS, NEW PROBLEMS

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, cooperation among the four countries was relatively easy to map. Iran provided Russia with drones, and North Korea sent ammunition, ballistic missiles, and later, troops. China became Moscow’s most critical lifeline, buying Russian oil and supplying the machine tools, microelectronics, and other components it needed first to sustain and then to expand its military production. Russia, in turn, transferred increasingly sophisticated military technology to its partners.

These exchanges were consequential, but they could still largely be understood as a series of bilateral transactions focused on Russia’s war. That is becoming less true. Cooperation is increasingly networked and geared toward solving new problems in new regions.

Russia’s drone program illustrates the change. Iran initially sold Russia its Shahed drones and then helped Moscow establish production at home. Russia did not simply replicate what it received; it incorporated Chinese components and continually modified the drones’ navigation, communications, payloads, propulsion, and tactics in response to Ukrainian defenses. New military units fed successful modifications back into production, generating an unusually rapid cycle of battlefield adaptation. Russia’s Unmanned Systems Forces, a drone-and-robotics branch of the Russian armed forces, was established last year to help institutionalize this cycle. The combination of domestic adaptation and axis partnership has proved effective. Russia’s latest jet-powered Geran drones, for instance, are faster, carry larger payloads, and are significantly harder for Ukrainian forces to intercept than earlier variants.

Russian improvements do not stay in Russia, either. They circulate through the axis network. For Iran, the technology that originally flowed to Russia is now returning, along with tactical advice drawn from Russia’s experience in Ukraine. If Russia’s jet-powered drones also show up in the Middle East, as they likely will, Iranian attacks on U.S. forces and regional energy infrastructure will become harder and costlier to defend against.

North Korea and China are also benefiting. According to Ukrainian reports, Russia struck a deal to help North Korea expand production of its Shahed-type drones. North Korean engineers have learned from time spent working in Russia’s massive Yelabuga drone factory, and North Korean forces fighting alongside Russia have gained firsthand experience in integrating drones into modern combat. Chinese military personnel have received training in drone warfare from Russian forces, and Chinese suppliers are gaining valuable information about how their technologies perform in combat. Beijing is thus seeing gains from the evolution of drone warfare that began with Iranian technology and has been refined in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

THE MODEL CAN TRAVEL

Two years ago, it was not clear whether partnerships among the four members of the axis could outlast the war that accelerated their formation. If the Ukraine war ended and Russia no longer needed Iranian drones, North Korean ammunition, or Chinese economic and technological support, the relationships might lose momentum.

Yet the war did not only create an immediate need for cooperation. It has also provided proof of concept for what these partnerships can accomplish, beyond what any country might attain on its own. Ukrainian defenses, Western sanctions, U.S. military supplies, and diplomatic isolation have all been less effective than would be the case if Russia were operating alone. By helping one another withstand pressure, the axis countries make it harder for the United States and its allies to compel them to change course.

Iran is now showing that the model can travel. Russia’s support for Tehran has been operationally meaningful but carefully bounded. Even as it fights its own war in Ukraine, Moscow has found ways to help Iran strike American targets and sustain the fight through diplomatic cover and material support while stopping short of actions that could draw Russia into direct conflict with the United States. China has been even more cautious, but its sharing of dual-use electronics and purchases of Iranian oil have similarly enhanced Iran’s ability to withstand U.S. pressure.

Russian, Iranian, and Chinese officials meeting in Beijing, March 2025 Reuters

Such restraint is not evidence that the axis is weakening but rather a defining feature of how these partnerships work. With the striking exception of North Korean soldiers deployed on Russia’s behalf, the axis countries have generally avoided fighting one another’s wars. Instead, they provide political backing, economic support, intelligence, technology, and limited military assistance when doing so advances their own interests at manageable risk.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran have taught the axis another lesson: supporting a fellow member does not merely strengthen the recipient. Conflict in one theater can also create opportunities for partners elsewhere. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for example, sent oil prices soaring, delivering a windfall to Russia and prompting Washington to temporarily ease restrictions on Russian oil exports. Iran’s war thus generated resources Russia could use to sustain its own.

Before attacking Iran, the United States redeployed key military assets, including air and missile defenses, from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. As the fighting continued, U.S. forces put two aircraft carriers in the region, leaving none in the Indo-Pacific. China gains operational freedom from a thinner U.S. military presence in the western Pacific and is less vulnerable when U.S. munitions stocks are depleted. If Washington settles into a prolonged strategy of containing Iran, as it did with Iraq in the 1990s, Beijing could enjoy the advantages of those diversions for years.

DO NO FURTHER HARM

The experience of the axis of upheaval shows that the size and strength of a network matter less if its members cannot turn their individual capabilities into collective power. The United States and its allies start from a position of considerable advantage: greater economic and technological resources, more capable militaries, and a far larger network of allies and partners. The question is which network can make better use of its assets.

That starts with leadership. For decades, the United States favored an international order that forbade wars of conquest, upheld freedom of the seas, maintained a generally open global economy, and allowed populations to exercise democratic rights, even if autocracies remained. Washington coupled this vision with an implicit bargain: any country that wished to join the order could do so. Upholding the order’s basic principles conferred benefits, including from the United States: trade relations, diplomatic preferences, sometimes military alliances.

For countries that rejected the open international order, as the axis countries do today, the benefits were far fewer and the penalties considerable. The United States sanctioned, pressured, and sometimes went to war against rogue states, and it resisted the establishment of competing orders such as the Cold War communist bloc. U.S. foreign policy started from the seemingly uncontroversial premise that Washington should befriend like-minded countries and treat them better than rejectionists.

The Trump administration demonstrates, at least at times, something like the opposite inclination. The U.S. ambassador to China recently said that Trump offered to sell Beijing weapons, while stalling arms sales to Taiwan. The president has expressed greater interest in and affection for North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, than for South Korea’s democratically elected president, Lee Jae-myung. The administration has also intermittently pressured Ukraine to cave in its war of survival against Russian aggression. And Trump has threatened to bomb Oman, a longtime partner. Such moves both strengthen the axis countries and weaken the cohesion of the network best positioned to confront them.

Doing no further harm would be a good start in dealing with the axis. Beyond that, Washington should help its partners grow stronger. Just as the axis countries are helping one another work around sanctions, preserve access to critical technologies and components, and sustain their economies under pressure, the United States should aid its own network. That means strengthening supply chains that run through trusted partners, sharing technology, and encouraging allies to take on greater security burdens. Washington must take care, however, not to transfer defense responsibilities faster than allies can develop the capabilities to assume them—and not to do so in ways that erode trust, interoperability, and coordination. Otherwise, the United States and its allies could become individually more capable but collectively less effective.

The United States should also reverse policies that undercut its own network. Tariffs and other protectionist measures harm allied economies and their industrial bases. Expressing a desire to seize allies’ territory and attempting to undermine their political leaders do not make for a more capable international network. Washington should project vision and leadership to its friends, not jarring uncertainty and bullying transactionalism.

Even if the United States changes course, American and allied policymakers should prepare for a long struggle. As the unsuccessful regime-change effort in Iran demonstrated, there are no shortcuts to besting the axis countries, together or individually. The contest of networks will be nearly global, waged in multiple domains, with huge stakes riding on the outcome. The United States and its allies have the capacity to prevail. They should demonstrate the will.

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