China, Russia, and Iran are enemies we can’t bribe or persuade.
China, Russia, and Iran are enemies we can’t bribe or persuade.
T he Hamas invasion of Israel underlines a basic reality of the current world order that has been increasingly obvious for some time: China, Russia, and Iran have grown into a new Axis. This Axis opposes and menaces the West and the world’s liberal and/or democratic states and their allies — including Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. For that reason, it tends to draw into its orbit all of the enemies of Western liberal democracy. We need to be realistic about this fact, and about what it implies.
The new Axis is not like the Warsaw Pact, a single alliance connected by the central nerve system of a dominating empire. And despite the continued presence of the Iranian regime, it is not like the 2002 “Axis of Evil,” which comprised three rogue states on the periphery (two of them mortal enemies), who mainly shared common tactics and some connections through an underworld of terrorism. We are, instead, dealing with three large and almost geographically contiguous nations on the Asian mainland.
Crucially, two of them are among the world’s largest countries, with vast territory and populations, large armies and navies, the domestic capacity to produce and duplicate high technology, and long-standing nuclear arsenals. These would be formidable adversaries in a conventional or nuclear war; they are already potent backers of proxies and among the world’s shrewdest regimes in the black arts of espionage and propaganda. In this sense they resemble nothing so much as the Central Powers of the First World War or the Axis of the Second. Which is not a reassuring parallel, given what stopping each of those took.
The Chinese, Russian, and Iranian regimes are not animated by a common ideology other than nationalism, and, for that matter, their nationalist ideas are each very particular to the old soil of their own cultures. While Vladimir Putin’s regime justifies itself in Russian traditions that meld czarist and Soviet history, the official ideologies of China and Iran remain rooted in the revolutionary doctrines of, respectively, the 1949 Chinese Communist revolution and the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution. None of the three are interested in exporting ideas or a worldview that the others would like to adopt.
But their own ideas are not the point. Ours are.
A Monopoly of Ideas
The end of the Cold War found the liberal-democratic idea (small “l,” small “d”) triumphant. With the collapse of global communism, there was no longer a viable rival to a worldview grounded in the rights of individuals and government answerable to them. That worldview carried with it an opening of economic liberties and free markets, both in social-democratic states (witness the liberalizing of the Israeli and Indian economies) and in places such as China that expanded trade and a measure of free enterprise without any political liberalization.
For most of the past three decades, wherever liberalism, democracy, and free markets have been resisted, it has been either by the dead hand of closed societies (such as North Korea and Cuba) or based on local and particular culture (as in much of the Islamic world). The September 11 attacks, and after them the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, offered an ideological opponent to liberal democracy but not a real competitor. Radical Islam may offer an all-consuming ideological worldview that is highly effective at recruiting the disaffected few, but it has persistently failed to have the sort of sustainable mass appeal of 20th-century communism or early modern absolute monarchy.
The dangerous illusion for Americans was the tendency — associated with neoconservatism but not exclusive to it — to assume that, because nothing could compete with liberal democracy and free markets on the mass global marketplace of ideas, we could repeat in other contexts the Cold War strategy of undermining foreign tyrannies by seducing their people with our own way of thinking. Who wouldn’t rather live like an American?
There is still power in that idea, but it turned out to be harder to export to some places than others. Some of the old Cold War adversaries, such as Russia, soured after their first taste of democracy and free markets and gradually fell to older forms of authority. Muslim societies proved resistant to American liberalism. The Chinese regime grew more sophisticated at marrying the country’s ancient cultural norms — which are quite un-Western, illiberal, and undemocratic — with modern methods of pervasive surveillance and propaganda.
In the past two decades, the West itself grew more illiberal, less confident in its own ideals, and more hostile to its own heritage, while its societies grew obsessed with secular sexual ethics that were far more foreign and less attractive to people in traditional societies than they were in the America of the 1980s. Even across the broader West and its allies, we see both the rise of an increasingly intolerant form of progressivism and the resurgence of traditional and illiberal ideas about religious and secular authority that are particular to places such as India, Israel, and Hungary.
A Community of Interests
Resistance to the Western liberal-democratic and free-market order is the raison d’être of the new Axis and explains how it can cast itself as defensive in nature even as it makes revanchist claims to old imperial territory. For Russia, this means Ukraine and the rest of the old Soviet and czarist lands; for China, it means mainly Taiwan, one of the last remaining pieces of the territory conquered during the Qing Dynasty that is still outside the control of the People’s Republic. For Iran, it means the Muslim reconquest of Israel. The fact that activity on these fronts strains the American-led coalition is precisely what causes these governments to think and act as if they have interests in common, even if (like Germany and Japan in the 1940s) this does not require much in the way of formally coordinated action.
Consider the current crisis. The precise details of Iran’s responsibility for the Hamas attack on Israel is unknown and likely to never be exactly known. But the evidence of Iran’s long and deep engagement as the primary backer of Hamas is open and notorious. Over the past week, we saw Summer Said, Benoit Faucon, and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal report from what they claimed to be Hamas and Hezbollah sources that Iran was intimately involved in the planning of the attack. Then, Joby Warrick, Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, and Souad Mekhennet of the Washington Post reported from “current and former Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials” that Hamas had received crucial training, funding, and technical assistance from Iran.
The Biden administration tried to push back: Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times have dutifully published a claim from “several American officials” that “key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attack in Israel.” That seems uncharacteristic of the Iran–Hamas relationship, but even if it’s true, as one of the Post sources noted, “If you train people on how to use weapons, you expect them to eventually use them.”
A further report in today’s Times by Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman explains:
Over the past year, there have been signs that Iran and its proxies were preparing to take a more aggressive approach toward Israel. Gen. Esmail Ghaani, who is in charge of supervising Iran’s network of proxy militias as head of the country’s paramilitary Quds Force, repeatedly traveled to Lebanon for covert sessions with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, a Shiite Lebanese militia that Iran also supports. Over the past year, Mr. Ghaani worked to coordinate and unify all of Iran’s proxies, according to public statements from Iranian analysts and five Iranians familiar with the work of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, held an hourslong online meeting in March with an elite group of strategists from all the Iran-backed militias and told them to get ready for a war with Israel with a scope and reach — including a ground invasion — that would mark a new era, according to two participants from Iran and Syria.
Russia has tried to play both sides over the years, courting both Hamas and Israel, but its legitimation of Hamas dovetails with its interest in backing the latest assault, on which Russia has been suspiciously quiet. Vladimir Putin invited Hamas leaders to the Kremlin back in 2006, when elections first raised them to power, and on multiple occasions since then, most recently this spring. Some Russia critics claim that Hamas’s tactics have signs of Russian training. The assault came on Putin’s birthday.
For the Chinese, by contrast, the eruption of war in Israel can be treated as an opportunity worth exploiting, just as the Biden administration’s effort to squeeze Saudi Arabia allowed China to swoop in and negotiate a rapprochement between the Saudi and Iranian regimes — to the benefit of the latter. China’s approach to much of the world is a combination of offering material incentives against and waging propaganda war on the West, rather than bothering to market the Chinese model itself.
Rhetorically, China has cast the conflict in morally neutral cycle-of-violence terms and taken an increasingly pro-Hamas tone, as Foreign Minister Wang Yi argued that “the crux of the issue lies in the fact that justice has not been done to the Palestinian people.” This is naked hypocrisy coming from the imperial oppressors of Tibet and the Uyghurs, but it is popular with third-world governments that see the Palestinian cause in terms of “decolonization.” China, increasingly a financial backer of the Iranian regime (as well as a major importer of Russian, Iranian, and Venezuelan oil), is also using its propaganda network inside the United States to spread pro-Hamas arguments.
Strategic Implications
If we think in terms of an Axis, what does that mean?
The first implication is that we need to accept that it will not easily be broken up. For too long, prominent people in this country — leading Democrats, business elites, and a faction on the right — have entertained the illusion that one or more of the members of this Axis can be peeled off and realigned with our side. Most prominently, the Obama and Biden administrations have been obsessed with forging a working relationship with Iran that would end its isolation from the West. This had led to a long series of compromises and deals, none of which have modified the behavior of the mullahcracy in the slightest.
They have not been alone in this folly. Western business has been very hesitant to let go of the Chinese market, even as it becomes clear that their engagement with China allows the country more leverage over their behavior than they can hope to exercise over China’s. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has worked hard to avoid the enmity of Russia or China and has been repaid with the hard reality that they will always prefer Iran to Israel. Elements of the American Right have looked to Russia, with its traditionalist Orthodox church, its masculine culture, and its long battles against Muslim enemies, as some sort of friend; it is not.
Sure, if you look at the strategic situation in board-game terms, it would be great to repeat the Nixon-to-China or Italy-to-the-Entente moves of breaking off one the members of the Axis and having it defect to our side. But a realistic assessment of the modern Axis members’ incentives should have made it obvious some time ago that their regimes can get a lot more out of one another without the West’s pesky interest in liberties and rights.
The best we can do is, when possible, to aggravate sources of tension among the partners. Chinese irredentism, for example, still rankles at the humiliations of the mid 19th century. One of those humiliations came in 1860, when China — beset by multiple major civil wars and invaded by Britain and France — agreed to cede territory to Russia that included what became the port of Vladivostok, thereby rewriting a more favorable territorial settlement dating to 1689.
At least in the case of China and Russia, we should also abandon the neoconservative illusion that spreading our culture and values will lead their people to demand changes that fundamentally alter or overthrow the regimes from within. China’s culture is too ancient and deep-rooted, its mood too nationalistic, its propaganda machine too sophisticated; and the West is too consumed with its own ills to manage that. Russians, likewise, are unlikely any time soon to replace the Putin regime with something that looks Western. This has implications for U.S. immigration policy: We should be thinking more about granting asylum to people wishing to permanently break with China and Russia and less about allowing Chinese and Russian nationals to study in American universities, spy on us, and return home with what they’ve learned (while their families are effectively held hostage to ensure their loyalty). Iran is a different story: There remains a more reasonable hope of breaking the mullahs’ grip, which remains deeply unpopular with the urban, educated segment of the population.
Another consequence is that we need to get genuinely serious about the efforts of all three countries to gain intelligence, spread propaganda, and install sympathizers in public office in the United States. Russian efforts to gain influence in the 2016 Trump campaign and the Trump administration, and to inject propaganda into that election and its subsequent controversies, is well known. It is far from the only example. The Chinese regime penetrated the offices of Dianne Feinstein and Eric Swalwell — and then some. The Iranians had an entire propaganda-influence operation around Biden’s chief Iran envoy Robert Malley, who has since been suspended by the State Department and is under FBI investigation. Malley has been tied to the Iran Experts Initiative, a network of Western scholars who spread Iranian-government propaganda. Malley hired one of the experts, ultimately getting her into the Pentagon, and only failed to hire another because he failed to get a security clearance — so instead Malley let the guy ghostwrite his own tweets. House Republicans are right to demand more information about Malley and the entire Iran-influence network and its intersection with Iran-deal enthusiasts.
Militarily, the situation calls for more serious investment in our armed forces, in particular the industrial base needed to build ships and planes and rockets and other weaponry far faster than we do today. Politically, we need to sober up about picking leaders. Culturally and educationally, we need to rebuild the sense of informed patriotism and civilizational self-confidence that carried us through the Cold War and will be needed for the struggle ahead — needed, even, to form the desire to survive it.
The road ahead will be filled with peril. But the first step is seeing that there is a road, and where it is possible for it to lead.