
The US, Europe and a Ukraine-Russia peace deal
EXPERT INTERVIEWS – As global leaders gather at the Munich Security conference this weekend, they confront profound questions about Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Trump […] More
EXPERT Q&A – Experts have been concerned in recent times, about national security threats emanating from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea but a new collective strength based on closer ties between the these countries – most clearly demonstrated by Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang’s support for Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine – has the potential to reshape today’s world order.
Cipher Brief expert and former Acting Director of CIA John McLaughlin talked to us about how this new informal alliance (often referred to as the ‘Axis of Authoritarians‘,) is already having an impact in places like Ukraine.
The Cipher Brief: How should we understand this new “Axis of authoritarians” as the informal alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are being referred to?
McLaughlin: On one level, we’re tempted to think of it as a catchphrase. It’s much more important than that, and it may be emblematic of the major changes of our times.
We always think about the past in terms of what we’ve experienced. So, I think of it often as ‘how does this compare to World War II? How does this compare to the Cold War?’ What we’re going into now is very different, and we run the risk of misjudging it.
What it represents is not what we experienced with the Cold War, because the Cold War was about the alignment of the world into two big blocs, which various countries chose to join and which some countries chose not to join. This is different.
You’ve got a block that’s hardening on the western side with the growth of NATO.
In addition to that, a tripartite agreement among Japan, South Korea and the United States; and a tripartite agreement involving the Philippines, the United States and Japan; and the AUKUS agreement involving the U.K., Australia, and the United States. That’s on the side of the countries we are allied with or have close relationships with.
On the other side, you’ve got the one we’re talking about — Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China.
The alignment of these countries produces something greater than the sum of the parts. Because what’s happening is that they are mutually covering each other’s deficits, and therefore each country in that group is becoming more uniformly capable.
This is not an ideological competition. This is a competition about alignments.
The Ukraine war is at the heart of this in the sense that Putin would not be visiting North Korea and hugging Kim Jong-Un if he didn’t need things for the Ukraine war. He would not be entering into a major strategic military partnership with Iran, and Iran would not be rushing to build a drone plant in Russia, if it were not for the Ukraine war.
The Ukraine war breaks all the rules that we thought had been established as to how the world works, how threat is perceived, and how you respond to it.
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The Cipher Brief: What are the practical manifestations of this grouping?
China benefits from all of this because it needs Iranian oil, it needs Russian oil.
Russia needs China’s help. And they’ve gotten upwards of 3 million artillery shells from North Korea. They’ve gotten countless hundreds of drones from Iran. And all of this increases the capability and influence of these countries in any confrontation with us.
For example, let’s assume there is a Taiwan contingency of some sort. If we try to invoke our partners in Asia, well, by virtue of North Korea now having tightened this relationship with Russia, Russia has more of a hand in that confrontation than they would have had otherwise. And this “axis” will end up strengthening North Korea militarily, which means that North Korea can distract or can certainly tie up South Korea at a time when we might want South Korea’s assistance in a Taiwan contingency.
Or in the Middle East, because of the tightening relationship between Iran and North Korea and Russia, in the event that there is, as appears likely, a confrontation between Lebanon and Israel, with Lebanon housing a major Iranian proxy in the form of Hezbollah, there’s no question that Russia is prepared to strengthen Iran’s missile capability in one way or another. And that in turn, would reflect on Iran’s ability to support Hezbollah in any confrontation with Israel.
And if I were to imagine, without looking at any classified information, what are the Iranians and North Koreans getting in return for what looks like almost essential help they’re providing to Russia? Well, I know what they need. The Iranians need help with their missile program because they have yet to get to the point of an ICBM capability. Russia can help them with that.
What do the North Koreans want? Well, they’ve demonstrated that they have a nascent intercontinental ballistic missile capability by virtue of the range they’ve achieved with their most robust missile. But I’ve yet to see anything in the public information sphere that tells me they have the capacity to guide that missile very precisely.
Going back to Iran, they are by all accounts in possession of enough material to make a bomb. But once they do, I don’t think they have yet mastered the capacity to put that into a bomb and then to miniaturize it sufficiently to put it on one of their medium range missiles. That’s something Russia could help them with.
So in all of those ways, this “axis” is far greater than the sum of its parts.
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The Cipher Brief: How should the U.S. respond to this “Axis”?
I don’t think we should think of this as a whole series of bilateral issues that we have to deal with. It’s more than that. The first thing that has to happen is that we need a whole-of-society approach, or a whole-of-society understanding of what we’ve just been talking about, and we don’t have that.
What we’ve seen in Europe with the imminence and the proximity of a Russian threat is a societal awareness that is now highly developed. Talk to a Finn, talk to a Swede, talk to an Estonian, talk to a Pole. They understand what they’re up against.
We’ve been so caught up in our own domestic drama, that looking out beyond our borders is not a focus. Our national leadership needs to lay out the fact that the world is very different than the world that most of us have integrated into our societal understanding of how the world works.
We think of it as, ‘Oh, there was the Cold War and we won that, and then we had these two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, and they didn’t go very well and we’re glad they’re over, and now something’s going on with China.‘ We have to worry about that. But somehow, national leadership needs to find a way to communicate to the American public that this is the world we’re looking at now and maintaining our preeminence in it will not be easy.
The second thing is, if I said that the center of gravity for all of this is the Ukraine war, you’ve got to then press on the American public that we must not allow Putin to prevail with what he’s done in Ukraine. It breaks all of the rules of what we judge to be a world in which institutions and rules are commonly followed.
And then the third thing you have to do, is fit China into this because China and Russia are still the pivot points for everything we’ve talked about. The focus on China needs to be on deterrence. It means all aspects of the U.S. government need to work together to bring to bear a combination of diplomacy, military preparedness and communication to deter and hold off any kind of kinetic conflict with China.
We need to find every means we can to have a robust diplomatic dialogue with China in which we make clear where we stand on our capabilities, where we stand in terms of the issues that divide us.
In order to be credible, we need to reinvigorate our defense industrial base, which has deteriorating. And we need to demonstrate our credibility by doing what we said we were going to do in Ukraine. China needs to see that we will defeat Putin in Ukraine. That will carry a very strong message for Taiwan. We won’t have to say anything about Taiwan, but if he sees that Russia loses and cannot win and that we are in it for the long haul, the message to China is one of deterrence.
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