On July 17, an Iranian missile struck the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, killing three American soldiers and wounding four others in an attack characterized by an unusual and devastating degree of precision. In the weeks that followed, U.S. intelligence and defense officials made a disturbing discovery: prior to the attack, Tehran had received high-resolution satellite imagery of the base, data directly instrumental in refining its targeting capabilities. Following the strike, Iran obtained additional imagery, allowing its forces to assess the damage and lay the groundwork for future operations. Those critical images, investigators discovered, came not from domestic Iranian assets, but from Chinese commercial and state-affiliated entities.
This precision strike was far from an isolated incident, underscoring a broader, deeply concerning trend in modern international conflict. China is far from alone in quietly assisting Tehran’s military campaigns. Russia, too, has actively helped Tehran locate and strike American and allied positions across the Middle East. Just two days before a March 27 assault on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia—an attack that wounded 12 American personnel—14 Russian spy satellites tracked overhead. U.S. officials subsequently concluded that Moscow had fed vital satellite intelligence directly to Iran, effectively guiding the incoming projectiles. Beyond intelligence sharing, Moscow has supplied Iran with advanced weaponry and military expertise, including upgraded iterations of Iranian-designed drones that have been heavily refined on the battlefields of Ukraine. Furthermore, Russian engineers are actively assisting Iran in the development of sophisticated supersonic cruise missiles, armaments explicitly designed to evade advanced U.S. and Israeli air defense systems.
Neither Russia nor China has formally or directly entered Iran’s ongoing military conflict with the United States. Crucially, they have not needed to. By providing targeted intelligence, advanced military technology, crucial components, and robust economic and diplomatic backing, these powers are providing Tehran with precisely what it requires to sustain its operations without entangling themselves in a direct war with Washington.
This dynamic stands in stark contrast to the structural advantages the United States possessed at the outset of the conflict. Washington entered the fray backed by assets its adversaries historically lacked: a vast, sprawling network of formal allies, established overseas military bases, deep intelligence-sharing frameworks, defense partnerships, and highly interoperable forces stretching across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet, as the conflict has worn on, many of Washington’s traditional partners have grown increasingly reluctant to openly associate themselves with the campaign. Some allies have outright denied the United States specific forms of military access, at least temporarily, while others have publicly resisted American calls to help secure vital maritime chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz.
The widening gap illustrates a striking shift since security analysts first classified Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of upheaval" in Foreign Affairs two years ago. At the genesis of this alignment, America’s adversaries were saddled with a comparatively weaker, disjointed network, while Washington commanded the far superior coalition. However, after years of trial and error spent navigating Russia’s war in Ukraine, members of this axis have successfully learned how to operationalize their network within a brand-new theater. They are fine-tuning their cross-border cooperation to make their respective partners more resilient—and consequently, far more dangerous to the United States—while successfully containing their own costs and risks. Meanwhile, Washington risks generating friction across its traditional partnerships rather than deepening them, potentially squandering its structural network just as its adversaries are learning to maximize theirs.
Sources of Upheaval
Much of the geopolitical landscape has transformed dramatically since 2024. Most visibly, the United States itself has transformed from the chief architect of the international order into a distinct source of global upheaval. The Trump administration has openly challenged established international institutions, placed severe strains on traditional alliances, and embraced a far more transactional, unpredictable approach to foreign policy. The administration has upended long-standing trade agreements, questioned the sovereignty of close allies such as Canada and Denmark, and championed strategic unpredictability. At the same time, it has pursued improved diplomatic relations with China, North Korea, and Russia while simultaneously attempting to economically and militarily weaken Iran. Yet, none of these shifting diplomatic overtures have managed to loosen the strategic ties binding America’s adversaries together.
Early in the current presidential term, U.S. officials frequently expressed hope that normalizing relations with Moscow might successfully peel Russia away from its anti-Western alignment. Yet, despite President Donald Trump’s frequent expressions of personal warmth toward the Kremlin, no substantive gaps have opened between Moscow and the other members of the axis. From the perspective of Moscow, the U.S. administration has consistently failed to deliver a viable, lasting deal concerning Ukraine. Furthermore, any Trump-driven rapprochement with Washington is viewed by the Kremlin as inherently temporary; the U.S. Congress maintains relentless pressure on Russia, and a future American administration could easily pivot back to a harder-line, confrontational approach.
More fundamentally, attempts by Washington to peel members away from the axis misunderstand the core glue holding the coalition together. Its constituent members fundamentally object to an international order they view as permanently enshrining Western dominance at their direct expense. More pointedly, they deeply oppose the extraordinary, coercive power the United States wields to constrain, isolate, and punish them, and potentially to threaten the survival of their ruling regimes. Recent high-profile U.S. actions have only aggressively rekindled those exact fears. The U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the targeted killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have thoroughly reinforced long-standing anxieties in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran regarding unchecked American interventionism and regime security.
While axis nations may deliberately moderate their anti-American rhetoric whenever it proves tactically useful, their underlying motivation to systematically reduce their vulnerability to American power remains entirely intact. The Trump administration’s internal skepticism toward the traditional rules-based international order will do nothing to ease anxious minds in axis capitals. On the contrary, Washington’s push toward a transactional, coercive global environment effectively increases the intrinsic value of their partnerships. As global rules and institutions constrain nations less and brute geopolitical power matters more, countries naturally seek out reliable partners to help them blunt economic sanctions, access restricted critical technologies, compensate for glaring military weaknesses, expand their room for geopolitical maneuver, and resist international isolation. Axis cooperation is rapidly evolving to meet this precise moment.
New Regions, New Problems
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, cooperation among the four adversarial nations was relatively straightforward to map and categorize. Iran supplied Russia with explosive Shahed drones, while North Korea funneled millions of artillery rounds, ballistic missiles, and eventually combat troops into the European theater. China quickly emerged as Moscow’s most critical economic lifeline, aggressively purchasing discounted Russian oil while supplying the machine tools, advanced microelectronics, and industrial components required to sustain and expand Russian military manufacturing. In return, Moscow began transferring increasingly sophisticated military technology to its partners.
While these early exchanges were profoundly consequential, they could still largely be understood as a series of isolated bilateral transactions primarily focused on sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine. Today, however, that characterization is becoming increasingly obsolete. Cooperation among the axis is now thoroughly networked and purposefully geared toward solving novel strategic problems across entirely new geographic regions.
Russia’s domestic drone program offers a prime illustration of this structural evolution. Iran initially sold its Shahed loitering munitions to Moscow before directly assisting the Russian military in establishing domestic manufacturing lines. Rather than simply replicating the foreign technology they received, Russian engineers incorporated advanced Chinese electronic components and continually modified the drones’ navigation systems, communication protocols, explosive payloads, propulsion methods, and tactical employment in direct response to Ukrainian air defenses. Newly formed specialized military units fed successful battlefield modifications straight back into industrial production, generating an unusually rapid and lethal cycle of military adaptation. The creation of Russia’s Unmanned Systems Forces—a dedicated drone-and-robotics branch of the Russian armed forces established last year—helped permanently institutionalize this feedback loop.
The combination of domestic industrial adaptation and cross-border axis partnership has proved remarkably effective. Russia’s latest jet-powered Geran drones, for instance, are significantly faster, carry substantially larger explosive payloads, and are far harder for Ukrainian air defense forces to intercept than earlier propeller-driven variants.
Crucially, these hard-won Russian military improvements do not remain isolated within Russia. Instead, they circulate dynamically through the broader axis network. For Iran, the advanced technology that originally flowed northward to Russia is now filtering back southward, accompanied by invaluable tactical advice drawn directly from Moscow’s brutal combat experience in Ukraine. If these advanced, jet-powered Russian drones inevitably appear in the Middle East—a development regional security analysts consider highly probable—future Iranian attacks on U.S. forces and critical regional energy infrastructure will become vastly more difficult and costly for Western defenses to repel.
North Korea and China are likewise reaping substantial dividends from this networked arrangement. According to recent intelligence reports out of Ukraine, Russia has brokered a deal to help North Korea significantly expand its own domestic production of Shahed-type drones. North Korean engineers have gained vital technical expertise from extended periods working inside Russia’s massive Yelabuga drone manufacturing facility, while North Korean combat units deployed alongside Russian forces have acquired firsthand, brutal experience in integrating unmanned systems into modern combined-arms combat. Concurrently, Chinese military personnel have received specialized training in drone warfare from Russian combat veterans, and Chinese commercial suppliers are gathering priceless real-world data regarding how their dual-use technologies perform under intense combat conditions. Beijing is thus deriving immense strategic insights from an evolution in drone warfare that originally began with Iranian technology and was subsequently forged in the crucible of Ukraine.
The Model Can Travel
Two years ago, it remained an open question whether the transactional partnerships binding the four members of the axis could possibly outlast the specific conflict that accelerated their formation. Analysts questioned whether an eventual end to the war in Ukraine—diminishing Moscow’s immediate need for Iranian drones, North Korean munitions, and Chinese economic backing—might cause these relationships to quickly lose momentum.
Yet, the protracted war did far more than create an immediate, desperate need for wartime cooperation. It has effectively provided a permanent "proof of concept" for what these networked partnerships can accomplish collectively, far surpassing what any single rogue nation might achieve on its own. Ukrainian defenses, sweeping Western sanctions, U.S. military supplies, and stringent diplomatic isolation have all proved markedly less effective against Russia than they would have been had Moscow been forced to operate in complete isolation. By actively helping one another withstand intense geopolitical and economic pressure, axis countries have made it progressively harder for the United States and its allies to compel them to alter their strategic trajectories.
Iran is now actively demonstrating that this cooperative model can travel successfully to other theaters. Russia’s support for Tehran has been operationally meaningful while remaining carefully bounded and calculated. Even as it prosecutes its own grinding war in Ukraine, Moscow has consistently found ways to help Iran strike American targets and sustain its regional campaigns through vital diplomatic cover and material support, while deliberately stopping short of actions that would inevitably drag Russia into a direct military conflagration with the United States. China has maintained an even more cautious posture, yet its steady provision of dual-use electronics and continuous purchases of sanctioned Iranian oil have similarly enhanced Tehran’s capacity to withstand punishing U.S. pressure.
Such strategic restraint is not evidence of a weakening axis; rather, it is a defining operational feature of how these partnerships function. With the striking exception of North Korean soldiers deployed directly on Russia’s behalf, axis nations have largely avoided fighting one another’s direct wars. Instead, they selectively provide political backing, economic lifelines, intelligence data, advanced technology, and limited military assistance whenever doing so clearly advances their individual national interests at a manageable level of risk.
The concurrent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have taught the axis another vital lesson: supporting a fellow member does not merely strengthen the direct recipient. Armed conflict in one distinct theater can concurrently create massive strategic opportunities for partners elsewhere. Iran’s deliberate disruption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, sent global oil prices soaring, delivering an immediate financial windfall to energy-exporter Russia while prompting Washington to temporarily ease economic restrictions on Russian petroleum exports. Iran’s regional war thus generated substantial financial resources that Moscow could subsequently redirect to sustain its own military machine.
Similarly, before initiating major military operations against Iran, the United States was forced to redeploy critical military assets, including scarce air and missile defense systems, away from the Indo-Pacific and into the Middle East. As the fighting prolonged, U.S. Central Command maintained two aircraft carriers in the region simultaneously, leaving zero carriers stationed in the Indo-Pacific. China reaps immediate operational freedom from a temporarily thinned U.S. military presence in the western Pacific, while facing reduced strategic vulnerability as critical U.S. precision munitions stocks are rapidly depleted. If Washington settles into a prolonged, open-ended strategy of containing Iran akin to its containment of Iraq throughout the 1990s, Beijing stands to enjoy the enduring advantages of those strategic diversions for years to come.
Do No Further Harm
The collective experience of the axis of upheaval demonstrates starkly that the mere size and theoretical strength of a traditional network matter very little if its members fail to translate their individual capabilities into cohesive, collective power. The United States and its allies undoubtedly start from a position of immense structural advantage: they possess vastly superior economic and technological resources, far more capable and advanced militaries, and a dramatically larger global network of formal allies and partners. The central question facing Washington is which network can ultimately make more intelligent and efficient use of its underlying assets.
That critical task begins at the highest levels of leadership. For decades, the United States championed an international order that strictly forbade wars of conquest, vigorously upheld the freedom of the seas, maintained a generally open global economy, and permitted populations to exercise democratic rights, even while tolerating various autocracies. Washington coupled this sweeping vision with an implicit, highly attractive bargain: any nation willing to join and respect the international order was welcome to do so. Upholding the order’s basic principles conferred tangible benefits dispensed by the United States, including lucrative trade relations, diplomatic preferences, and reliable security alliances.
For countries that aggressively rejected this open international order—as the axis nations do today—the available benefits were far scarcer and the penalties considerable. The United States routinely sanctioned, diplomatically pressured, and occasionally waged war against rogue states, while actively resisting the establishment of competing geopolitical orders akin to the communist bloc of the Cold War. U.S. foreign policy historically operated from the seemingly uncontroversial premise that Washington should steadfastly befriend like-minded nations and treat them demonstrably better than hostile rejectionists.
By contrast, recent U.S. policy under the Trump administration has frequently demonstrated an inclination toward the exact opposite approach. The U.S. ambassador to China recently disclosed that President Trump had offered to sell advanced weaponry to Beijing while simultaneously stalling critical arms sales to democratic Taiwan. The president has repeatedly expressed far greater personal interest in and affection for North Korea’s authoritarian dictator, Kim Jong Un, than for South Korea’s democratically elected president, Lee Jae-myung. The administration has also intermittently pressured Ukraine to capitulate in its existential war of survival against unprovoked Russian aggression, while publicly threatening long-standing regional partners like Oman. Such erratic policy moves serve a dual purpose: they actively strengthen isolated axis countries while systematically eroding the internal cohesion and trust of the very network best positioned to confront them.
Adopting a posture of doing no further harm would represent a sound, sensible starting point in dealing with the rising axis. Beyond merely halting self-inflicted wounds, Washington should actively assist its partners in growing stronger. Just as axis countries are systematically helping one another work around crippling economic sanctions, preserve access to restricted critical technologies and industrial components, and sustain their national economies under extreme pressure, the United States should proactively aid its own network. This requires strengthening vital supply chains routed through trusted partners, sharing advanced technology responsibly, and encouraging allies to assume greater regional security burdens. Washington must take great care, however, not to transfer defense responsibilities faster than its allies can realistically develop the sovereign capabilities required to assume them—and to avoid doing so in ways that erode mutual trust, operational interoperability, and strategic coordination. Otherwise, the United States and its partners risk becoming individually more capable on paper while remaining collectively less effective in practice.
Furthermore, the United States should urgently reverse specific domestic and foreign policies that actively undercut its own network. Broad tariffs and heavy-handed protectionist measures inevitably harm allied economies and degrade their domestic industrial bases. Publicly expressing a desire to acquire allied territory or attempting to undermine friendly political leaders does not foster a capable international network. Washington must project a clear vision and steady leadership to its friends, steering away from jarring strategic uncertainty and bullying transactionalism.
Even if the United States successfully changes course and repairs its alliances, American and allied policymakers must prepare themselves for a long, grinding geopolitical struggle. As the ultimately unsuccessful regime-change efforts in Iran demonstrated, there are no simple shortcuts to besting the axis powers, whether acting together or individually. This ongoing contest of networks will remain nearly global in scope, waged fiercely across multiple military, economic, and informational domains, with enormous historical stakes riding on the ultimate outcome. The United States and its allies retain the collective capacity to prevail. They must now demonstrate the will to do so.
