On July 17, an Iranian missile struck the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, leaving three American soldiers dead and four others wounded. The strike was notable for its unusual precision, prompting an intensive intelligence investigation by U.S. officials in the weeks that followed. Investigators ultimately discovered that prior to the attack, Tehran had received high-resolution satellite imagery of the base specifically tailored to aid its targeting. Afterward, Iran obtained additional imagery, which investigators believe helped the regime assess the damage and refine plans for future strikes. Crucially, these vital images did not come from domestic Iranian capabilities; they were supplied by Chinese entities.
China, however, is not acting alone in providing critical assistance to Iran. Russia has similarly aided Tehran in identifying and striking American and allied targets across the Middle East. Just two days before a March 27 attack on the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia—an assault that wounded 12 American personnel—14 Russian spy satellites passed directly overhead. U.S. officials later concluded that Moscow had funneled crucial satellite intelligence to Iran, directly enabling its precision strikes. Beyond intelligence sharing, Moscow has provided Iran with advanced weapons and military expertise. This includes upgraded versions of Iranian-designed drones that have been heavily refined on the active battlefields of Ukraine, while Russian engineers are actively assisting Iran in developing supersonic cruise missiles capable of evading sophisticated U.S. and Israeli air defenses.
Neither Russia nor China has formally or directly entered Iran’s ongoing war with the United States. They have not needed to. By supplying vital intelligence on American targets, advanced military technology and critical components, and unwavering economic and diplomatic support, these powers provide Tehran with precisely what it needs to sustain its operations without entangling themselves in a direct military conflict with Washington.
When the broader conflict escalated, the United States entered the arena with structural advantages that its adversaries historically lacked: a vast, formalized network of international allies, entrenched military bases, deep intelligence-sharing arrangements, institutionalized defense partnerships, and highly interoperable forces spanning Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet, as the conflict has worn on, many of Washington’s traditional partners have shown considerable reluctance to closely associate themselves with the campaign. Some have explicitly 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 such as the Strait of Hormuz.
This dynamic illustrates a striking and consequential shift since analysts first described Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of upheaval" in the pages of Foreign Affairs two years ago. The United States’ adversaries initially formed a loose and seemingly weaker network, while Washington commanded the far stronger one. But after spending the past few years helping Russia prosecute its war in Ukraine, members of this axis have successfully learned how to make their cooperative network function seamlessly in a new theater. They are fine-tuning their mutual cooperation to render their respective partners more resilient—and significantly more dangerous to the United States—while carefully limiting their own costs and risks. Washington, by contrast, has frequently created friction within its traditional partnerships rather than deepening them, running the very real risk of squandering its network advantages just as its adversaries are learning to maximize theirs.
Sources of Upheaval
Much has fundamentally changed since 2024. Most visibly, the United States itself has transformed into an internal source of upheaval within the international system. The Trump administration has openly challenged traditional international institutions, strained historic alliances, and adopted a sharply transactional approach to foreign policy. It has upended longstanding trade agreements, questioned the sovereignty of close allies such as Canada and Denmark, and deliberately embraced a posture of diplomatic unpredictability. At the same time, the administration has pursued improved relations with China, North Korea, and Russia while simultaneously attempting to isolate and weaken Iran. Paradoxically, none of these diplomatic maneuvers have loosened the tightening ties among America’s primary adversaries.
Early in the Trump administration, U.S. officials expressed cautious optimism that normalizing diplomatic relations with Moscow might successfully peel Russia away from the broader anti-Western bloc. Yet President Donald Trump’s frequently expressed bonhomie toward the Kremlin has failed to open any meaningful diplomatic gaps with the other three axis members. From Moscow’s perspective, the administration has proven entirely unable to deliver a durable settlement on Ukraine, and any Trump-driven rapprochement with Washington is widely viewed as fleeting. The U.S. Congress continues to maintain intense legislative pressure on Russia, and any future administration in Washington could easily adopt a significantly tougher posture.
More fundamentally, attempts to weaken the axis through bilateral diplomacy fundamentally misunderstand the core glue that holds it together. Its members share a profound objection to an international order they view as permanently enshrining Western dominance at their direct expense. More pointedly, they collectively oppose the extraordinary, unilateral power of the United States to constrain, isolate, and punish them, and potentially to threaten the survival of their regimes. Recent high-profile U.S. actions have only served to rekindle those deepest fears. The U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the targeted killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have reinforced long-standing anxieties in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and Tehran regarding American interventionism and regime security.
While axis nations may occasionally moderate their anti-American rhetoric when it is tactically useful, their underlying motivation to reduce their vulnerability to American power remains entirely intact. The Trump administration’s overt skepticism toward the established international order will do nothing to ease the minds of leaders in axis capitals. On the contrary, Trump’s persistent efforts to forge a more coercive and transactional world stage may actually increase the intrinsic value of their partnerships. As global rules and institutions constrain nations less and brute power matters more, countries naturally seek out reliable partners to help blunt economic sanctions, access critical technologies, compensate for military weaknesses, expand their diplomatic room for maneuver, and resist international isolation. Axis cooperation is rapidly evolving to meet this historical moment.
New Regions, New Problems
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, cooperation among the four axis nations was relatively straightforward to map. Iran provided Russia with loitering munitions, while North Korea sent vital artillery ammunition, ballistic missiles, and eventually combat troops. China quickly emerged as Moscow’s most critical economic and industrial lifeline, purchasing discounted Russian oil while supplying the machine tools, microelectronics, and advanced components necessary to sustain and then rapidly expand Russian military production. In return, Moscow transferred increasingly sophisticated military technology to its allied partners.
Although these early exchanges were highly consequential, they could still largely be understood as a series of isolated bilateral transactions focused primarily on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Today, that is increasingly less true. Cooperation has become deeply networked and strategically geared toward solving new operational problems across multiple new regions.
Russia’s domestic drone program illustrates this profound structural change. Iran initially sold its Shahed drones directly to Moscow and subsequently helped the Russian military establish domestic production facilities. However, Russia did not simply replicate what it received; it integrated sophisticated Chinese components and continually modified the drones’ navigation systems, communication links, payloads, propulsion mechanisms, and tactical deployment methods in direct response to Ukrainian air defenses. New specialized military units fed successful battlefield modifications straight back into industrial production, generating an unusually rapid cycle of tactical and technical adaptation. Russia’s Unmanned Systems Forces, a newly established drone-and-robotics branch of the Russian armed forces, was created last year precisely to institutionalize this rapid-adaptation cycle. The combination of domestic engineering and broad axis partnership has proved remarkably effective. Russia’s latest jet-powered Geran drones, for instance, are significantly faster, carry larger explosive payloads, and are much harder for Ukrainian forces to intercept than earlier baseline variants.
Crucially, these Russian improvements do not remain confined within Russia; they actively circulate throughout the wider axis network. For Iran, the military technology that originally flowed northward to Russia is now returning southward, accompanied by hard-earned tactical advice drawn directly from Russia’s brutal experience in Ukraine. As these jet-powered drones inevitably appear in the Middle East, Iranian attacks on U.S. forces and regional energy infrastructure will become considerably harder and more costly to defend against.
North Korea and China are likewise reaping substantial dividends from this networked arrangement. According to recent Ukrainian intelligence reports, Russia has struck a deal to help Pyongyang significantly expand its own production of Shahed-type drones. North Korean engineers have gained invaluable technical insights from working directly inside Russia’s massive Yelabuga drone manufacturing complex, and North Korean soldiers deployed alongside Russian forces have acquired firsthand combat experience in integrating unmanned systems into modern multi-domain warfare. Similarly, Chinese military personnel have received specialized training in drone warfare from Russian forces, while Chinese component suppliers are gathering vital telemetry and performance data on how their commercial and dual-use technologies perform under intense combat conditions. Beijing is thus deriving immense strategic value from the evolution of drone warfare that originally began with Iranian technology and was subsequently refined on the battlefields of Ukraine.
The Model Can Travel
Two years ago, it remained an open question whether the partnerships binding the four axis members could possibly outlast the specific war that accelerated their formation. Analysts wondered if the Ukraine war were to end and Russia no longer required Iranian drones, North Korean ammunition, or Chinese economic and technological backing, whether these relationships would inevitably lose their strategic momentum.
Yet the prolonged war did not merely create an immediate, desperate need for cooperation; it has also provided a definitive proof of concept for what these combined partnerships can accomplish far beyond what any single country could ever attain on its own. Ukrainian defenses, sweeping Western sanctions, vast shipments of U.S. military supplies, and severe diplomatic isolation have all proven significantly less effective than they would have been had Russia been forced to operate in complete isolation. By helping one another successfully withstand external pressure, the axis countries make it progressively harder for the United States and its allies to compel them to alter their strategic course.
Iran is now demonstrating that this cooperative model is entirely transportable. Russia’s support for Tehran has been operationally meaningful yet carefully bounded. Even while intensely fighting its own existential war in Ukraine, Moscow has consistently found ways to help Iran strike American targets and sustain its military campaigns through vital diplomatic cover and material support, while deliberately stopping short of actions that could drag Russia into a direct, catastrophic conflict with the United States. China has exercised even greater caution, but its steady sharing of dual-use electronics and continued purchases of Iranian oil have similarly enhanced Tehran’s systemic ability to withstand crippling U.S. pressure.
Such diplomatic and operational restraint is not evidence that the axis is weakening; rather, it is a defining operational feature of how these partnerships successfully function. With the notable exception of North Korean soldiers deployed directly on Russia’s behalf, the axis countries have generally avoided fighting one another’s direct wars. Instead, they provide reliable political backing, economic lifelines, intelligence feeds, advanced technology, and limited military assistance whenever doing so advances their own individual national interests at a manageable level of risk.
The ongoing conflicts 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 de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for instance, sent global oil prices soaring, delivering an unexpected financial windfall to Moscow and prompting Washington to temporarily ease economic restrictions on Russian oil exports. In this way, Iran’s regional war directly generated financial resources that Russia could leverage to sustain its own military efforts.
Before launching major military moves against Iran, the United States was forced to redeploy key military assets, including critical air and missile defense batteries, away from the Indo-Pacific and into the Middle East. As the fighting dragged on, U.S. forces concentrated two massive aircraft carriers in the region, leaving the Indo-Pacific entirely devoid of carrier strike group presence for periods of time. China derives immediate operational freedom from a thinned U.S. military posture in the western Pacific and grows less vulnerable as critical U.S. munitions stocks are heavily depleted. If Washington settles into a prolonged, open-ended strategy of containing Iran reminiscent of its containment of Iraq throughout the 1990s, Beijing could enjoy the profound strategic advantages of those military 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 an international network matter very little if its members cannot successfully translate their individual capabilities into coordinated, collective power. The United States and its allies start from a position of considerable historical advantage: possessing far greater aggregate economic and technological resources, vastly more capable professional militaries, and an incomparably larger network of formal allies and global partners. The central question facing Washington is which network can ultimately make superior use of its underlying assets.
That vital test begins with leadership and strategic vision. 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 where autocracies persisted. Washington coupled this sweeping vision with an implicit, highly attractive bargain: any sovereign nation that wished to join the international order was free to do so, and upholding the order’s basic governing principles conferred tangible benefits from the United States, including preferential trade relations, diplomatic backing, and formal military alliances.
For nations that explicitly rejected this open international order—as the axis countries do today—the tangible benefits were far fewer and the punitive penalties considerable. The United States routinely sanctioned, pressured, and occasionally waged war against rogue states, while actively resisting the establishment of rival global orders like the communist bloc of the Cold War. U.S. foreign policy started from the seemingly uncontroversial premise that Washington should steadfastly befriend like-minded nations and treat them demonstrably better than rejectionist adversaries.
The current Trump administration, however, has frequently demonstrated something closely resembling the exact opposite inclination. The U.S. ambassador to China recently disclosed that President Trump had offered to sell advanced weapons to Beijing while simultaneously stalling critical arms sales to democratic Taiwan. The president has repeatedly expressed far greater public interest in and personal 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 war of survival against relentless Russian aggression, while President Trump has even publicly threatened to bomb Oman, a long-standing and reliable regional partner. Such disruptive moves simultaneously strengthen the strategic posture of the axis countries while actively eroding the internal cohesion of the very network best positioned to successfully confront them.
Doing no further harm would serve as an essential and constructive first step in effectively dealing with the rising axis. Beyond that baseline, Washington must actively help its traditional partners grow stronger. Just as the axis countries are systematically helping one another work around punishing economic sanctions, preserve access to critical technologies and advanced manufacturing components, and sustain their national economies under severe external pressure, the United States should actively aid its own network. This requires strengthening vital supply chains that run exclusively through trusted partners, sharing advanced technology responsibly, and encouraging allies to shoulder greater national security burdens. Washington must take care, however, not to transfer defense responsibilities faster than allied nations can realistically develop the sovereign capabilities 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 individual allies could paradoxically become technically more capable while remaining collectively far less effective.
The United States must also urgently reverse policies that actively undercut its own network. Sweeping tariffs and other unilateral protectionist measures frequently harm allied economies and damage their domestic industrial bases. Expressing a public desire to acquire allied territory or attempting to subvert democratically elected leaders of friendly nations does not foster a more capable or resilient international network. Washington should project steady strategic vision and reliable leadership to its friends, rather than jarring diplomatic uncertainty and aggressive, transactional bullying.
Even if the United States radically changes course and repairs its alliances, American and allied policymakers must prepare for a long, protracted strategic struggle. As the ultimately unsuccessful regime-change efforts in Iran demonstrated, there are no simple shortcuts to besting axis countries, whether acting together or individually. This contest of competing networks will be nearly global in scale, waged simultaneously across multiple distinct domains, with massive national security stakes riding directly on the final outcome. The United States and its allies retain the structural capacity to prevail; they must now consistently demonstrate the political will to do so.
