Every few years, Washington’s foreign policy establishment rediscovers its favorite con man: a grand, coordinated coalition of adversaries determined to dismantle the American-led world order.
Today, the specter haunting think tanks and op-ed pages is the so-called “anti-American axis”—an evil array of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, apparently conspiring in unison to bring the United States to its knees.
It is a compelling narrative. It’s also mostly wrong.
Let me be clear about what exists. There are countries with serious grievances against American foreign policy. There are bilateral transactions – Russia buys Iranian drones, North Korea sends artillery shells to Moscow, China maintains economic ties with Tehran despite sanctions.
These are real and they matter. Removing them entirely would be naive. But a transaction is not an alliance. Common discontent is not common strategy. And confusing the two leads to exactly the kind of inflationary threat that has repeatedly warped American grand strategy since the end of the Cold War.
The myth of coordination
Consider the four supposed pillars of this axis. Russia under Vladimir Putin is a declining regional power with a revanchist agenda focused almost entirely on its near abroad.
China is a rising global economic power with interests in stability, trade and long-term institutional influence – goals that are often undermined, not advanced, by Russia’s reckless adventurism in Ukraine.
Iran is a regional theocracy navigating complex domestic politics while projecting power through proxies in a neighborhood that has little to do with Beijing’s reckoning. And North Korea is essentially a nuclear-armed hereditary monarchy whose main goal is regime survival – full stop.
What do these four really share? A dislike of American unilateralism. A preference for the US not to deploy forces near their borders or fund opposition movements within their societies. This is, in essence, a defensive orientation – not an offensive coalition.
The Soviet Union was an ideological project with a universalist claim, a global network of client states, and a genuine institutional apparatus for coordinating strategy. What we have today is categorically different: opportunistic alignments of convenience that break the moment interests shift.
Washington’s role in creating the She’s Afraid narrative
Here is the uncomfortable question that official Washington refuses to ask: To what extent has American policy itself accelerated whatever convergence exists between these states?
NATO expansion to Russia’s doorstep. Regime change in Libya – a lesson that Pyongyang and Tehran internalized. Abolishing the Iran nuclear deal. Tariff wars and technology decoupling with China.
These policies, regardless of their individual rationales, collectively signaled to many great powers that the US reserved the right to reshape the international environment in ways that fundamentally threaten their security and governance.
When you treat different actors as members of a common axis, you create incentives for them to become one. It’s a classic self-fulfilling prophecy – and the interventionist neoconservative and liberal institutions have been running this experiment for three decades.
What realism really tells us
A realist reading of the current international landscape suggests something much more complex and, ultimately, more manageable than the axis narrative implies.
China and Russia have a relationship built on mutual comfort and personal chemistry between Xi and Putin, but structural tensions abound. China does not want a destabilized Europe, does not want to inherit Russia’s intact status, and is deeply uncomfortable with the nuclear strikes that Moscow periodically uses.
Beijing’s long game is economic and institutional; Moscow is territorial and nostalgic. These are not the same game.
Iran’s relationship with Russia is transactional and historically fraught – Iranians have not forgotten that Russia was among the powers that created their country in the 19th and 20th centuries. Tehran uses Moscow when it is useful and views Beijing with a mixture of hope and caution.
North Korea cooperates with anyone who offers guarantees of hard currency and security. It is not a strategic partner; it is a mercenary state.
Axle frame hazard
The pivot narrative isn’t just analytically sloppy—it’s strategically dangerous. It encourages the US to treat any bilateral conflict as a theater in a global war, thereby ruling out diplomatic platforms and demanding a level of commitment that US resources and public tolerance cannot sustain indefinitely.
It also serves bureaucratic and industrial interests. A shaft requires a stand. A stay requires a budget. A budget requires a story.
Washington has run this circuit since George Kennan wrote the long Telegram, and the beneficiaries are not American taxpayers or civilians caught up in the conflicts this framing perpetuates.
A more honest accounting
What would a more honest accounting look like?
It would recognize that the US faces several distinct strategic challenges – Chinese economic and military competition in Asia, Russian revisionism in Europe, Iranian regional destabilization, North Korean nuclear proliferation – each requiring tailored diplomacy, each best addressed by differentiating rather than uniting them into a single existential framework.
It would acknowledge that some of these challenges are amenable to negotiated accommodation and that others require strong restraint – but that the two categories are not the same and should not be treated as such.
And it would acknowledge the hardest truth of all: that American supremacy, exercised over the past three decades, has generated the resentments and alignments that now trouble us.
The question is not whether American interests should be protected—of course, they should—but whether the imperial overreach that passes for strategy in Washington actually serves those interests or merely serves the people paid to protect them.
There is no anti-American axis. There are some particular problems with wearing the same label. The sooner Washington learns to read the map instead of the legend, the better positioned it will be to navigate what is, in fact, a truly complex and important moment in world affairs.
it ITEM was originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is reprinted with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
