The anti-American axis myth

Every few years, Washington’s foreign policy establishment rediscovers its favorite bogeyman: a grand, coordinated coalition of adversaries hell-bent on dismantling the American-led world order.

Today, the specter haunting the think tanks and op-ed pages is the so-called “anti-American axis” — a sinister alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, presumably plotting in unison to bring the United States to its knees.

It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also mostly wrong.

Let me be clear about what does exist. There are states with serious grievances against American foreign policy. There are bilateral transactions — Russia buys Iranian drones, North Korea ships artillery shells to Moscow, China maintains economic ties with Tehran despite sanctions.

These are real, and they matter. To dismiss them entirely would be naive. But a transaction is not an alliance. Shared resentment is not shared strategy. And conflating the two leads to exactly the kind of threat inflation that has consistently distorted American grand strategy since the end of the Cold War.

Myth of coordination

Consider the four alleged 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 frequentlyundermined, not advanced, by Russia’s reckless adventurism in Ukraine.

Iran is a regional theocracy navigating complex internal politics while projecting power through proxies in a neighborhood that has little to do with Beijing’s calculus. And North Korea is essentially a hereditary monarchy with nuclear weapons, whose primary goal is regime survival — full stop.

What do these four actually share? A dislike of American unilateralism. A preference that the US not station forces near their borders or fund opposition movements within their societies. That is, at its core, 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 fracture the moment interests diverge.

Washington’s role in creating the narrative It fears

Here is the uncomfortable question that official Washington refuses to ask: to what extent has American policy itselfacceleratedwhatever convergence exists among these states?

NATO expansion to Russia’s doorstep. Regime change in Libya — a lesson that Pyongyang and Tehran absorbed viscerally. The abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal. Tariff wars and technology decoupling with China.

These policies, whatever their individual justifications, collectively signaled to multiple major powers that the US reserved the right to reshape the international environment in ways fundamentally threatening to their security and governance.

When you treat diverse actors as members of a common axis, you create the incentives for them tobecomeone. It is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy — and the neoconservative and liberal interventionist establishments have been running this experiment for three decades.

What realism actually tells us

A realist reading of the current international landscape suggests something considerably more complex and, ultimately, more manageable than the axis narrative implies.

China and Russia have a relationship built on mutual convenience 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 pariah status, and is deeply uncomfortable with the nuclear saber-rattling that Moscow periodically deploys.

Beijing’s long game is economic and institutional; Moscow’s 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 carved up their country in the 19th and 20th centuries. Tehran uses Moscow when useful and views Beijing with a mixture of hope and wariness.

North Korea cooperates with whoever offers hard currency and security guarantees. It is not a strategic partner; it is a mercenary state.

The danger of the axis framing

The axis narrative is not merely analytically sloppy — it is strategically dangerous. It encourages the US to treat every bilateral conflict as a theater in a global struggle, thereby foreclosing diplomatic off-ramps and demanding a level of commitment that American resources and public tolerance cannot sustain indefinitely.

It also conveniently serves bureaucratic and industrial interests. An axis requires a posture. A posture requires a budget. A budget requires a narrative.

Washington has been running this loop since George Kennan wrote the Long Telegram, and the beneficiaries are not the American taxpayer or the civilians caught in the conflicts this framing perpetuates.

A more honest accounting

What would a more honest accounting look like?

It would acknowledge 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 bundling them into a single existential frame.

It would acknowledge that some of these challenges are amenable to negotiated accommodation and that others require firm deterrence — 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 primacy, as exercised over the past three decades, has generated the very resentments and alignments that now concern us.

The question is not whether to defend American interests — of course, one should — but whether the imperial overreach that passes for strategy in Washington actually serves those interests or merely serves the people paid to defend them.

There is no anti-American axis. There are several separate problems 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 genuinely complex and consequential moment in world affairs.

This articlewas originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriberhere.