Hook: A recent geopolitical digest featured an almost headline-ready formula: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are supposedly assembling a new "axis." The word is resonant, weighty, historically charged — and therefore suspicious. "Axis" promises a familiar construction: three capitals, one treaty, a shared map of attack, an ominous table in a bunker.
But Thomas Wright's article in Foreign Affairs offers a more unsettling hypothesis: the new system may be more dangerous precisely because it is not an axis. It has no unified headquarters, no common ideology, and no obligation to enter every war for a neighbor. Instead, there are bilateral ties, each tailored to a specific task: ammunition in exchange for technology, drones in exchange for production, troops in exchange for money and military knowledge, machinery and electronics in exchange for access to industrial reconstruction.
This is not a ceremonial alliance, but a distributed system. Using an engineering analogy, we're looking not at a monolithic cluster with a single control plane, but a mesh network: individual nodes can fail, but routes continue to work. And this is where things get really interesting.
In popular imagination, the Axis powers — Germany, Italy, and Japan — look like a unified military organism. But the formal Tripartite Pact of 1940 was far less impressive than its later reputation.
The pact promised mutual assistance if one side was attacked by a power not yet participating in the war. However, it created no unified command, no common operational doctrine, and no mandatory plan for joint operations. Germany did not inform Japan of its plan to attack the Soviet Union. Japan did not warn Germany about its intention to strike Pearl Harbor. The Axis powers never conducted a single joint military operation.
Moreover, Japan signed a neutrality pact with Moscow in 1941 and observed it almost until the very end of the war, disregarding the fact that Germany was fighting on the Eastern Front. On paper — a trio. In reality — three states conducting their own wars and periodically discovering that an ally hadn't informed them about the most interesting developments.
The Soviet-Chinese alliance of 1950 was more substantive. The USSR and PRC signed a treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance, cooperated in the Korean War, developed military industry and joint production. But the construction proved fragile: Stalin treated China as a junior partner, Mao painfully perceived the inequality, and after Stalin's death, accumulated resentment quickly turned into ideological and geopolitical schism.
The historical lesson here is unpleasantly simple: formality doesn't guarantee depth, and depth doesn't have to be formal.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine became a catalyst for this network. Before 2022, China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia shared a common hostility toward the American order, but it was more parallel animosity than a working exchange mechanism.
The war created deficits, and deficits generated exchange.
Initially, Pyongyang was in no hurry to provide Moscow with serious support. But by 2023, North Korea became one of Russia's most important military suppliers: millions of artillery shells, ballistic missiles, and other material assistance.
In return, Moscow gave Pyongyang access to military modernization — including assistance with satellite technology, air defense, and closer economic ties. In 2024, the countries signed a mutual defense treaty, and then Kim Jong Un sent more than 12,000 military personnel to Russia.
This is no longer just a "shells for money" deal. North Korea gained the opportunity to test people and doctrines in a real war, while Russia gained manpower and ammunition. According to a BBC investigation based on satellite images and official photographs of a new memorial in Pyongyang, around 2,300 North Korean soldiers may have died in battles for the Kursk region. South Korean estimates say at least 11,000 were sent there in total.
Pyongyang paid in blood for military experience. In the logic of an authoritarian system, this is not only a tragedy but also an investment: the war became a proving ground for the DPRK army that cannot be built on their own territory.
Iran started with deliveries of Shahed strike drones. Russia used them against Ukrainian infrastructure, and then cooperation moved to missiles, technical expertise, and instructors.
The key turning point occurred at the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan. There, the Russian side began financing and deploying production of the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, known in Russia as Geran. According to CNN, by 2025, around 90% of production stages were already being performed either in Alabuga or at other Russian sites.
In an official Russian documentary film, the facility's director described the site almost as an industrial ideal: aluminum blanks go in, engines are manufactured inside; microchips become electronics; fuselages are assembled from carbon fiber and fiberglass. In other words, this is no longer about "assembling an imported product," but about a localized supply chain.
Satellite images from 2025 showed rapid expansion of the complex: new buildings, warehouses, dormitories, and air defense positions. A 2026 Ukrainian investigation cited Russia's annual target — 60,000 long-range strike drones and 50,000 decoy drones.
Here appears a particularly unpleasant plot twist. Russia, having mastered and scaled up Iranian technology, effectively began pushing Iran itself to the periphery. According to a CNN source's assessment, Tehran was irritated that it received little in return for drones, missiles, and other assistance. Iran transferred the technology to Moscow, and Moscow turned it into a mass industrial platform — after which it needed the original supplier less.
A classic geopolitical deal suddenly became a venture contract where the startup handed over the prototype to a large manufacturer and discovered that they'd already released their own version, hired all the engineers, and now offer to buy the product back.
Beijing avoids direct weapons deliveries to Russia, but that's precisely why its contribution is easily underestimated. According to U.S. officials and analysts, China supplies dual-use goods: microelectronics, machine tools, optical components for armored vehicles, nitrocellulose for ammunition production, and other critical elements.
This is a fundamentally different type of assistance. Iran supplies a specific military system. North Korea — shells and people. China helps restore Russia's capacity to wage war.
The difference between these two types of support is enormous. A delivery of missiles ends, but a restored industrial base continues producing ammunition, engines, and components. This is a transition from aiding the front to aiding the production cycle.
In May 2025, Reuters reported that around 200 Russian military personnel underwent secret training in China, mainly on drone use and countermeasures. A bilingual Russian-Chinese agreement signed on July 2, 2025 in Beijing also provided for training hundreds of Chinese military personnel in Russia.
China publicly calls itself a neutral mediator. But training Russian military personnel who then return to fight in Ukraine is not quite a diplomatic view from the sidelines. This is the transfer of operational knowledge, that is, practical military knowledge, in an exchange circuit.
Russia, in turn, transfers to partners what they have less of: military technologies, modern warfare experience, space and missile competencies. U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo warned that Russia could transfer submarine technologies to China capable of reducing American underwater advantage. According to U.S. military intelligence assessments, Moscow is expanding transfers of space, nuclear, and missile-related technologies and materials to China, Iran, and the DPRK.
The result is not "Russia — China's junior partner," but an exchange market of competencies where each node has its own deficit.
The four countries have no single treaty obligating them to enter war. No common headquarters. No common ideology — China, Russia, Iran, and the DPRK are too different even by their own authoritarian standards.
But there are several bilateral channels:
Each channel can be hidden, deniable, or stopped without formal declaration of the "bloc's" collapse. This is an important architectural feature.
A formal alliance is politically vulnerable: it's enough to prove that one side violated the treaty, didn't come to help, or acted separately. A network is structured differently. If Moscow and Tehran quarrel over Alabuga, Chinese machine tools and North Korean shells won't disappear. If China temporarily retreats due to sanctions pressure, Russia will continue receiving support from other routes. There's no single point of failure that can be shown impressively on a map.
Wright's article in Foreign Affairs calls this model "more flexible and in some ways more dangerous." This doesn't mean the four regimes are friends or capable of suddenly launching a coordinated world war. It means something else: they don't need to fully trust each other to mutually strengthen their own war machines.
In distributed systems, trust is also not a mandatory condition. It's enough for the exchange protocol to work, for packets to arrive, and for participants to see benefit from the next request.
Usually sanctions assume a state can be isolated: cut off supplies, restrict technologies, hinder settlements, disconnect from markets. But if four countries gradually connect their own production and financial circuits, isolation turns into a game of whack-a-mole.
The CNAS report The Axis of Upheaval describes an effect that goes beyond individual deals. Iranian drone technology goes through Russia further to other participants. Russian officials and specialists move between capitals, creating connectivity that wouldn't otherwise exist. Ukraine war experience spreads throughout the network. Joint use of bases increases Russia's and China's reach.
In parallel, mechanisms for circumventing pressure develop: barter, money laundering, shadow tanker fleet, transshipment of goods through third countries, local production, and alternative diplomatic platforms. BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are not military alliances, but create spaces where rules not written by Washington can gradually be normalized.
The main result is not an "anti-American army," but an ecosystem less vulnerable to American coercion.
This is a subtle but fundamental difference. The system doesn't have to be self-sufficient. It's enough to be connected enough that sanctions stop delivering quick and definitive effect.
It's tempting to call this network a new Axis, but such a comparison can be misleading.
First, real contradictions remain between participants. Russian intelligence services fear Chinese penetration. Between Moscow and Beijing there's asymmetry: the Chinese economy is much larger than Russia's, while Russia tries not to look like a junior partner. Iran hasn't forgotten that Moscow didn't give it expected political and military support during the 2025 Israeli campaign. China doesn't want to unnecessarily become an open party to war and fall under secondary sanctions.
Second, mutual assistance doesn't equal mutual defense. Beijing can supply machine tools while simultaneously denying military involvement. Pyongyang can send troops but isn't obliged to help China in a hypothetical conflict with the U.S. Moscow can share technologies while it's profitable, but not turn a partner into an equal.
Third, the authoritarian network heavily depends on a few leaders. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have met more than forty times and personally maintain the "partnership without limits" formula. With leadership changes, chains could sharply weaken.
But this doesn't refute the model. On the contrary: political dependence is its weak point, not proof of absence. The question isn't whether the network will become eternal. The question is how many military, technological, and industrial changes it will manage to produce before a possible rule change.
For the U.S. and its allies, the danger isn't that four states will one day sign a beautiful document and declare war on the whole world. Far more likely are several less cinematic scenarios.
If the U.S. faces a crisis around China, Russia or North Korea could exploit the distraction. They don't need to coordinate a common operation in advance. It's enough to act in one convenient moment based on their own benefit.
Russia's military experience, North Korean ammunition, China's industrial base, and Iranian drone technology allow Moscow to restore conventional armed forces faster. For Europe, this means less time for rearmament and more pressure on defense budgets.
If one participant loses access to a component, another can offer a bypass route, a third party — fictitious export, a fourth — local assembly. You can't say the network makes sanctions meaningless. But it makes them slower, more expensive, and less predictable.
War stops being one country's experience. Drone tactics, countermeasure methods, camouflage techniques, work with cheap decoys, and electronic warfare spread through exchange channels. Each subsequent war may begin with a more prepared adversary.
CNAS directly warns of rising risk of simultaneity: multiple crises may arise not according to a single plan, but because network participants independently saw the same window of opportunity.
This is an important change in the threat model. A planner can no longer consider four regimes as four separate tasks, each solved in its own browser tab. They don't have to act as a team to affect one system.
I think the main conclusion here is not that "a new axis was born." That's actually too convenient and too beautiful a formula. A system of deficit exchange was born.
North Korea has people and ammunition, but few technologies. Iran has cheap and proven drone designs, but a limited industrial base. Russia has combat experience, missile and space competencies, but needs components, manpower, and ammunition. China has industrial scale, but needs military knowledge, strategic depth, and partners capable of distracting the U.S. in other regions.
This creates not friendship, but coupling. Each participant doesn't have to love neighbors; it's enough to understand that the next exchange is more profitable than its cancellation.
The historical Axis was theatrical scenery — impressive, but poorly connected inside. The modern network is less spectacular: instead of a single flag, it has contracts, machine tools, drones, instructors, satellite images, shadow transport, and people sent to someone else's war. But these ties work at the level of production cycles.
And there's the most unpleasant engineering lesson: a monolith is easier to notice, but a distributed system is harder to neutralize. A monolith has headquarters, a signature, and a single point of failure. A mesh network has many mediocre, pragmatic, partially hidden connections. It doesn't have to be beautiful, coordinated, or eternal. It's enough to keep routing.
Therefore, the question of coming years isn't "will they create an Axis?" They probably won't. The question is tougher: will the West manage to learn to see military threat as a graph of connections, not a list of four countries?