In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush warned that the United States needed to confront a new “axis of evil” threatening the world—a turn of phrase that would come to define Bush’s controversial foreign-policy legacy and years of costly quagmires in the Middle East.
In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush warned that the United States needed to confront a new “axis of evil” threatening the world—a turn of phrase that would come to define Bush’s controversial foreign-policy legacy and years of costly quagmires in the Middle East.
If you thought Washington was past all that, think again.
More than two decades later, the axis of evil is back on the menu. The phrase, and others like it, have again burrowed into the Washington zeitgeist to describe what some believe is a growing alliance between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
“We have to always remember [that] a win for Russia is a win for China. And we can never let that axis of evil gather any more momentum,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in late August on her Republican presidential primary campaign. “There’s an axis of evil in the world: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell similarly warned in a CBS News interview in October. “And we need to stand up to the axis of evil, not try to do business with them.”
“Axis of evil” is a phrase that harkens back to an era of badly misguided optimism about American power abroad—and the badly mishandled wars that followed. The fact that it has come back could be a harbinger of what U.S. foreign policy will look like in the coming years.
Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington warn of the increasing links between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia is leaning on Iranian and North Korean arms shipments to supply its war in Ukraine, and the United States and its allies are anxiously eyeing any military or economic lifelines Beijing could throw Moscow’s way to prolong the war. Russia’s support for Iran, meanwhile, has positive knock-on effects for militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that are viewed as Iranian proxies in the fight against Israel, and Russia appears to be using the ongoing Israel-Hamas war to try to burnish its own credentials in the global south.
President Joe Biden has tied U.S. support for Israel and Ukraine together in his pitch to Congress for more national security funds, framing both conflicts as part of a global fight to defend democracy. And many in Washington, rightly or wrongly, argue that a Russian victory in Ukraine would embolden China to invade Taiwan. Many in Washington view these rivalries as deeply interconnected—even if they are not banging the axis drum.
“I think it’s important to be clear who our adversaries are,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic foreign-policy heavyweight in the Senate, told Foreign Policy in a recent interview. “We need to understand who is trying to undermine the United States, who is trying to undermine democracies around the world. And it is China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea.”
There isn’t apparently a single instance of Biden or top administration officials using the phrase, but that doesn’t mean it’s not catching on. On the Republican side, McConnell and Sens. Tim Scott and Marsha Blackburn, as well as Rep. Cory Mills, have all tossed the term around, while on the other side of the aisle, one of the most influential and longest-serving Democrats in the House, Rep. Steny Hoyer, has adopted it.
Not everyone’s on board, however. Some experts bristle at the idea of lumping these four disparate powers together, wary that it could lead to a new generation of U.S. foreign-policy debacles and mishaps. “There are a lot of differences in the overall strategic goals of these countries,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy. “It’s not ultimately going to be productive to just group them all together and go at them as if they’re an anti-U.S. Voltron.”
They are all nuclear powers, or soon will be. They all create mayhem in their neighborhoods. But the security challenges posed by Russia, currently at war in Europe, or China, which has set its sights on conquering Taiwan in the indeterminate future, are different from those posed by Iran and North Korea.
“Each of these countries needs to be treated in its own right,” said Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group think tank.
Unlike Washington’s network of alliances abroad, which run deep on interconnected economies, militaries, values, and other links, the alliances between these four U.S. adversaries are more alliances of convenience, Ero and other experts and Western diplomats argue. These alliances of convenience, furthermore, are laced with mutual suspicion and distrust, and they are more fragile than those in the axis of evil camp seem to suggest.
China, North Korea’s main benefactor, views it as a key buffer state between Washington and its allies in the Asia-Pacific, namely South Korea. But according to several senior Western and East Asian officials, China is growing uneasy about how North Korea is deepening its ties with Russia, lest that reduce the leverage Beijing has over Pyongyang or further exacerbate tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Iranian power brokers are split over how their country has deepened its ties with Russia, and Tehran still views Moscow with suspicion even as they expand military ties, according to regional experts. China may look to deepen its relationship with Russia, but only in ways that benefit Beijing’s economic and political interests, not out of any affinity or loyalty toward Moscow, as recent talks on energy cooperation between the two powers show. This axis wobbles.
It may be “a convenient shorthand, but it’s not convenient in terms of shaping policy,” Ero said. “I think there’s a danger in putting them all into one basket and with a master stroke assuming you can have just one policy on all of them as well.”
Foreign-policy hawks have been testing phrases, portmanteaus, and acronyms to describe threats to the West in recent years. Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence tried out “wolf pack of rogue states” for a brief period in 2019 when he was working to burnish his foreign-policy credentials. Earlier this month at the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual gathering of hundreds of top foreign-policy officials and experts from democratic countries, some began using the acronym CRINK—China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—to describe these Western rivals, in a nod to the BRICS bloc of countries. But recycling is easier than inventing something new.
If this rhetorical game previews a new era in U.S. foreign policy—depending in part on who wins the 2024 presidential election—some foreign dignitaries warn there could be some real-world consequences for Washington trying to revive an era of “good versus evil” in global politics.
Multiple foreign diplomats at Halifax voiced concern, saying the trend could drive middle powers and countries in the so-called global south away from the United States; many, like India and South Africa, have deep economic and military relationships with both China and Russia.
Top Biden administration officials have repeatedly stressed they don’t want to force countries in Africa, Latin America, or elsewhere to choose between the United States and China, wary of driving potential partners away. But explicitly lumping China into an axis of evil may, in the end, have the same effect.
Even dignitaries from some of Washington’s closest partners are voicing concern at lumping China into the same pool as Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Top Ukrainian officials have been cautious not to derail ties with China even as Kyiv’s primary backers in the West gear up for a new cold war against Beijing, lest it push China to ramp up support for Russia in the ongoing war.
“I hate the idea [of] put[ting] China in the list of nations with the evil axis,” Petro Poroshenko, the former president of Ukraine, told Foreign Policy on the sidelines of the Halifax forum. “I mean Russia, Iran, North Korea, maybe Belarus, but definitely not China. Let’s not put it together that way, because that would be the biggest mistake,” he said.
“I still keep my fingers crossed that China’s influence can help de-escalate the situation,” he said, adding that he had “very positive experiences cooperating with China and President Xi [Jinping].”
Bush said that countries were either with America or against it. It’s actually more complicated than that, and, experts widely agree, global politics in general is vastly more complicated than it was in 2001 or 2002, when the United States stood as the lone and unchallenged world superpower.
The West “needs to acknowledge that sometimes what we see as major global problems don’t resonate the same way in other parts of the world,” said Sarah Margon, director of foreign policy at the Open Society Foundations.
“‘Axis of Evil’ is a great title for an article, but when it becomes the driver of policy, it makes it really difficult for countries in the middle, because they feel like they have to choose a side, and that’s just not how international politics will work in the world today,” she said.
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