Now They Tell Us

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 03, 2025

 

Vox’s Joshua Keating has some bad news. “There’s a new ‘axis’ in town,” the subheading of his latest analysis read. “This time, it might be real.”

 

That’s right. It increasingly seems like each of America’s most committed geopolitical adversaries — China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia — are working as “a cohesive unit” to overturn the U.S.-led world order. Indeed, save for their hostility toward liberal democratic norms and the primacy of individual rights, their mutual suspicion of the geostrategic status quo is about all they these powers have in common.

 

It’s nice that the onset of the second Trump administration has made it less painful for center-left media outlets to acknowledge our shared reality, but the condition Keating is calling attention to has been self-evident.

 

As I wrote of “this new axis” for the print edition of National Review in the immediate wake of the October 7 massacre, the strategic cooperation between these powers has been as obvious as the goal it was designed to achieve:

 

The enemies of the United States do not observe the careful distinctions between them that advocates of a humbler American foreign policy often emphasize. Sunni terrorists and Shiite regimes are not at one another’s throats when they share a common enemy. The nominally Marxist regime in Beijing has no problem joining hands with an Islamist theocracy. Decades-old historical grievances deter neither Iran nor China from supporting Russia’s murderous military campaigns on Syria’s eastern plateau and the steppes of Ukraine. They are united in their foremost goal: ending the age of American dominance. Challenges to American hegemony anywhere are challenges to it everywhere. America’s enemies recognize that, even if its friends do not.

 

That analysis has been updated several times over the intervening 15 months as Russia’s anti-American allies deepened their efforts to support Moscow’s war of conquest in Ukraine and the terrorist campaign Iran’s proxies waged against the West and its allies. It’s nice to see the correct and unavoidable consensus emerge, albeit belatedly.

 

Of course, Keating’s observation would not be complete without a gesture toward the notion that America’s challenges abroad are entirely of our own making. “One other thing these countries have in common is that they’re all the target of a US-led economic sanctions regime, and extremely eager to find ways to overturn that regime,” the author posited. “Some experts argue that it’s actually US economic pressure that has created the axis.”

 

Thus, the sudden onset of the revelation that America’s adversaries do not shelve their plans for global domination just because a Democrat occupies the White House manages to comport with Vox’s general worldview. “The bigger issue may be that a US-dominated global economy and the military primacy of Washington as global police officer does indeed pose a bigger threat to China and Russia than has been forthrightly acknowledged,” the outlet argued in 2023.

 

So, it’s our fault that our enemies violently lash out at their surroundings, and it’s our fault that they object when we react negatively to their adventurism. It sure does sound like there’s nothing we could do to satisfy our adversaries, and the only course available to us other than abandoning the U.S.-led world order would be to defeat them.

 

That’s a novel idea, the virtue of which we can expect Vox to come around to at some point in early 2029.