West’s enemies may be evil, but there’s no ‘axis’

Its rival bloc is the first of these things, without question, but not the second. In fact, doesn’t “bloc”, or “axis”, give too much credit, too soon, to a grouping as loose and putative as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea?

Since the present crisis in the Middle East began earlier this month, there has been some despair in democratic capitals about the bonhomie among these four states. So there should be. Better an excess of vigilance than an excess of nonchalance. But the West shouldn’t do its antagonists’ work for them by granting their claim to be an equal and opposite coalition.

What, after all, unites the four? The group includes secular communists and the world’s leading theocracy. The two largest members fell out with each other in the Cold War. (Richard Nixon exploited, but did not invent, the Sino-Soviet split.) There are jabber-fests that bring most of the members together, such as the BRICS-plus summit, but no NATO- or EU-grade institution that requires tangible sacrifices from those who belong.

And what is their shared view of global economic governance? What is the “Moscow consensus”? State sovereignty, at least, used to be the one shibboleth of autocrats. Since the invasion of Ukraine, and the tolerance of it in parts of the world, does even that still hold?

“Just wait, complacent liberal,” I’ll be told. It takes a while for states to congeal into an axis.

But consider the last two times that democracies were under existential siege from an autocratic grouping. As the years passed, it was the tensions within that camp, not the unities, that stood out.

In World War II, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact didn’t make it to its second anniversary. In the Cold War, Mao and Khrushchev started to diverge over Marxist doctrine as soon as the 1950s.

What is the most recent historical precedent for autocracies co-operating on a lasting basis? The Concert of Europe, perhaps, which kept the continent more or less at peace in the 19th century. And even that had liberal Britain as a sort of regulating half-member.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Treating the West’s adversaries as a coherent bloc is not just analytically wrong. It is dangerous, to the extent that it becomes self-fulfilling. Belief in a solid and hostile alliance might discourage the West from even attempting to prise apart the various members.

There is a precedent for this kind of error. A generation has passed since George W. Bush set the US against the “axis of evil”. At the time, the moral absolutism of the word “evil” aroused most of the liberal derision. In retrospect, the “axis” bit was worse. There was little to connect a Ba’athist state (Iraq) to a theocratic one (Iran), or either to a communist dynasty 6400 kilometres away (North Korea).

The mistake was of more than academic consequence. In conflating three such different entities, Bush didn’t consider that invading one might empower another. No nation has profited more from the US-led fiasco in Iraq than Iran, whose long arm now gropes around the region almost at will.

In its broad outlines, the foreign policy of the free world over the coming years more or less writes itself.

It has to be a patient game of teasing out the contradictions within the autocratic world: between theologians and commissars, between closed economies and trading ones, between rising powers and fading ones, between states with extensive contact with the West and total outcasts.

Instead, we have no less a personage than Mitch McConnell describing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil”. All four nations will blush at the flattery.

Financial Times