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U.S. and Allies Sound Alarm Over War Ties Among Axis of Adversaries
The Biden administration is struggling to halt cooperation among Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. It feels urgency over the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East while also aiming to protect Taiwan.
Reporting from New York during the United Nations General Assembly and from Ukraine and China on trips with the U.S. secretary of state
Call it the Axis of Anger.
It is ripped from the pages of the World Wars or the Cold War: a coalition of powers working to strengthen one another’s militaries to defeat America’s partners and, by extension, the United States.
That is how the Biden administration characterizes Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, as those nations align more closely. U.S. officials have been sounding the alarm in speeches and closed-door talks around the world, most recently at the United Nations General Assembly in New York that ended over the weekend.
As the conflict in the Middle East widens — and as the world watches for whether Iran will retaliate against Israel for the killing on Friday of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its strikes across Lebanon — U.S. officials feel an even greater sense of urgency.
Yet the partnerships are not as unified as they might appear, and U.S. officials say they still see ways to slow that trend.
At a Security Council meeting on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the council’s priority should be stopping the stream of military aid — including ballistic missiles, drones and artillery shells — from North Korea and Iran to Russia. And he noted that China had sent machine tools, microelectronics and other supplies to Russia’s defense industry as President Vladimir V. Putin presses his invasion of Ukraine.
“If countries stopped supporting Russia, Putin’s invasion would soon come to an end,” Mr. Blinken said.
Russia, in turn, is helping those nations meet their ambitions, including by sharing nuclear technology and “space information” with Iran, Mr. Blinken said. Another senior U.S. official said that while the nuclear aid to Iran seemed to be for use in its civilian nuclear program for now, the space information was more alarming — it could eventually allow Iran to develop capable intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Russia is also considering arming the Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen with advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, U.S. officials say.
Those nations have denied some of the specific American assertions. And they say it is the United States that is forming blocs around the world to maintain dominance. On Saturday at the United Nations, Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, said the Americans were “merely seeking to preserve their hegemony and to govern everything.”
But there is no doubt those powerful countries seeking to counter the United States have grown their military, diplomatic and economic cooperation.
Leaders of U.S. partner nations are quick to point out the growing threats. In an interview with The New York Times at the United Nations last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine denounced the shipments of arms to Russia from North Korea and Iran.
Sitting next to him, the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, said, “This is a global issue, because the closer cooperation between North Korea, Iran and Russia is a challenge for all of us, of course, including the U.S., and with China helping one way or the other.”
Some of the leaders of the adversarial nations are making flashy displays of their alliances, as if throwing a gauntlet down at the Americans. In June, Mr. Putin revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pact with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, during a visit to Pyongyang, the capital. Those two nations are “all in” on anti-American cooperation, said the senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.
Two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow and Beijing announced a “no limits” partnership in a 5,000-word joint statement when Mr. Putin visited President Xi Jinping in China.
“The militarization of these relationships is very remarkable,” said Michael Kimmage, a former State Department official and a professor of Cold War history and U.S.-Russia relations who is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. “The overt part is the most worrying aspect for the U.S.”
Mr. Kimmage cautioned that “it’s possible to over-interpret the degree of political alignment,” and that “what the U.S. got wrong during the Cold War is that they interpreted more homogeneity in this than was the actual reality.”
In important ways, the current alignments are a continuation of the Cold War. Now, as then, the center of gravity of the anti-American partnerships is Russia. That nation has pitted itself against an American and European partner — Ukraine — and is trying to wipe it out that. Russia is attracting aid from North Korea, Iran and China.
In fact, Ukraine has become the kind of proxy-war battlefield that was common during the Cold War, in places like the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam. The shadow of the Korean War, which never officially ended, is even at play here: While North Korea is giving weapons to Russia, South Korea has done the same with Ukraine, via the United States.
But coalitions are not as hardened as they appear, which the United States discovered in the sprawling conflicts of the 20th century, sometimes belatedly. And today they are based not so much on a shared ideology — communism was a unifying factor for much of the Cold War — as on opposition to U.S. power rooted in each autocratic nation’s specific interests. Analysts say the partnerships now are marriages of convenience or pragmatism.
For instance, the theocratic leaders of Iran obviously have a different ideological perspective than do the leaders of Russia, China or North Korea, known formally as the D.P.R.K., which all share a communist history.
China, the most powerful of those nations and the greatest challenger to American power, does not seem intent on knitting together a cohesive coalition based on a grand ideology, the way the Soviet Union once tried to do.
“China’s foreign policy is drawing the dividing line using the U.S. as the criteria,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “What it means is that when China looks at Russia, D.P.R.K. and Iran, it sees anti-U. S. partners.”
“China believes it doesn’t have an alliance or axis with these countries, as the very thing that anchors their alignment is the U.S.,” she added. “But for the end result, the motivation matters much less than the substance, and the relationships come across as an axis. When it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”
For months, the Biden administration has warned China against commercial trade that allows Russia to rebuild its defense industry. The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on more than 300 Chinese entities. But U.S. officials also say China has not given direct weapons aid to Russia.
China has the world’s second-largest economy and does robust trade with the United States and its allies. American officials note that Mr. Xi appears to want to keep China within the global network of institutions and commerce that the United States has dominated for decades. They say he believes that America is in terminal decline, and that his aim is to displace the United States within that network rather than build a rival global system.
Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, often meet with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, and occasionally with Mr. Xi. Their idea is that keeping up high-level diplomacy, along with bolstering U.S. military power in Asia, will help deter China from invading Taiwan or making other aggressive moves. On Friday, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Wang met in New York and talked about areas of both cooperation and concern.
“Our intent is not to decouple Russia from China,” Mr. Blinken told reporters afterward. “But insofar as that relationship involves providing Russia what it needs to continue this war, that’s a problem, and it’s a problem for us and it’s a problem for many other countries, notably in Europe, because right now Russia presents the greatest threat, not just to Ukrainian security, but to European security since the end of the Cold War.”
U.S. and allied officials say the kind of Sino-Soviet split that began between the late 1950s and early 1960s is unlikely. But European officials are calling out China’s aid to Russia in the hopes that Chinese leaders will realize they are placing their economic ties with Europe in jeopardy.
On a trip to Ukraine with Mr. Blinken this month, David Lammy, the foreign secretary of Britain, said, “We’re seeing this new axis — Russia, Iran, North Korea; we urge China not to throw their lot in with this group of renegades, renegades in the end that are costing lives here in Ukraine.”
U.S. and allied officials are also carefully watching Iran to see whether there is a diplomatic opening, perhaps through future nuclear negotiations, to try to get it to limit its cooperation with Russia. They are wary, because Iran has a decades-long history of hostility with the United States and Israel. But analysts say Iranian leaders are intent on getting the United States and its allies to lift sanctions on Iran.
In a speech on Tuesday at the United Nations, the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, used conciliatory language, saying, “We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”
After leaving New York, Mr. Pezeshkian wrote on social media that his government “is seeking political and economic diplomacy from west to east, from New York to Samarkand.”
Julian E. Barnes and Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department. He is the author of the book “At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China.” More about Edward Wong
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