Andy Blinken has repeatedly fired arrows at them. And despite their major differences, it is clear that the US treats them as a team. A group that wants to upset the balance of power on the geopolitical stage.
Their stated goal of a new order, their aggressive revisionism, is what led The Economist to call them “the chaos quartet.” The reason for Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Two democracies, one “hybrid” and the other Islamic, a dictatorship and a one-party communist system with faith in the… open market. Xi Jinping is not Kim Jong Un and is not threatening anyone with nuclear weapons. And Russia is not a theocratic regime as much as there is Putin worship. They are very different cases, but at the moment they are united by the conflict with the West. And the growing economic, but also military ties. Unholy alliances and interdependencies are developing between them.
Some go so far as to compare them to the Axis powers, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan. “Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have already been cooperating longer than the future Axis powers did in the 1930s,” Philip Zelikoff warned in the Texas National Security Review.
“The members of this new chaos quartet – whose ideologies range from Islamism to hard-line communism – have very different views of the world,” acknowledges the Economist, adding: “Yet they are united by their hatred of the US-led order of things.”
A US government official who spoke on condition of anonymity to the British magazine said the four regimes share a desire for bilateral agreements, which are sometimes in their own narrow interest or in the collective interest.
To understand how deep cooperation has been so far, let us think of three “buckets”: bullets (i.e. arms transfers), industrial support, and brains (technology diffusion). While the first two represent the most immediate danger, it is the exchange of technology and military know-how that poses the greatest long-term threat to the West’s security and ability to deter adversaries.
The bullets
North Korea and Iran are moving hundreds of missiles, including more than 200 Fath-360 short-range ballistic missiles, to Russia, and have already sent millions of artillery shells and thousands of attack drones.
Analysts expect Russia to use them to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses, freeing up its own more capable missiles to carry out longer-range strikes elsewhere. Russia has fired about 65 KN-23s, short-range missiles, at North Korea since the war began.
Industrial support
While China has not shipped weapons, it has provided massive supplies of dual-use components that are “directly applied to the Russian war machine,” according to the US. Ninety percent of Russia’s microelectronics imports and 70 percent of its machine tools come from China. A surge in imports of Chinese excavators in 2022 has helped Russia build a formidable defense that fended off a Ukrainian counterattack last year. Meanwhile, Russian companies are increasingly choosing to trade and finance in Chinese yuan to circumvent Western sanctions.
And technology sharing
Equally important, and less well known, is the rapid exchange of technology and minds. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have created ample opportunities for knowledge-sharing. Ukraine is a “laboratory of knowledge and learning” for the Iranians, Dima Adamsky of Reichman University in Israel tells the Economist.
It is getting real-time information about the effectiveness of its weapons against Western defenses, while Russia is learning from Iranian advisers how to conduct airstrikes that mix drones and missiles.