Friday Thoughts On The Russia-North Korea-Iran-China Axis

Spitballing some foreign policy observations here.

Photo by Abdullah Al Hasan on Unsplash

[Leave me a comment if you agree or disagree with any of these assessments or vibe checks!]

I’m fascinated in how the War in Ukraine has developed with Iran sending Russia a bunch of attack drones, and North Korea has reportedly begun to send human personnel to Ukraine as well as the ammunition North Korea has been supplying in bulk already. How ideologically committed are Iran and North Korea to a Russian victory over Ukraine?

The war is relatively stalemated, at least as long as Europe and the US continue scrounging economic funding and supplies, and Russia is pyrrhically gaining ground slowly, callously wasting a generation of its young men in sociopathic meat wave assaults losing up to seven or more soldiers for every one Ukrainian lost. What might a supposed Russian victory look like after expending so many young men and isolating the Russian economy into a pariah nation dangerously indifferent to its alarming state of societal decay?

Russia already has a lower GDP per capita than Kazakhstan, Mexico, and Bulgaria. Not to throw shade on those countries, but Russia believes itself a peer power and economy to the United States. Russia has often been described as a gas station with a nuclear arsenal clinging to former Soviet glory, but now Putin has scrap-piled the Soviet armory to the point of dependence on shitty ammunition from the deranged hereditary dictatorship of North Korea.

Iran is also helping prolong the war by selling attack drones to Putin in bulk, which is kind of a weird way to fight back against America’s past hegemonic sins of meddling in Iran… by helping a different country meddle in and invade Ukraine.

China is kind of playing both sides, because it doesn’t mind seeing America lose or suffer the geopolitical humiliation of giving up in Ukraine, and is also benefiting from Russia wasting a generation in a reckless war while drastically losing influence and capacity throughout Central Asia. If China wanted to, I believe some Russian land could be conquered without much of a fight. Not to feed any Chinese delusions of imperial grandeur, but I’d suggest it’s not worth trying to puncture through the first island chain by invading Taiwan, and butting heads against the US — and by extension Japan, Australia and India of the Quad, as well as South Korea — over the inevitable ruins of a very well defended Taiwan. Instead, China can expand pretty fast peacefully right now in the Central Asian vacuum Russia has left.

China geographically is and always has been a land power, so attempting to beat the world’s hyper sea power, the US, seems like it would come at a sisyphean cost. Meanwhile, the US isn’t very interested in Central Asia, so China will have much more latitude to do what it wants there than trying to pull off an amphibious landing against a close US ally with defense agreements signed by Asia’s other biggest economic powerhouses.

Not to mention China’s bubble-ridden economy is really struggling, and its demographic problems have caught up to it. I’d like to suggest that if Xi Jinping needs some distracting military adventurism abroad to turn around domestic disapproval and malaise, heading west and north over land instead of east over sea is win-win kind of de-escalation for the Chinese-America rivalry.

Behind Ukraine and Taiwan, the ongoing demolition of Gaza is another flashpoint for the flirty Russia-North Korea-Iran-China axis. Disproportionate and effective Israeli actions in Gaza and increasingly Lebanon are now being followed by suspicion Israel might try to attack Iran in a much bigger way than their current, surprisingly stable tit-for-tat face-saving bombings. How might that roll the dice on how the geopolitics will shake out?

Unfortunately, Gaza is not a very helpful front for a united axis as Israel pretty quickly decimated the leadership and organization of Hamas and Hezbollah, and Israel’s defenses backed up by the US and even Sunni Gulf states — that are all but treaty allies of Israel against the influence of Shia Iran — look frankly too strong for Iran to really threaten. With Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie bombings going off so successfully, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is likely quite paranoid about what triggers Israel might have ready to pull against their leadership ranks. The Ayatollah is not too belligerent to understand that a war against Israel could quickly become a existential threat for the regime.

But imagine a more extreme world where a year or so ago Xi Jinping announced he was chill with Russia using tactical battlefield nukes in Ukraine to blitz the government in Kiev, and Iran chose to go all in with Hamas and Hezbollah after the October 7th attack and launched a huge missile, drone, and ground war against Israel, and China launched a sneak attack on US bases across the South Pacific as well as airfields and ports in Japan and South Korea ahead of an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. What if America’s enemies were more coordinated?

The idea is an interesting counterfactual daydream, but a bit sensationalist. The US and its Western allies are so strong it’s not really worth it. Israel can take Hezbollah and Hamas at the same time, and a US carrier group just off-shore in the Mediterranean is a formidable warning to Iran that destruction awaits a serious attack on Israel. Ukraine is not backing down, and the possibility of Putin having to rely on North Korean troops does not suggest Putin has the political capital to outlast US and NATO commitment if Trump loses. And Taiwan, on account of its geography and hefty supply of US weapon systems, is the axis’s most pyrrhic prize of all.

It’s important to note the power superiority of the American coalition. The Russian military is bogged down in Ukraine without even going up against any of NATO’s far advanced weapons and air power, Iran’s long-term proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah have been smashed, and China and North Korea essentially have almost no actual real-life military experience despite all the money they have spent to the detriment of their peoples’ standards of living. North Korea obviously stands to gain a lot of knowledge, technology, and experience helping Russia’s war effort, but the deeper they get involved the more South Korea is threatening to get involved on the Ukrainian side. The only real advantage of this new potential axis against the Western World is that none of them are democracies so they don’t have to worry about the political costs of wasting a lot of money and citizens’ lives. …And, of course, Trump might get reelected and pull the US out of NATO, betray Ukraine, and ignore Taiwan, though Putin could likely convince Trump to defund Israel for Iran’s benefit if they were that coordinated.

Fortunately, the dictators of this 21st Century have smaller visions of global domination than the dictators of the 20th Century, and Putin, Jinping, Khamenei, and Kim Jong Un aren’t as dementedly addicted to amphetamines like Hitler was! 🥃

---

☕ Enjoy my comedy and political commentary? Buy me a coffee!

But first subscribe to my Substack The Halfway Café to get my work right to your inbox.

Check out my Linktree for all my digital branches, but definitely follow The Halfway Post on Twitter or Threads to interrupt your daily political doomscrolling with my Dada News.

If you think Donald Trump is a joke, I published the book for you: “Satire In The Trump Years: The Best Of The Halfway Post,” available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I also have two poetry books full of Millennial existentialism, Cabaret No Stare and Moon Goon available in print and on Kindle.

Browse my comedy portfolio, my Dada News portfolio, and my poetry portfolio.