The World Is Realigning
Like a lightning strike illuminating a dim landscape, the twin invasions of Israel and Ukraine have brought a sudden recognition: What appeared to be, until now, disparate and disorganized challenges to the United States and its allies is actually something broader, more integrated, more aggressive, and more dangerous. Over the past several years, the world has hardened into two competing blocs. One is an alliance of liberal-minded, Western-oriented countries that includes NATO as well as U.S. allies in Asia and Oceania, with the general if inconsistent cooperation of some non-liberal countries such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam: a Liberal Alliance, for short. The other bloc is led by the authoritarian dyad of Russia and Iran, but it extends to anti-American states such as North Korea, militias such as Hezbollah, terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, and paramilitaries such as the Wagner Group: an Axis of Resistance, as some of its members have accurately dubbed it.
With the adoption of the Abraham Accords normalizing Israel’s relationship with several Arab countries, and with the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO, the Liberal Alliance has forged tighter ties. In response, the Axis of Resistance has adopted a more offensive posture. “This is an entente that is really coming together in a way that should alarm us quite a lot,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan said recently in an interview with the journalist Bill Kristol. “These countries disagree about a lot of things; they don’t share a common ideology. But they do share a common enemy: us. And the thing that they agree on is that we are a major obstacle to their objectives and their plans, and therefore that it’s in each of their interest to help the others take us down.”
The Axis of Resistance does not have a unifying ideology, but it does have the shared goal of diminishing U.S. influence, especially in the Middle East and Eurasia, and rolling back liberal democracy. Instead of a NATO-like formal structure, it relies on loose coordination and opportunistic cooperation among its member states and its network of militias, proxies, and syndicates. Militarily, it cannot match the U.S. and NATO in a direct confrontation, so it instead seeks to exhaust and demoralize the U.S. and its allies by harrying them relentlessly, much as hyenas harry and exhaust a lion.
The Axis has thus developed into an acephalous networked actor, its member states operating semi-independently yet interdependently, taking cues from one another and sharing resources and dividing duties, jumping in and out of action as opportunities arise and circumstances dictate. One country will help another bust sanctions while receiving military equipment from a’s Anne Applebaum , Russia, Iran, and China have also joined forces on the propaganda front, launching waves of disinformation toward the West. Although the Axis normally takes care to keep its hostilities beneath the threshold that would trigger state-to-state military conflict, it can and will resort to direct military confrontation if it sees need or advantage.
