These revelations are examples of the growing military-industrial ties between China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. “We’re almost back to the axis of evil”, says Admiral John Aquilino, the recently-departed head of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, referring to the term applied by George W. Bush, a former president, to Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Others draw parallels with the Axis forces of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and fascist Italy, with worrying conclusions. “Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea…have now been co-operating for a longer time, and in more ways, than…any of the future Axis countries of the 1930s,” warns Philip Zelikow, in the Texas National Security Review, a military and security journal.

The members of this new quartet of chaos—whose ideologies range from Islamism to hardline communism—are riven by distrust, and they have very different visions of the world. Yet they are united by a shared hatred of the American-led order, and are keen to deepen their economic and military-industrial links. Their relationships amount to a kind of “strategic transactionalism,” says an American administration official. That is, the four regimes share a systematic intent to conduct bilateral deals that are in each participant’s narrow self-interest, and sometimes in the collective interest too.

To get a sense of how deep co-operation is so far, consider three buckets: bullets (ie, weapons transfers), brawn (industrial support) and brains (technology diffusion). Although the first two present the most immediate danger, it is the exchange of military technology and know-how that poses the greater long-term threat to the West’s security and ability to deter adversaries.

Start with bullets. North Korea and Iran are transferring hundreds of missiles, including more than 200 Fath-360 short-range ballistic projectiles to Russia, having already sent millions of artillery shells and thousands of attack drones. Analysts expect Russia will use them to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences, freeing-up its own more capable missiles to conduct long-range strikes elsewhere. Russia has fired around 65 KN-23s, a North Korean short-range missile, since the start of the war.

Mateship, missiles and muscle

Industrial brawn has been just as important. Although China has not sent arms, its vast supplies of dual-use components are being “applied directly to the Russian war machine”, said Mr Campbell recently. China accounts for 90% of Russia’s microelectronics imports and 70% of its machine tools. These inputs have enabled Russia to churn out cruise missiles and drones. China’s support has had surprising effects elsewhere on the battlefield: a jump in Chinese excavator imports in 2022 helped Russia build formidable defences, which foiled Ukraine’s counter-offensive last year. Meanwhile Russian companies are conducting more trade and financing in Chinese yuan in order to bypass Western sanctions.

Just as important, and less well known, is the booming exchange of technology—the brains. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have created abundant opportunities to swap technical know-how. Ukraine is a “laboratory of knowledge and learning” for the Iranians, says Dima Adamsky of Reichman University in Israel. It gains real-time insight into the effectiveness of its weapons against Western defences, while Russia learns from Iranian advisers how to conduct air attacks that mix drones and missiles. Russia is sharing information about its jamming of drone-control and GPS signals with Iran, according to the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, an NGO. It is also sending the Islamic Republic captured Western kit, which will probably be stripped for technical examination.

North Korea, too, receives “valuable technical and military insights” on the performance of its missiles against Western air defences, notes Mira Rapp-Hooper, an American security official. China’s strategists have been studying the performance of HIMARS, landmines and drones—capabilities it expects to encounter in a war over Taiwan—in the Ukraine war, says Lyle Goldstein, an expert on China’s armed forces at Brown University.

A different kind of tech boom

Increasingly, the flows of technology are extending beyond these ad-hoc arrangements, to long-term deals. Sino-Russian co-operation, once hampered by mutual suspicion, is surging ahead in areas including submarines, aeronautics and missiles. Russia is willing to help China build missile-warning and defence systems, according to the research arm of the US air force. It reckons there is now significant co-operation in space, too. This is not confined to China. Russia is helping Iran’s space programme, which is widely considered a front for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). North Korea has also been promised unspecified technological assistance by Mr Putin, Russia’s president. This could include helping North Korea develop re-entry vehicles for its ICBMs, suggests Victor Cha, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think-tank.

While there is little evidence of a surge in nuclear-weapons collaboration, the spread of the most advanced military technologies is accelerating. “Whether Russia will part with the crown jewels is hard to say, but Putin needs his ammunition,” says Mr Cha. Avril Haines, America’s director of national intelligence, has indicated that Russian “concessions” to North Korea were potentially undermining long-held non-proliferation norms. And there are some signs of joint military actions or obligations. There have been naval drills in the Gulf of Oman by Russia, China and Iran. Russia and China have flown joint bomber patrols near Alaska. A deal signed by Mr Putin in Pyongyang in June commits Russia and North Korea to “immediately provide military and other assistance” to each other in the event of war, which would imply Russian involvement in any conflict on the Korean peninsula.

The quartet of autocracies still faces a number of constraints that may limit the extent of its members’ co-operation. One is that their appetite for risk varies. China’s defence industry is big enough to tip the scales in Ukraine, yet the country has held back from providing lethal assistance, not least because doing so would also undermine its ability to present itself as a neutral mediator in world affairs and jeopardise its economic links with the rich world. Russia, Iran and North Korea—pariah states already under sanctions—may have fewer qualms. But even so, Russia seems to have backed down for now from sending anti-ship missiles to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia, following economic pressure from the Gulf monarchies and possibly China, all of which need stability in the Red Sea for trade.

Another constraint is mistrust, born of a history of feuds and infighting. China, which claims chunks of Russian-occupied territory, is jostling with its neighbour for influence in Central Asia and is leery of Russia’s growing defence ties with North Korea, which it sees as its own client state. Meanwhile, many Iranians remain well aware of the Soviet invasion in 1941. “All of these countries have bilateral ties but there is not any kind of quadrilateral co-operation,” notes Nicole Grajewski of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. “This isn’t an alliance,” says Jon Alterman of CSIS dismissively of the quartet. “This is a pickup game.” The shortcomings of the grouping are most starkly revealed by a comparison with NATO, the West’s main security pact, most of whose members share a deep alignment of political values, similar economies and a high degree of trust.

Yet despite its limitations, the quartet is already beginning to give the West headaches, and the pain looks likely to intensify. America’s armed forces, organised to fight one major war, are already being forced to make hard choices and accept risky trade-offs over scarce resources. This was starkly illustrated by a shortage of 155mm artillery shells last year, when in January America drew down emergency stocks stored in Israel to send them to Ukraine, only to have to reverse course in October, diverting shells intended for Ukraine to Israel. Similarly every anti-aircraft missile fired by Western ships at Houthi drones in the Red Sea is one less available to defend Taiwan. The exchange of technical know-how will dilute the efficacy of Western weapons around the world—Russian jamming has reduced the effectiveness of Excalibur, a GPS-guided artillery round, to below 10%, according to Mark Cancian, also of the CSIS.

The frightening four

It could, of course, be far worse: the four autocracies have yet to co-ordinate their nuclear weapons efforts or conduct joint military campaigns. Yet for all their shortcomings and differences the autocracies operate according to a simple shared calculus: the more powerful and troublesome each member becomes, the greater the opportunity the others have to capitalise on chaos. This “distraction dividend”, argues Hal Brands of John Hopkins University, can “multiply the challenges that their members pose individually and collectively.” The risks posed by the quartet’s ever-closer alignment do not need to be vastly exaggerated, nor extrapolated far into the future, to be causes of concern. They are worrying enough as they are.