When Russia enlisted the aid of China, North Korea and Iran in its war against Ukraine, some American and British officials began talking about a new “axis.”
It appeared that the four countries were united by anger, authoritarianism and animus against the United States and its allies.
But Iran’s sales of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia for its war and oil shipped to China did not pay off when it mattered, raising doubts about unity among the nations.
None of the other three states rushed to aid Iran during its war with Israel or when U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear sites. China and Russia, by far the two most powerful countries among the four, issued pro forma denunciations of the American actions but did not lift a finger to materially help Iran.
“The reality of this conflict turned out to be that Russia and China didn’t run to Iran’s rescue,” said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “That just exposes the limitations of the whole ‘axis’ idea.”
“Each of them is pretty selfish and doesn’t want to get embroiled in the wars of others,” he added. “These are very different wars and different sets of conflicts. The countries are not necessarily sharing the same structures and values and institutional links the same way the U.S. and its allies do.”
The four nations all have autocratic systems and harbor hostility toward the United States, which traditionally has aimed to weaken them and challenge their legitimacy. The countries also have some strategic ties and have undermined U.S.-led economic sanctions by doing commerce and sharing weapons technology with one another.
“Yes, there is probably a very modest amount of coordination among China, North Korea, Iran and Russia — in the sense that they talk with each other and have some of the same frustrations with the United States or with the West,” said Michael Kimmage, a history professor at Catholic University of America and a former State Department official who has written a book on the war in Ukraine.
“But it’s not particularly meaningful,” he added.
Among the nations, only Russia and North Korea have a mutual defense treaty. Besides providing weapons to Russia, North Korea has sent more than 14,000 troops to fight alongside the Russians against Ukrainian forces.
Their bond is rooted in a shared Communist past and the anti-American war on the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, in which Mao’s China also took part.
That history also accounts for the close ties between China and Russia, one of the most consequential bilateral relationships for the U.S. government and much of the world. The leaders of the two nations have forged a personal bond over many years, and their governments announced that they had a “no limits” partnership just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
China still sees value in abiding by some of the international norms promoted by a pre-Trump America and democratic nations, and it has refrained from sending substantial arms aid to Russia during the war. But it has helped to rebuild Russia’s defense industrial base, U.S. officials said, and it continues to be one of the biggest buyers of Russian oil.
Russia and Iran have never had that type of relationship.
One issue is religion. Iran is a theocracy with the type of ruling body that the other three secular, socialist governments regard with suspicion. Both Russia and China view the spread of Islamic fundamentalism with alarm. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has taken extreme measures against even moderate Muslims, suppressing some Islamic practices among ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs in his country’s northwest.
“There are no shared values beyond vague platitudes about the ‘multipolar world order,’ and there are quite a few contradictions,” said Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University. “Putin indicated what they are: His relationships with Iran’s neighbors, including Israel and the Arab states, are too important to sacrifice on the altar of Russian-Iranian friendship.”
“He is a cynical manipulator interested only in his strategic interests, and if this means throwing Iran under the bus, then he is prepared to do this,” Mr. Radchenko added. “To be sure, the feeling is fully reciprocated in Tehran.”
Mr. Putin and President Trump spoke about the Israel-Iran war on June 14, and Mr. Putin offered to mediate. Afterward, Mr. Putin said publicly that Russia had helped Iran build a nuclear power plant and was assisting with two more reactors.
While he spoke of Russia’s partnership with Iran, he signaled a reluctance to commit to aiding the country in the war.
“We are not imposing anything on anyone — we are simply talking about how we see a possible way out of the situation,” Mr. Putin said. “But the decision, of course, is up to the political leadership of all these countries, primarily Iran and Israel.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with Mr. Putin in Moscow on June 23, a day after the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, but the Russian summary of the meeting had little beyond the usual expressions of diplomatic support. That day, Iran carried out a symbolic missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar and then agreed to a cease-fire with Israel and the United States.
China also watched from the stands as the crisis unfolded.
Mr. Xi said that all sides “should work to de-escalate the conflict.” And when Mr. Trump ordered the American strikes on Iran, China said it strongly condemned the attacks and accused the United States of violating the United Nations Charter.
But like Russia, China did not send material support to Iran. Although China does sometimes take an official position on conflicts in the region, it also often tries to appear noncommittal in order to balance interests. For years, it has been building up its ties to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two rivals of Iran. Saudi Arabia, like Iran, is a big oil exporter to China.
An extended regional war would jeopardize China’s oil imports from those countries, so it seeks to quell hostilities rather than stoke them.
China’s aim of being a neutral broker in the Middle East became evident in March 2023, when it helped finalize a diplomatic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
China also used that opportunity to develop closer ties with Iran’s partner in the region, Syria, ruled then by Bashar al-Assad.
That was a period when China’s influence in the Middle East was at a peak, said Enrico Fardella, a professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” who has taught at Peking University and studies China’s foreign policy. Now, with Iran weakened by the war and Mr. Assad overthrown by rebels, China is treading carefully around the Iran-Israel conflict to see which governments and political groups or militias in the region emerge as the most powerful.
“While Beijing has a vested interest in promoting a cease-fire and post-conflict stabilization, its current low-profile diplomacy suggests limited confidence in its ability to influence events,” Mr. Fardella said in a text message. “As in post-Assad Syria, China may once again adopt a wait-and-see strategy, carefully repositioning itself to salvage influence in a rapidly shifting post-conflict landscape.”
Yun Sun, a scholar of China’s foreign policy at the Stimson Center, a research institute in Washington, argued that the “axis” formulation for China, Russia, Iran and North Korea was still valid. Although the four countries do not have a mutual defense agreement binding all of them, she said, they share an “anti-U.S., anti-West and anti-liberal democracy” outlook.
“An alignment short of mutual defense is an alignment after all,” Ms. Sun added. “The fact they won’t fight for each other in a war does not make their cooperation and collective positioning less of a challenge. China has provided nuclear and missile technologies to Iran. It has bankrolled Russia’s war and kept North Korea on life support.”
But there are limits to China’s support for Iran, Ms. Sun said, adding that Chinese officials lack confidence in Iran’s theocratic leadership, and that they see Iran as having “been too naïve, opportunistic, indecisive and wavering in its external relations.”
Chinese officials are also aware that Iran, like North Korea, is an isolated country and needs China, despite occasional ebbs in the relationship.
On June 26, after Iran agreed to a cease-fire with Israel, Iran’s defense minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh, made his first trip abroad since the war began — to the Chinese city of Qingdao for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian security group led by China and Russia.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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