In November, two watershed moments changed the global geopolitical landscape. For the first time, North Korean troops showed up on the battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine war. Shortly afterward, the Danish military detained a Chinese-flagged bulk carrier, the Yi Peng 3, on the suspicion that it had deliberately cut two data cables on the floor of the Baltic Sea.
Both incidents mark a fundamental shift in the strategic environment. For the first time, the United States’ adversaries are willing to come to the direct military aid of one another, even on the other side of the globe.
Call it an “axis of aggressors,” an “unholy alliance,” a new “axis of evil,” or something else altogether—the fact remains that military ties among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are deepening. And this change should upend how the United States and its allies around the world think about and provide for their national security.
North Korea’s troop deployment and China’s suspected cable-cutting cargo carrier did not come out of nowhere. For years now, millions of North Korean shells and thousands of Iranian drones have showed up on the battlefield in Ukraine while Chinese economic assistance has also backstopped Russia’s war effort. China and Russia announced their “no limits” friendship in February 2022, just days before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
More recently, Russia and North Korea inked a mutual defense pact committing the two to aid each other in war, while Russia and Iran are working on a comprehensive treaty that the Russian foreign minister has said will include a defense component. But pacts and promises are one thing; direct involvement in two ongoing wars in Europe—a hot one and a hybrid one—is quite another. China and North Korea have now crossed that Rubicon.
To better understand why these events change everything for the United States, one must delve into the rather wonky world of U.S. defense strategy and force planning.
Beginning with its entry into World War II, the United States sized its military to be able to fight two wars at once—one in the Pacific against Imperial Japan and one in Europe against Nazi Germany. That force-planning construct stuck—more or less—for much of the Cold War, when the United States was worried about beating back communism around the globe.
After the Cold War, the U.S. military held on to a two-war force structure—ostensibly to guard against the possibility of simultaneous wars against Iraq and North Korea—at least on paper. Whether the United States could have fought two full-blown wars in practice remains an open question.
The initial fighting was never the primary challenge; the United States has sufficient forces to do that on two fronts. Sustaining forces for dragged-out wars is what proved to be so difficult. The burden of sustaining two simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretched U.S. ground forces to their core, notwithstanding the reality that these were relatively limited counterinsurgency wars, rather than the more intense style of conventional conflict that we are seeing again in Ukraine.
But as Chinese military power became increasingly formidable and the United States worked to reduce the military modernization deficit left over from the so-called global war on terror, a two-war force structure became increasingly untenable. Defense planners recognized that the United States military would be hard-pressed to fight even one war against a major power, let alone two simultaneously.
So Washington lowered the bar. The Obama administration’s 2011 Defense Strategic Guidance—a policy document that serves as the basis for overall military planning—called for “defeating aggression by any potential adversary” while imposing “unacceptable costs” on another—nicknamed the one-and-a-half-war strategy. The first Trump and then the Biden administrations went one step further and got rid of the half: The 2018 and 2022 defense strategies directed the U.S. military to plan for fighting and winning one war in one theater at a time, while deterring other adversaries without major fighting. The plan is to keep a conflict isolated and localized.
This, in turn, brings us back to why North Korea’s military deployment and China’s cable-cutting are so important. First, both acts indicate that a conflict with one adversary in one part of the world will not necessarily stay limited to that one adversary and region. And second, these events highlight the United States’ limited ability—if not lack thereof—to deter one adversary from joining the fight with another halfway around the globe.
Simply put, as the United States’ adversaries grow closer to one another, the chances of any one conflict in one region then metastasizing elsewhere increases dramatically. And that means that the bedrock planning assumptions in the most recent national defense strategies are outdated, if not outright wrong.
Previous administrations have tried to head off this increasingly precarious strategic environment by attempting to break apart this conglomeration of malign actors. The Obama and Biden administrations offered overtures to Iran. The first Trump administration tried rapprochement with North Korea. And the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations all tried various resets and overtures to Russia.
All of these ventures, unsurprisingly, have come up short for the simple reason that each of these adversaries is, in its own way, unhappy with status quo and has interests that fundamentally clash with the United States.
Even if the Trump administration succeeds in stopping the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the budding axis between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea will endure, for the simple reason that it remains in all four states’ strategic self-interest to preserve it.
For China, the axis translates to new sources of raw materials, military technology, and potentially a future tool for geopolitically distracting the United States. For Russia, the axis provides an economic lifeline (in the form of China) and military hardware (from North Korea and Iran). Iran and North Korea, in turn, stand to gain military technology and great-power backing.
None of these reasons will go away—even if Trump administration brokers some sort of truce.
The other way that administrations have tried to tackle the mismatch between threats and military resources is by writing off parts of the world. Most notably, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations all wanted to downsize the United States’ military commitment to the Middle East. But each administration found itself pulled back into the region in pretty big ways—to stop the Islamic State; repel Iranian proxies; or, most recently, defend Israel and stop a broader regional war.
This is what some might call a revealed preference: Whereas successive administrations may pay lip service to the idea that the Middle East is peripheral to core U.S. strategic interests, time and again, Washington has demonstrated that it actually does care enough about this region to risk blood and treasure there.
The same may be even truer of Europe, with which the United States is fundamentally intertwined. Even leaving aside the cultural and historical ties, trade between the United States and the European Union makes up nearly 30 percent of all global trade in goods and services and 43 percent of global GDP.
And so, despite the desire by some in Washington to walk away from European security and focus squarely on the Indo-Pacific, the United States will find that it is much easier to say that in the abstract than it is to implement such a shift in practice.
If the United States cannot break the axis apart or ignore aspects of it, then it needs to plan for a changed strategic environment. This includes the very real possibility that the United States will need to fight more than one adversary in more than one theater at a time.
That is why the National Defense Strategy Commission—an bipartisan group of experts tasked with reviewing the national defense strategies—called in its most recent report for the United States to develop a three-theater force construct, acknowledging the reality that the United States faces simultaneous challenges in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and must therefore be prepared to defend, along with allies and partners, its global interests in all three regions.
Of course, confronting the combined weight of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is a herculean proposition. It will require a larger military and significantly more defense spending. That may be a tough political sell. But the United States today only spends about half as much on defense as a share of GDP as it did during the Cold War.
And so, if U.S. leaders truly believe what they say in their strategy documents—that this is most dangerous period since the Cold War and perhaps even since World War II—then it only stands to reason that the United States will need to devote a similar level of effort as during those previous times.
Even with increased spending, the United States still won’t be able to go it alone. As much as the United States may preach “America first,” providing for U.S. security and prosperity will be far cheaper and more effective if Washington can draw on the combined strength of its global network of allies and partners.
That, of course, is premised on the idea that the allies and partners are net contributors to—rather than mere consumers of—global security. So as the United States ramps up its defense investments, its allies around the world must raise theirs in parallel.
In January, there will be a new administration, a new strategy, and a potential chance to reevaluate the United States’ strategic assumptions. That should start by acknowledging that Washington does indeed care about multiple parts of the world, and that the threats posed by the axis of adversaries—or whatever label you choose to describe it—are here to stay. It’s high time to plan accordingly.
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