Let me start by offering my thanks to the National Security Institute for organizing this event, and to Jamil Jaffer for the kind introduction.  It’s great to see my former governmental colleagues Bonnie Glick and Paula Dobriansky again, and – if you’ll forgive me the usual obligatory caveat about how everything I say here will represent only my personal views, and not necessarily that of anybody else in the U.S. Government or elsewhere – I’m pleased to be able to contribute.

It is certainly the case that we – and indeed anyone concerned with preserving international peace and security – have some significant challenges ahead of us as a result of the growing cooperation that seems to be emerging between the world’s most dangerous dictatorships: the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Those regimes are united by their hostility to the international community, their commitment to threatening or using force – including nuclear weapons threats – to intimidate and frighten other states into compliance with their wishes, and their desire to remake the international system in ways more congenial to their brutality and lawlessness.  And they are increasingly finding common cause against the United States, our Allies, and our partners around the world.

That said, while acknowledging the problems that such unholy partnerships can create, we also shouldn’t panic. Cooperation among the world’s revisionist and provocateur regimes against the fabric of international order, and against international peace and stability, is unfortunately not a new phenomenon. 

The Enemy of My Enemy ….

In the classic Indian treatise on statecraft, the famous Arthashastra, Kautilya – an advisor to Chandragupta, the founder of the ancient Mauryan Empire in the 4^th century B.C.E. – articulated the concept of a “circle of states,” existing at various removes from one’s own, each member of which can be regarded as an actual or potential enemy or ally in an extended sequence of relationships.  Under this schema, for instance, a state located in your adversary’s geographic rear becomes valuable as your ally in the event of conflict, thus becoming that adversary’s “rear enemy,” just as his ally in your rear would become your “rear enemy,” and so forth, out two or three jumps, if you will, in expanding circles of counterpoised interrelationship.

In Kautilya’s illustrations, these relationships are a function of geography, but that the concept is clearly much more broadly applicable.  And while it’s not clear to me where the aphorism first originated about “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – since I’ve seen it variously attributed to sources such as the Imam Ali, ancient Latin sources, Niccolò Machiavelli, and a 19^th Century writer by the name of Gabriel Manigault – I think this idea is very much what the Arthashastra had in mind more than two millennia ago.  Anyway, however you phrase it, this maxim is widely believed, and widely followed, including by those who feel themselves to share an interest in undermining the current international system.

Even when it comes to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – an area in which, given the stakes, you might think (or at least hope) that countries would show at least a little prudence and self-restraint – such opportunistic oppositionalism has been dangerously common.  Keen to build up a fellow Communist dictatorship that joined it in hating the capitalist democracies of the West, for instance, the Soviet Union helped China acquire nuclear weapons, training Chinese scientists and providing nuclear weapons technology to Beijing in the 1950s – though Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev eventually thought better of his initial promise to provide Mao Zedong with an actual prototype weapon. 

China, in turn, gave nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan – which had a famously fraught relationship with India, on China’s contested Himalayan border to the south – reportedly providing not merely uranium hexafluoride (UF6) for Pakistan’s first nuclear weapons but in fact an actual Chinese nuclear weapon design.   And Pakistan later passed that design along, as well as uranium enrichment technology stolen from Europe, to clients in the Muslim world such as Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and the Iranian revolutionary regime, through the notorious smuggler A.Q. Khan.  Meanwhile, China has provided missile components to both Iran and Pakistan for decades, thus contributing to what might be called a strategic “twofer”: supporting the military power of regimes deeply antagonistic to both its regional rival (India) and its global rival (the United States).

Less dramatically, during the Cold War both the Soviets and the Communist Chinese would throw aid and money at any guerrilla, terrorist, or insurgent group willing to voice vaguely Marxist sentiments while working against any country friendly with or allied to the United States.  And, truth be told, we sometimes returned the favor, as with the so-called “Reagan Doctrine” during the 1980s, which saw semi-covert U.S. support for no small number of anti-communist governments and fighters in the developing world.

Many people in America today, moreover, may know U.S. servicemembers killed or wounded in the line of duty in Iraq by munitions supplied to local insurgents by the Iranian regime.  And notwithstanding the supposed role of the Russians and Chinese as intermediaries in the “Six Party Talks” process with North Korea, we’ve seen China play a critical role as Pyongyang’s effective co-conspirator by illegally providing aid and helping the North Koreans evade sanctions for years – Beijing obviously being pleased by the degree to which DPRK provocations preoccupy and challenge U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific, distracting us from responding effectively to the threats China presents.

So while it’s certainly bad news to see cooperation among anti-American provocateurs and imperialist autocrats increasing today, it is hardly shocking. 

Structural Adversity

Nor, in any fundamental sense, was such cooperation really preventable.  We did not “cause” this cooperation, and we could not have prevented it from occurring simply by trying to appease the anti-American grievances articulated by the autocrats involved.  Their cooperation arises out of a degree of shared strategic interest that is largely independent of the vagaries of U.S. policy choices, because it grows from deeper roots.

It is not really that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have a particular grievance with any given set of U.S. policy agenda items, and that our choices have “driven them” to cooperate against us.  They certainly do tend to dislike our policy choices, but in reality their grievance is much more structural, grounded in the basic fact of the United States’ generally dominant role in the postwar (and especially the post-Cold War) international security environment. 

Short of some kind of weird, self-abnegating U.S. global surrender and withdrawal from all international engagement and crippling politico-economic decoupling from the outside world – and perhaps not necessarily even then – there is no U.S. policy choice that would even begin to meet their demands.  Simply put, these regimes want a different world, one in which their sort of brutal coercion is afforded free reign, in which our role and position in the international system is broken and reduced, and in which our allies are separated from us so that those powers can have their way with them.  (Not incidentally, the regimes that rule those countries also all loathe the system of government that we have tended to represent in the world, in which citizens enjoy rights enforceable against their rulers and have the ability to change rulers through the ballot box if and when such leaders fall short of expectations.)

U.S. presidents of various stripes sometimes tend to think that they can – through their own peculiar charisma, shrewdness, or gestures of good faith – break through the ice of those regimes’ hostility and resolve the most important differences between us.  Yet the most important and decisive differences aren’t policy differences, but rather structural ones, rooted in things that are largely non-negotiable for all concerned.  Approaching their resolution as if one were bargaining for passage of a Senate resolution, making a real estate deal, or expecting one’s counterparty to suddenly recognize that you’re really a good guy after all, is simply a fool’s errand, for that’s not the kind of game those regimes are playing at all.

They share their “enemy of my enemy” common interest against us, in other words, pretty much no matter what we do.  They’ll cooperate with each other against our interests as much, and for as long, as they think they can get benefits out of doing so at an acceptable cost. 

Limits to Malign Cooperation

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that they’re in any danger of forging a really deep alliance against us.  The good news, perhaps, is that there are likely limits on the breadth and depth of their cooperation.  North Korea doesn’t fit so well into this typology, but Russia, China, and Iran, at least, are all countries that look back with nostalgia on ancient empires.  And these regimes dream today of their own regional hegemony, and have invested their legitimacy narratives in militarized revanchism. 

The problem with this – from their perspective, at least – is that those various revisionist dreams are not really compatible with each other, especially those of Russia and China.  They share an interest in messing with us, as it were, but they do not share real strategic interests beyond that.  Quite the contrary.

China and Russia certainly don’t really trust each other.  After all, they fought each other for centuries, even millennia, and some of those issues are far from settled.  There are no small number of Chinese nationalists today, for instance, who look with jealous eyes on Russian territory such as Primorsky Krai, which they regard as having been stolen from China through so-called “unequal treaties” in the 19^th Century.  And even observers who aren’t so historically minded cannot but notice that the resource-rich but already thinly populated Siberian territories of an economically and demographically declining Russia sit just a poorly-defended border away from the energy- and resource-hungry economy and enormous population of China.  (As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?)

Moreover, those two countries’ ruling elites – fixated on geopolitical grievances as they are, and having indeed tied much of their regimes’ autocratic domestic legitimacy narratives upon “righting” the geopolitical wrongs supposedly done to their countries in the past – have strategic objectives and desired global end-states that conflict all but irreconcilably.

Both China and Russia want us weakened and America and its allies out of their revisionist way.  Beyond that, however, the revisionisms with which their ruling regimes are currently intoxicated are not compatible revisionisms.  Russia wants to be a superpower again, second to no one, and to be the dominant power in Eurasia.  Yet China wants to be the globally dominant power, and it will not accept anyone else’s genuine equality with itself.  Russia’s dream of geopolitical return is incompatible with being a second-rate power, much less China’s vassal state, but China’s dream of return is incompatible with Russia being anything but a second-rate power behind China, and most likely indeed Beijing’s vassal.  (And the current Ukraine war is sharpening this dynamic, making Russia more and more, in fact, into a Chinese tributary state.)

The so-called “no limits” partnership between Beijing and Moscow thus has structural limits, and will not last.

The problem, however, is that while I think the wheels will eventually fall off that cooperative bus, this is likely to take some time – and in the meantime both regimes will continue to feel a strong interest in undermining not just our interests, but also international peace and security more generally.  Ironically, moreover, the incompatibility between Chinese and Russian revisionist dreams may remain less acute and more merely nascent – and thus their ability to cooperate be more prolonged – to the degree that we succeed in our own competitive strategy of stymying their aggressive moves and making achievement of those dreams seem still seem out of reach. 

This means, in other words, that we shall likely have to buckle down for a potentially very long period of challenging, unpleasant, and sometimes outright dangerous rivalry and geopolitical jockeying for advantage.  Barring the happenstance of someone’s domestic collapse, a providential defenestration, or some form of regime change in one or more of those states, I see little space for clever policy “solutions” other than simply the United States and its Allies and partners plugging stolidly along in this competition with resolution and intestinal fortitude for the indefinite future.  That’s not too pleasant a prospect, and such resolution and fortitude will require strategic vision, consistency of focus, programmatic resourcing, and freedom from domestic political distraction that we will find far from easy to supply.  Yet supply it we must.

A Global Anti-Imperialist Agenda?

That said, let me pivot to a more hopeful note, since although the focus of their supposed grievances and their revisionist imaginations is the United States, we are not in this alone against them.  To the contrary, our range of at least potentialpartners in this great competitive endeavor is positively huge, for those dangerous regimes are – through their provocative actions and policies, and through the very cooperation that we find so problematic – ensuring that, by Kautilya’s criteria in the Arthashastra, virtually the whole world increasingly should share an interest in working with us to ensure that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea don’t get their way. 

Remember how China – for decades, going back at least to the Bandung Conference of 1955 – spent so much of its time in Third World diplomatic fora playing to anti-imperialist sympathies to gain favor and influence among countries that used to live under European colonial rule?  Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have always been enormously hypocritical about this, given their country’s imperialist history and their own imperialist ambitions, but for so long as China was generally a weak power and claimed to play an underdog role in the world – vis-à-vis not just the Americans and Europeans, but also the USSR after Beijing broke with Moscow in the late 1950s – this discourse had real diplomatic traction.  As astonishing and absurd as this may seem in retrospect, the brutally authoritarian, mass-murdering, and territorially aggressive communist regime of Mao Zedong made remarkable progress winning friends in the anti-colonialist Third World by mouthing anti-imperialist rhetoric and preaching the virtues of “non-intervention,” and Beijing has tried to keep playing that card ever since.   

But that was then, and this is now.  And this is where that intra-authoritarian cooperation I’ve been discussing has a major downside, at least for China.  For today, Beijing is now the “no-limits” friend and facilitator for an openly imperialist regime in the Kremlin that is at war trying to invade and annex a smaller, neighboring country that a generation ago escaped imperial subjugation and acquired its independence.

Let us not overlook how much of a big deal this is.  The mask of hypocrisy has been torn off of Beijing’s diplomatic pretensions to “non-intervention” and “anti-imperialism.”  The CCP’s horrific quasi-alliance with Russia’s wars of conquest comes, moreover, just as China is now quite openly preparing for its own campaign of imperialist aggression and annexation against Taiwan – and even as Beijing also tries to manipulate webs of economic dependency to influence domestic politics and political behavior in a wide range of countries around the world. 

So in diplomatic and political terms, at least, I’d say the tables are now turning.  We, along with our Allies and partners, are now – in strategic terms – on the side of the anti-imperialist underdogs who want heavy-handed bullies like Russia and China to stop invading and annexing their neighbors.  We are now on the side of every independent country everywhere that wishes to live in an international system that protects nations’ sovereignty, independence, and autonomy against imperialist coercion.  We are now the natural friends of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) against the conquistador regimes of Russia and China, which now clearly represent imperialism at its most grim and brutalizing. 

And that ought to be a pretty big deal indeed – and to give us diplomatic and political opportunities as we build partnerships around the world to preserve an international order in which such aggression is illegitimate and unlawful. 

The Biden Administration talks of us being in a struggle for the future of the world between autocracies and democracies, but I think the issue is actually more structural and more fundamental than that.  When one talks about the “rules-based international order,” any state that prizes is own autonomy and independence ought to share an inescapable and even existential interest in protecting and preserving a system organized around the principle of protecting hard-won national sovereignty against predatory monsters that would invade and annex other states.  And this ought to be the case whether that state is a democracy or an autocracy.

Given how widely shared that interest ought to be, perhaps we can thus turn the Arthashastra’s maxims against the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean co-conspirators who find such strategic value in cooperating against us.  In terms of its ancient concepts of statecraft, those countries’ actions ought to make the entire rest of the world increasingly into their enemy, making them truly – almost literally – international outlaws.  And we can thus perhaps build our strategy upon the ideal of anti-imperialist partnership, for as the “adversary of the adversaries” of sovereign national independence, as it were, we are now very much the rest of the world’s friend. 

Kautilya, perhaps, would approve.

-- Christopher Ford