Election 2024: How to Respond to the Axis of Autocracies

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Russia is providing Houthi militants in Yemen with satellite data to target their missile attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea. Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facilitated the transfer, giving Houthis “eyes” on ship traffic that they did not previous have.

The news adds to growing concern that an axis of autocracies has formed among Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Their goal? To test, and ultimately break, U.S., and Western dominance more broadly, of world affairs.

Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has said how they will counter what some analysts contend is a threat to U.S. security that “may be unprecedented in the potential peril it represents.” But the issue could well dominate their presidency.

How should the United States respond? The answer to that question depends in good part on whether one sees the axis as a temporary marriage of convenience that is limited by its members’ conflicting interests and will likely collapse, or the beginning of a true, perhaps even larger, anti-Western bloc.

It is easy to marshal evidence for both sides of that debate. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea do have conflicting interests. Above all, Moscow isn’t likely to accept a permanent role as a junior partner to Beijing. And as the recent BRICS meeting illustrates, other non-Western powers do not look eager to sign up for an anti-U.S. coalition.

However, marriages of convenience can last a long time even if they never evolve into something deeper. That is especially true when the conditions that produced the marriage remain in place. The axis of autocracies has formed in good part in response to U.S. policy choices to sanction its members and constrain their freedom of action. Those decisions, while justified on their individual merits, provide a glue to bind the axis together.

As U.S. policymakers assess these contending perspectives, they have four broad choices for a response.

Wait the axis out. If the axis is destined to collapse of its own weight, or is limited in how much it can cooperate, then the wisest strategy might be to sit tight and let events take their course. The United States might even double down on current policies to hurry the breakup along. The problem is that the axis could do considerable damage in the time it takes for their differences to surface. That is particularly true with increased sharing of critical military technology. The countries may get a divorce, but they will walk away with much more formidable military capabilities.

Divide the axis. The United States could seek to break the axis, which really means separating China and Russia. Wooing away either Iran or North Korea would not substantially reduce the threat the axis poses. A wedge strategy would require the United States to abandon actions it has taken, for good reason, against either China or Russia. And while discussions of wedge strategies inevitably invoke how Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger wooed China away from the Soviet Union, they took advantage of a pre-existing Sino-Soviet split. The United States today would have to engineer one. That’s a much taller task.

Rally others. If strength lies in numbers, then the United States should add numbers. Broadening and deepening a coalition opposed to the axis could counter its ambitions and potentially curb its actions. But will U.S. domestic politics allow any president to offer deals to persuade so-called global swing states like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Turkey that their interests like with the West and not with the axis? The opposition to new trade deals and hostility to foreign aid suggests not. Even if domestic politics were conducive to coalition building, how would the United States prevent swing states and others from playing one bloc off against another? Rallying others could also have the perverse effect of intensifying cooperation among axis members by denying them opportunities to work with others.

Give axis what it wants. The United States could try to disrupt the axis by giving its members what they want. At the top of their list for China, Russia, and Iran, would be U.S. recognition of their right to dominate their neighborhoods. Deciding to respect spheres of influence might seem far-fetched. It runs counter to the last eighty years of U.S. foreign policy. However, it is implicit in calls for the United States to remove itself from entangling overseas commitments and to turn inward. And as history shows, efforts to satisfy great power ambitions may embolden rather than appease them.

After considering the pluses and minuses for each strategy, which one would you favor?

Campaign Update

The Trump campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission this week accusing Britain’s governing Labour Party of “blatant foreign interference” in the 2024 election. The allegation is that  party members traveled to the United States at Labour’s expense to advise Democratic strategists. The Labour Party says that the individuals in question traveled at their own expense. If true, then U.S. election law was not violated. The penalty for breaking the law would be a fine. However the complaint is resolved, U.S.-UK relations could be testy if Trump wins on November 5.

Far more significant election interference is coming from Russia, Iran, and China. The Kremlin has allegedly paid a former Florida sheriff’s deputy living in Russia to create fake news sites and videos that discredit Harris and Walz. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence believes that the former deputy created a video in which someone impersonating a former student of Walz’s accuses him of sexual assault. The video has received more than 64 million views. Meanwhile, Microsoft warns that Iran is ramping up its efforts to interfere in the election. Those efforts, which parallel similar efforts by China and Russia, may include trying to foment violent demonstrations after Election Day.

President Joe Biden said in New Hampshire this week that “we gotta lock him [Trump] up.” He quickly qualified his words: “Politically lock him up. Lock him out.” The Trump campaign was quick to accuse Biden of admitting that his administration had weaponized the legal system against his predecessor:

Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square.

As of this morning, more than 33 million Americans have cast their 2024 vote. To put that number in perspective, almost 160 million people voted in 2020. As in 2020, more Democrats than Republicans have been voting early.

What the Candidates Are Saying

The Atlantic and the New York Times both ran stories this week in which Trump’s former secretary for homeland security and chief of staff, retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, challenged his former boss’s fitness to return to the Oval Office. Kelly said that Trump had praised Hitler, denigrated wounded and fallen U.S. troops, and longed to be a dictator. Kelly added that he regarded Trump as a “fascist.”

Trump took exception to Kelly’s comments. He called Kelly, whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, “dumb” and “a LOWLIFE.”

What Trump has never explained is why so many senior officials in his administration, including his vice president, oppose his return to the presidency. He instead has questioned their intelligence, effectiveness, and honor. That raises two questions. First, why does Trump have what he implicitly admits is a terrible track record in making senior hires? Second, what has he learned that will help him make better hiring decisions should he return to the Oval Office?

Harris initially tread lightly in response to the reports of Trump’s praise for Hitler, saying only that the reported remarks were “deeply troubling.” She also said that Trump “wants unchecked power.”

The vice president upped her criticism of Trump at a CNN town hall on Wednesday night. She said that Kelly was “putting out a 911 call to the American people" and that she agreed with Kelly that Trump is a fascist.

Trump sat for an interview with the Saudi news outlet Al Arabiya. He was asked for his views on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s likely decision to order a retaliatory attack against Iran. Trump was blunt: “I think Netanyahu is going to do what he wants to do. And I think he has to do that.”

Trump also praised Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman as “a great guy” who is “respected all over the world.”

Trump gave a separate interview to the Wall Street Journal editorial board that was released last Friday. In the interview, Trump claims that during his presidency he told Russian President Vladimir Putin: “If you go after Ukraine, I am going to hit you so hard, you’re not even going to believe it. I’m going to hit you right in the middle of fricking Moscow.” (The Kremlin declined to comment on the accuracy of Trump’s claim.)

The Journal also asked Trump how he would stop China from invading Taiwan. He responded by saying “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%.” When asked if he would use military force to end a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, he dismissed the possibility: “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy.” The Journal doesn’t appear to have pressed the former president on what he would do if China thought he was bluffing.

Trump criticized Harris on Truth Social for failing to protect Christian Armenians when Azerbaijan retook the Armenian in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023.

That doesn’t sound like a candidate who has embraced isolationism. Trump did not take up the cause of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh when he was president.

The former president had people scratching their heads at a rally in Duluth, Georgia, on Wednesday. During the course of his speech, he said: “You have no idea what I did in the White House. I stopped wars. With France.” No, you aren’t misremembering the Trump presidency. Relations between the White House and the Élysée Palace were indeed strained at times when Trump sat in the Oval Office. However, France and the United States never came close to war. What Trump was referencing was a 2019 trade spat over France’s plan to tax U.S. high-tech firms like Facebook and Google. The French government went ahead with the tax, which remains in place today, despite Trump’s threat to impose retaliatory tariffs. Although Trump did not have this in mind, his story is a good reminder that tariffs can trigger trade wars. While such conflicts don’t shed blood, they can leave all the participants worse off.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Elana Schor argued that while Washington may be bracing for a possible repeat of January 6, 2020, efforts to block the certification of the election results face a much steeper climb in 2025. Everett and Schor note that the passage of the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act made “one key change: Previously, only one senator and one House member could join forces to object to any state’s presidential results and force a vote. That objection threshold is now orders of magnitude higher—20 senators and 87 House members, one-fifth of each chamber.”

That said, a group of Politico reporters explored how Trump could lose the election but still claim the presidency. Their main claim: “Not only could Trump make a second attempt at overturning an election he loses, he and his allies are already laying the groundwork.” Such a strategy would rest on creating enough doubt about the vote count that friendly swing-state legislatures agree to appoint “alternative” pro-Trump electors. That would either give Trump a victory outright or “ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose Trump as the next president.”

If you are wondering how things would work if neither Harris nor Trump gets to 270 electoral votes, whether because of skullduggery or because they split the Electoral College vote evenly, Geoffrey Skelley of FiveThirtyEight has the answer: “In this scenario, the U.S. House of Representatives would choose the president, although based not on the vote of the whole chamber but each state’s preferences—meaning a candidate needs majority support from 26 state delegations out of 50 to win—and the 100-seat U.S. Senate would pick the vice president based on the vote of individual senators, with 51 votes needed to win.” Trump would be the likely winner in this scenario as Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to be the majority party in a majority of states in the new Congress. And yes, a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College might never get to a House vote because a “faithless elector” crosses party lines and votes for the opposing candidate. That scenario seems extremely unlikely given the condemnation that would rain down on that elector.

The New York Times’s Emily Bazelon reviewed the major risks to a free-and-fair vote in 2024. Among other things, she notes that “a third of state and local election officials have resigned since 2020.” That means that one of the most contested elections in U.S. history will be handled in good part by people who have never worked on an election count before. And that could understate the problem. The Financial Times reported that election boards in battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin have yet to hire a full complement of poll workers. A major problem is that prospective hires worry about their safety. That isn’t an unreasonable fear. In response to what happened in 2020, the election office in Maricopa County in Arizona “has added metal detectors and armed guards,” and “on Election Day, as workers tabulate ballots behind new fencing and concrete barriers, drones will patrol the skies overhead, police snipers will perch on rooftops and mounted patrols will stand ready.”

Josh Rudolph argued in Foreign Policy that Trump is not an isolationist as he is so often described. He should instead be understood, as Rudolph sees it as “a would-be autocratic strongman who looks to realign U.S. foreign policy away from democratic allies and toward the dictators whom he clearly admires—and whose ranks he yearns to join.” 

John Seward argued at NOTUS that Trump has been using podcast appearances to win over young male voters and that foreign policy has been a favorite talking point. Seward writes that Trump “almost always quotes Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, when asked how he sees global issues being resolved under his possible presidency. On multiple podcasts, Trump has warned about the great possibility of World War III. And whenever the wars in Ukraine or Gaza come up, he paints a particularly dark future.”

Politico’s Matt Kaminski toured east Asia and came away surprised. Unlike in European capitals, where a clear preference exists for a Harris presidency, in Asia he “was struck by how little difference senior government and business leaders see between Trump and Harris. Not in terms of their personalities, obviously, but how they will impact this part of the world.” Kaminski’s takeaway is that Asia is home to the “double hater” who believes that on the issues that matter most, namely security and trade, “Harris and Trump sing similar tunes.”

What the Polls Show

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs reported that American public views of China have hit an all-time low. The Chicago Council asked respondents to record their feelings toward China on a 100-point scale, “with one hundred meaning a very warm, favorable feeling, a rating of zero a very cold, unfavorable feeling, and fifty meaning not particularly warm or cold.” The average rating was twenty-six. That compares to thirty-two in 2022 and forty-five just six years ago. The declining warmth Americans feel toward China can be seen across political groupings.

Just as important, 55 percent of Americans now say the United States should actively work to limit the growth of China’s power.

A nationwide poll Arab New/YouGov found that Arab Americans are eager to vote in 2024 and that they favor Trump over Harris by two percentage points, 45 to 43 percent. The respondents were split 38 percent to 38 percent on which candidate would be better for the Middle East generally. But a plurality gave Trump (39 percent) the nod over Harris (33 percent) on which candidate would be “most likely to successfully the resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.” The poll does not shed light on what deal respondents think Trump might make.

One of the big questions going into Election Day is whether the polls will be off in 2024 the way they were in 2016 and 2020, or the way they were off in the 2022 midterm elections. This chart shows why the answer matters:

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn and NBC’s Steve Kornacki both weighed in this week with their assessments of why pollsters have gotten it wrong. Their assessments bring to mind George Santayana’s observation from more than a century ago that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and it’s less remembered corollary, “those who learn from the past find other ways to mess up.” Meanwhile FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote that voters “should be open to the possibility that” forecasts saying that the election is a toss-up are wrong, “and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.” Sometimes, you just have to wait until the movie ends to see how things play out.

The Campaign Schedule

Election Day is eleven days away (November 5, 2024).

Electors will meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in fifty-three days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th U.S. Congress will be sworn into office in seventy days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election in seventy-three days (January 6, 2025).

Inauguration Day is eighty-seven days away (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.