Election 2024: Is the United States Ready to Confront the Axis of Autocracies?

The news that Chinese firms are helping Russia to produce long-range drones to use against Ukraine and that North Korea is sending thousands of troops to fight in Ukraine highlights one of the most disturbing trends in global politics—growing cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has said much on the campaign trail about this emerging axis of autocracies. But whoever wins next month will need to devise a strategy to respond to it.

The war in Ukraine might look like the reason for the formation of this axis, which has been called the axis of upheaval, the axis of anger, the axis of disorder, and the quartet of chaos, among other names. But increasing economic, diplomatic, technological, and especially intelligence and military cooperation among the four countries predates Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s decision in February 2022 to strike a strategic partnership with “no limits.” Russia began selling arms to China well before invading Ukraine, Russia and Iran have collaborated for more than a decade to keep Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria, and China and Russia have worked for years to help keep North Korea afloat.

That said, cooperation between axis members has intensified since the war in Ukraine began. Iran has sold Russia thousands of drones, while North Korea provided Russia with millions of artillery shells even before contributing troops. China says it is not supporting Russia’s war effort. However, Chinese firms supply Russia with dual-use technologies that are used to build weapons, and Chinas now absorbs nearly half of Russian energy exports. China and Russia have increased their joint military exercises, which included flying bombers in international airspace in Alaska’s Air Defense Identification Zone this summer. Russia has in turn been providing highly sensitive military, space, and surveillance technology to China, Iran, and North Korea. This past June, Putin visited Pyongyang—his first in twenty-four years—and signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty with Kim Jong-un.

For all this activity, the axis of autocracies as it now stands is a marriage of convenience and falls far short of being an alliance like NATO. Most of the interactions among the four countries are bilateral rather than trilateral or quadrilateral. China’s refusal to overtly aid Russia in its war against Ukraine shows that their partnership does have discernible limits, at least for now.

How much cooperation among axis members might deepen—and whether it will expand to include other countries—can be debated. The group brings to mind the adage that politics makes for strange bedfellows. China is a Marxist-Leninist state. Russia is personalist dictatorship defending Orthodox Christianity. Iran is a militant Shia theocracy. North Korea operates like a mafia state.

So this is not a group that shares a vision of the world it wants to create. What it agrees on is the world it wants to escape, namely, one in which U.S. power limits their freedom of action abroad and Western values threaten their control at home. All four countries are convinced that the United States, and the West more generally, are in terminal decline, while they believe their own growing power enables them to undermine U.S. global leadership. Their collective efforts are intended to hurry that outcome along.

The divergent interests among the members of the axis may ultimately prove its undoing. China and Russia vie for influence in Central Asia. Russia’s growing closeness to North Korea troubles China. The Ukraine war jeopardizes Chinese goals in Europe. Iran’s efforts to dominate its neighborhood complicates China’s efforts to deepen ties to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A falling out among axis members could be just around the corner.

It is a bad bet, though, to base U.S. policy on the hope that adversaries will stumble. Even if the axis doesn’t grow into a true anti-Western bloc but remains, as Anne Applebaum puts it, about deals and not ideals, it poses a significant threat to U.S. interests. Collaboration among axis members makes it harder for the United States to achieve its foreign policy objectives—as the war in Ukraine shows. The axis members can, and are, stoking crises in Gaza, Yemen, Africa, the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere, all at a relatively low cost to themselves, that will strain, and perhaps even break, U.S. capabilities.

That’s why the commander of the U.S. Army Pacific warned this week that the axis is a “very dangerous combination that we all should pay very, very close attention to.” The challenge is devising an effective response that can be pursued at an acceptable cost. That is a task the next administration should not put off.

Campaign Update

If early voting in Georgia is any indication, voter turnout in battleground states will be high this year. The Peachtree State recorded 328,000 votes on Tuesday, the first day of early voting. That set a record high for the first day of voting. The prior record was set in 2020 when 120,000 people cast votes. By Wednesday night, more than 620,000 Georgians had voted either early or by absentee ballot. As of this morning, the number was more than 900,000. To put things in perspective, roughly five million Georgians voted in 2020. If this week’s trend continues, far fewer voters will be voting on Election Day itself than in past years. That will ease the burden on poll workers and perhaps diminish the chances for a chaotic ending to the balloting.

Speaking of Georgia, a state judge on Wednesday halted the implementation of the new rules that the Georgia State Election Board adopted last month, including one that requires county election workers to hand count the number of ballots cast in each precinct. The judge declared that “these rules are illegal, unconstitutional and void.” The election board can appeal the ruling.

Georgia isn’t the only state with election-related lawsuits. An Alabama judge ordered the state to stop purging inactive voters from its voter rolls. A Texas judge struck down parts of a 2021 state law that limits what can be done to assist people when voting. Election officials in a rural Virginia county are suing to require that the vote be counted by hand rather than by voting machines. Now is a great time to be an election lawyer.

Florida and North Carolina are both developing plans to relax voting rules in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton.

What the Candidates Are Saying

Harris the called the death of Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, an "opportunity to finally end the war" and a reason to begin planning the "day after."

It’s not clear, however, that Sinwar’s death has made either Israel or Hamas more inclined to seek a ceasefire or brought the region closer to peace.

Harris told Jewish voters on a call just before the start of Yom Kippur last Friday that “Iran must never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” and that “all options are on the table to make sure it never happens.”

Trump used an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago to make his case that the United States needs a dose of tariff medicine to cure its economic woes. He told Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait: “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word.” Trump disputed the views—embraced by virtually all economists—that tariffs will fuel inflation and lower economic growth, insisting that tariffs are “going to have a massive effect, positive effect.”

Trump’s comments make clear that his thinking about tariffs has evolved. During his presidency, he sought to use tariffs to gain leverage to negotiate trade deals that would help U.S. exporters and lower the trade deficit. He now describes tariffs as a way to force producers overseas to relocate to the United States. That would not be a quick process, however, as factories take time to build. The process would also cause considerable economic disruption as U.S. trading partners will retaliate against substantial new U.S. tariffs, leaving everyone worse off.

Trump gave Ukraine additional reason this week to worry about the future of U.S. support should he return to the White House. The former president told a podcaster that Ukrainian President Zelensky “should never have let that war start. That war is a loser.” That framing suggests that Trump believes that Ukraine should have handed over its eastern provinces in 2022 to appease Putin.

Trump said at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday that he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as the legal basis “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil." The law has been invoked just three times in U.S. history, and always in the context of a declared war. Legal experts differ on whether Trump can use the 226-year-old law, which allows the president to detain or deport the citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing, as he imagines. More broadly, Trump looks to be proposing to use the U.S. military on U.S. soil in ways that have few precedents in American history.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Bob Woodward’s newest book, War, which hit bookstore shelves on Tuesday, alleges that Trump had as many as seven phone calls with Putin since leaving the White House. Woodward’s claim, which rests on a single source, has yet to be corroborated. What is undeniable, as the New York Times’s Peter Baker reported, “is that Mr. Trump has acted as something of a shadow president on international affairs” since leaving the White House. “Foreign governments realized that Mr. Trump was still a force in American politics,” according to Baker, “and that they needed to take him into account in their dealings with the United States.” The heads of government who have met with Trump include “the leaders of Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Hungary, Argentina, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other countries.” Trump was asked this week if he had spoken with Putin. His response: “If I did, it’s a smart thing.”

Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, argued in Foreign Affairs that Trump’s economic proposals threaten to derail the U.S. economy. In Posen’s view, “almost all of Trump’s economic proposals would reduce supplies of labor, industrial inputs, consumer goods, and federal tax revenues. His strategy would impose uncertainty throughout the U.S. economy, as businesses and consumers would fear that prices could go up or that access to resources might be restricted at any time the government chooses. This is the exact opposite of the policies aimed at macroeconomic stability that have a proven track record worldwide of bringing sustained growth and low inflation.”

Oliver Stuenkel warned in Foreign Policy that a second Trump presidency would likely push Latin America toward China. His argument is that “a second Trump presidency would likely see the return of more explicit U.S. pressure on Latin American countries to pick sides in the brewing competition between the United States and China. That could create considerable friction in the region, just as it did during Trump’s first term in office, when many countries warmed to China’s embrace. The more aggressive Trump’s approach to Latin America, the faster governments can be expected to balance Washington by fostering closer ties to Beijing.”

The Cato Institute’s Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome reviewed the various laws Congress has passed over the years delegating power to the president to set tariffs. Their conclusion: “Congress has broadly delegated its constitutional tariff powers to the president, and there is a real risk that the legislative and judicial branches would be unwilling or unable to check a future president’s abuse of US trade law as currently written.”

Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim wrote in Foreign Affairs that presidents don’t always get their way with the foreign policy bureaucracy. “The bureaucracies that design and implement foreign policy, including the Defense Department, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies, have been essential to making the United States powerful and capable. But strong bureaucracies are also conditioned to preserve the existing way of doing things. Each agency naturally safeguards its mission and resources, and major change is always a threat to someone. As a result, bureaucratic resistance has frequently stymied change in Washington.”

Heather Hurlbut assessed what the election means U.S. trade policy. Her conclusion? “The two parties now start from a shared expectation of an international economic landscape shaped more by competition and industrial policy than by continued liberalization. However, the two presidential candidates’ views of which trade tools to use, and whether to proceed with allies and partners or unilaterally, could not be more different.”

Politico’s Hailey Fuchs and Meridith McGraw explored the Trump campaign’s refusal so far to participate in the transition process set up by the Presidential Transition Act. “The decision not to take federal assistance,” they conclude, “allows them to raise unlimited funds without disclosing their donors, while avoiding oversight from federal bureaucrats, whom Trump and his advisers deeply distrust. But if Trump wins the election and continues to drag his feet on signing the agreement with the White House, it will limit the information he and his team can access to understand current federal operations and challenges.”

What the Polls Show

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found broad support for Trump’s proposal to raise U.S. tariffs. Overall, 56 percent of registered voters said they were more likely to support a candidate who backed a 10 percent tariff on all imports and a 60 percent tariff on imports from China. One-third of Democrats said they would be more likely to support a president who proposed tariffs. The Reuters/Ipsos poll, however, only asked about tariffs in the abstract. It did not ask respondents if they support increased tariffs given their likely costs. When Cato asked that question, support for tariffs fell substantially.

This is a reminder to be wary of polls about public support for specific policies. People often do not consider, or know, the consequences for any particular policy choice. Once they are reminded or told that policy changes can come with a price tag, their preferences can change dramatically.

A Wall Street Journal poll of the seven battleground states found that voters have greater faith in Trump than Harris in handling the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Trump held a fifteen-percentage point lead in who can best handle the war in Gaza (48 percent to 33 percent), and an eleven-point lead in who can best handle the war in Ukraine (50 percent to 39 percent). The poll also found that the Middle East, Ukraine, and other foreign-policy issues fall way down the list of issues worrying voters.

A Gallup Poll out today found that 52 percent of Americans say that they and their families are worse off today than they were four years ago. At first glance, that number is troubling news for the Harris campaign and good news for the Trump campaign. However, as is often the case with polling—see above—there may be less here than meets the eye. Gallup reports that the finding largely owes “to Republicans’ much greater likelihood to say this than opponents of the incumbent president’s party had been in prior election years.” 

The Campaign Schedule

Election Day is eighteen 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 sixty days (December 17, 2024).

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

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

Inauguration Day is ninety-four away (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.