The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of the 'Authoritarian Axis'

There is no “authoritarian axis,” but Matthew Kroenig is eager to create one:

Iran was founded on resistance to the West and the United States. Tehran does not want to be Washington’s friend. There are some countries on the fence, but Russia, Iran, and China are firmly in the opposing camp. They see the success of the United States and the U.S.-led, rules-based international system as an existential threat. It would be nice to peel them apart, but that won’t work. So, Washington needs to work with existing allies and other like-minded states to counter Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran at the same time.

Kroenig’s analysis is lazy and simplistic, and it echoes the arguments of Cold War hawks that assumed that the U.S. was confronted with a monolithic, ideologically-driven group of states. The failure to understand the importance of nationalism for pitting different communist states against each other hampered U.S. strategy for decades. Had Kroenig been around then, he would have insisted that exploiting the rift between the USSR and China wouldn’t work. His conceit that Russia, China, and Iran all belong to the same enemy camp is similarly wrongheaded and harmful. Like overzealous anticommunists in the 1950s, Kroenig overrates the importance of ideology and discounts divergent national interests of the different countries involved. To the extent that these countries have cooperated more in the last ten years, they have been pushed into doing so by ham-fisted U.S. policies aimed at punishing or “containing” all of them. The U.S. has been doing what Kroenig thinks should be done, and it has produced bad results on every front.

His claim that “Iran was founded on resistance” conflates the regime with the country, it fails to account for changes in the Iranian government’s behavior over time, and it ignores the reality that the U.S. and Iran actually have some interests in common. The Iranian government may not want to be America’s “friend,” but there is a lot of ground between becoming a “friend” and being treated like a pariah and enemy. A smart U.S. strategist would try to test and find out how accommodating Iran’s leaders might be once our government stops waging an economic war on them. Instead of taking their ideologues’ statements at face value, we ought to be willing to explore areas where the U.S. and Iran could cooperate, but we can’t do that if we are obsessed with “countering” their every move no matter what it is.

Kroenig asserts, “They see the success of the United States and the U.S.-led, rules-based international system as an existential threat.” This is far too America-centric, and it ascribes to all three of these governments the exact same ideological animus towards the “rules-based” order. This is a familiar hawkish talking point, and it is also quite misleading. Insofar as the “rules-based” order is a euphemism for American interference, these governments are opposed to it, but if it actually refers to international law and institutions the picture is much more complicated. All three of these states are interested in using the system to their advantage, and Russia and China will sometimes bend or break the rules when it suits them like any other major power would, but they also see the “rules-based” order as a protection against the U.S.

The U.S. shouldn’t be seeking confrontation with any of these states, but choosing to pursue hostility to all three at once is truly mindless belligerence. If you view China as the most powerful adversary and believe that opposing China should be the priority, that requires you to adopt more accommodating policies toward other lesser adversaries. The U.S. is in relative decline, and it cannot keep acting as if it is still 1999. Adapting to the new reality means adjusting U.S. ambitions in other parts of the world accordingly. Reducing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is not only consistent with our limited interests there, but it could also be the key to finding some modus vivendi with an Iranian government that is much more pragmatic than its official rhetoric suggests. The alternative is to continue our government’s irrational obsession with Iran, and that means that Iran will increasingly turn to Moscow and Beijing for support.