Can Trump's art of the deal beat a China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis?

If you’re horrified by the foreign policy of President Donald Trump, you probably believe that he is betraying American friends (such as NATO and Ukraine), principles (democracy and sovereignty) and also interests (by sowing global chaos and anarchy). It doesn’t help that his national-security lieutenants give off a general air of incompetence, texting each other and also a random journalist about detailed war plans.

If you’re a MAGA partisan, however, every national-security idea that might seem crazy — annexing Canada and Greenland, building Rivieras in the Gaza Strip, sending heart emojis “to Russia with love” — instead reflects Trump playing four-dimensional chess, too sophisticated for mere mortals to fathom.

There is a third option: With his reckless pursuit of short-term deals and photo ops, Trump could do lasting damage to the so-called rules-based international order while simultaneously — by dumb luck more than cunning — solving one of the biggest strategic conundrums facing the US. That problem is the looming formation of an anti-American “axis” among China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Reminiscent of that earlier axis between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, such an entente, if it ever congeals, could someday force America to fight four simultaneous wars (or, if you prefer, one four-front world war). Since the US military is set up to win only one major and one minor war at the same time, America might, in this nightmare scenario, lose.

Signs of this new axis have accumulated especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Once it became clear, under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, that the US-led West stood on Kyiv’s side, Beijing, Pyongyang and Tehran, who all share the Kremlin’s loathing of American primacy, backed Moscow.

North Korea signed a pact with the Kremlin and sent troops to fight alongside the Russians. Iran gave Russia drones and missiles to shoot at Ukrainians. China provided dual-use technologies with military functions. And Moscow returned the favor with goodies from cheap Siberian oil to military know-how. It even has North Korea’s back at the United Nations, vetoing the enforcement of sanctions against Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

For a time, the motivation for this cooperation was obvious: All four regimes oppose the same adversary in Washington and the order, imperfect as it was, which America safeguarded from 1945 to January 2025, and which encompassed everything from liberal trading rules to international law. By talking up a global moral contest between democracies and autocracies, Biden himself provided the axis with its narrative.

But autocracy is not an ideology as Marxist-Leninism, say, was during the Cold War. In fact, Moscow’s neo-Tsarism, Tehran’s theocracy, Beijing’s socialism with Chinese characteristics, and Pyongyang’s hereditary leader cult share little (beyond disdain for liberty and lust for power).

Instead, China and North Korea, which Mao Zedong described as being like lips and teeth, generally distrust each other. Russia may have made common cause with Iran during the Syrian civil war and gladly accepted its help after invading Ukraine, but it could abandon Tehran on a whim. Iran’s mullahs, meanwhile, regard their counterparts in the other three powers as infidels, if somewhat less odious than Americans or Israelis.

And China, which needs the other three less than they need it, aspires to global co-leadership with the US, better relations with Europe, and otherwise more dominance over East Asia. It has no interest in North Korea building more nukes, Iran getting any at all, or Russia threatening the use of such weapons in Ukraine. Beijing would much prefer to lead, say, the Global South than an axis of pariahs.

Even before Trump took his second oath of office, these tensions made some American strategists doubt whether the axis was a plausible threat. “I would slam them together,” one former national-security official told a group including me, because these “guys will tear each other apart.”

Then came Trump. And suddenly all prior assumptions were off. Trump has no interest in contests between democracy and autocracy. Instead, he aspires to become a strongman like Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin or Xi Jinping in Zhongnanhai. He berates Ukraine and NATO allies including Canada and Denmark, whose territories he’d like to annex much as Russia covets Ukraine. Above all, he wants deals, ideally ones that are quick and photogenic.

With this mindset, Trump approaches each of the ominous foursome as though it were an isolated actor. He’s talking to Putin about a general Russo-American reset, with Ukraine relegated almost to the fine print. He’s slapped some additional tariffs on China, but has otherwise gone surprisingly easy so far. He’s done nothing about North Korea yet, but he met with Kim Jong Un during his first term and would do so again.

Trump talks toughest against Iran and has returned to exerting “maximum pressure” through sanctions. That was to be expected, since Iran is the weakest of the quartet — the only one without nukes, and the one with the least impressive air defenses since Israel bombed most of them to smithereens last fall. What he really wants from Tehran is a new deal, better than the one he walked away from in his first term, to limit its nuclear program.

In that light, his Iran policy currently makes no sense. Trump says he wants to be a peacemaker and a deal-maker, but he threatens to bomb, or to let Israel bomb, Iran’s underground centrifuges and other kit. (Notably, his national-security advisers, including the one responsible for including a journalist in that scandalous texting thread, sound more jingoistic than Trump himself does.) If he really wants a deal, he should instead communicate that he would allow the regime to survive, and to continue operating its civilian nuclear program as allowed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That way, Tehran also has an incentive to talk.

Once that diplomacy heats up, things get interesting for the entire axis. Russia and China were co-signatories of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, the one Trump later rejected. They could again line up with the US (and the European Union and others), as part of a new deal. Simultaneously, Trump may start talking with Putin and Xi about averting their own three-way nuclear arms race, and about the residual problem of Kim on the Korean peninsula. At the UN, the US already votes with members of the axis instead of its traditional allies.

If Trump, by putting so many constellations in flux, averts the formation of a bloc hostile to the US, that would be a good outcome. The problem is the cost. The new détente would be based on an understanding that the US abdicates its traditional role as custodian of the Pax Americana, the system of rules and norms that, more or less, constrained large powers to protect small countries.

In this brave new world, China may feel freer to gobble up minnows in its seas, Russia in its neighborhood, and the US in the Western hemisphere. They’d just be less likely to go to war against one another. Whatever you call that, progress it is not.