Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, China’s Xi Jinping made a call to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout, the two leaders pledged to deepen their “strategic coordination” and “practical cooperation” and “firmly support each other.”

Just a few days earlier on January 17, Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement, pledging a wide range of military cooperation.

Meanwhile, North Korea is pledging to send more troops to Russia, where they have been fighting alongside Russian forces against Ukraine since last October, taking shockingly high losses.

It’s clear that America’s principal global adversaries are increasingly cooperating, and policymakers and experts are increasingly treating these four countries in particular — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — as a cohesive unit. They’ve been called the “axis of upheaval,” the “quartet of chaos,” or simply the “CRINKs.”

The cooperation between the four is hard to deny, and while some of these countries have been erstwhile friends since the Cold War, the relationship has certainly deepened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what does this “axis” actually stand for? Is it just an alliance of convenience or something deeper? And how will a new US administration, one that takes a much more transactional approach to foreign policy and is far less invested in promoting democracy abroad, deal with the quartet?

What do these strange allies have in common?

The four members of this group are all autocracies, but they don’t share an official ideology. China is a one-party communist party state with capitalist characteristics. Russia is a conservative, nationalist oligarchy. Iran is a Shiite Islamic theocracy, and North Korea is a hybrid of state communism, radical self-reliance, and racial supremacism.

Nor do they have much in common economically: China is the world’s second-largest economy, largest exporter, and an inextricable centerpiece of the global economy, while North Korea is basically an economic nonentity (unless you count cybercrime).

But as Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New America Security (CNAS) argued in an influential article for Foreign Affairs last year, the four countries “are united in their opposition to the prevailing world order and its US leadership.” What Western countries see as the “rules based international order” established out of the ashes of World War II, these countries see as a cloak for American power.

There are other commonalities.

“They share a belief in state-based political rights rather than any kind of individual rights or human rights,” Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at CNAS, said. “They share a vision of spheres of influence.” In other words, it’s countries’ interests on the world stage that have to be respected, not those of their citizens.

Or as Xi and Putin put it in their joint communique issued shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they “stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.”

All four also view themselves as the inheritors of important historical civilizations. Putin’s arguments for the invasion of Ukraine at times seem to refer more often to events in the ninth century than to recent grievances. North Koreans are taught that their country is one of the cradles of world civilization. And China has sought to promote an “Ancient Civilizations Forum,” composed of countries deemed to have inherited “great ancient civilizations” — one of which is Iran.

Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine have dubbed the alliance the “axis of upheaval” — a term that brings to mind the “axis of evil” — referred to by President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the........

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