Editor’s note, September 2, 12:10 pm ET: This week, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Russia, along with around two dozen other heads of state, are in China for a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which doubles as an advertisement for China’s bid for global leadership. In February, Vox reported on how American policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking at these four countries as a cohesive unit, brought together by a mutual interest in overturning a US-led international order.

Since then, the limitations of this alliance have been illustrated: Iran’s allies notably did not provide much aid when it came under Israeli and US airstrikes in June. The Trump administration has also been far less interested than Biden’s in isolating and pushing back against these regimes, as shown by President Donald Trump’s recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. But this week’s festivities in Beijing also make clear that these countries continue to work closely together and that others — perhaps India — may be falling into their orbit in the face of an increasingly erratic US foreign policy. The story below was originally published on February 3.

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........

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