It has become a cliché to say that this is an unusually dangerous time in world politics. The list of threats to help make the point has become familiar: Russia, persisting with its aggression in Ukraine and menacing all its European neighbours; China, reminding Taiwan that reunification is bound to come, if necessary by force; Iran, close to a nuclear capability and stirring up trouble around the Middle East and elsewhere; North Korea, developing its weapons of mass destruction.
These countries are by no means the only ones making the world dangerous, but they share two features. They are all deeply hostile to the US and its allies and increasingly they work together. Thus China, North Korea, and Iran have all become important, in different ways, to Russia’s war effort. They have also been taking bilateral and multilateral steps to institutionalise their developing relationships, meeting regularly and issuing communiques which claim that they are the ones upholding global norms and that is the West that is undermining them.
There is growing concern that in this way they are becoming less a set of separate threats and instead are coalescing into one big threat. They may still have their differences but have concluded that a united front is essential to confront the West. Recently Philip Zelikow, with a distinguished career both as a historian and a diplomat, has written a rich and substantial essay about a new Axis in the tradition of the anti-American partnerships that led to the Second World War (Italy, Germany, Japan) and which marked the early Cold War (The Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China). He shows the continuities between the current Axis and those of the past as well as its distinctive features.
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