The United States is contending with the most challenging international environment it has faced since at least the Cold War and perhaps since World War II. One of the most disconcerting features of this environment is the burgeoning cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some policymakers and commentators see in this cooperation the beginnings of a twenty-first-century axis, one that, like the German-Italian-Japanese axis of the twentieth century, will plunge the world into a global war. Others foresee not World War III but a slew of separate conflicts scattered around the globe. Either way, the result is a world at war—the situation is that serious.

What should be done about this cooperation is another matter. Some strategists argue for ruthless prioritization, focusing on the members of the axis that represent the greatest threats. Others believe that only a comprehensive effort will succeed. But the best strategy would borrow elements of both approaches, acknowledging that China is the primary long-term concern for U.S. national security strategy—“the pacing threat,” in the U.S. Defense Department’s framing—but also a different kind of global actor than its rogue-state partners. Accordingly, Washington’s aim should be to make clear to Chinese President Xi Jinping how counterproductive and costly to Beijing’s interests these new relationships will turn out to be. That means effectively countering Iran, North Korea, and Russia in their own regions, thereby demonstrating to China that tethering itself to a bunch of losers is hardly a path to global influence.

Cooperation among the members of this twenty-first-century axis has been heavily centered on military, industrial, and economic support for Russia in its war on Ukraine, which could not be sustained without such help. The resulting defense industrial cooperation and incipient integration is likely to go well beyond what existed among the twentieth-century axis partners. North Korea is providing artillery shells, other munitions, military personnel, and industrial workers to Russia and getting oil and missile and space technology in return. Iran is providing missiles and drones produced in its defense plants as well helping to build such plants in Russia itself, and getting assistance with its own missile, drone, and space programs and perhaps with civil nuclear power as well. China is so far providing everything short of actual weapons: dramatically increased trade and purchases of oil, gas, and other natural resources; dual-use technology that is being integrated into Russian........

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