Throughout the western media coverage of this week’s huge military parade in Beijing, when Xi Jinping was joined by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, one phrase appeared again and again: an Axis of Upheaval.
Everyone from CNN and NBC News to the Guardian and the Telegraph reported that “some analysts” are using the term to describe the relationship between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
The BBC’s diplomatic editor extended the Axis of Upheaval to include those who attended the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, including India’s Narendra Modi. Sky News took the same approach, adding that the designation “feels about right when you look at the guest list; leaders from Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Belarus and Turkey”.
Axis of Upheaval has a pleasing ring to it, rhyming with George W Bush’s Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq and North Korea) and with an added whiff of sulphur in its echo of the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan. It was coined last year in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine by Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine from the Centre for a New American Security, a hawkish Washington think tank.
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“The four powers increasingly identify common interests, match up their rhetoric, and co-ordinate their military and diplomatic activities. Their convergence is creating a new axis of upheaval – a development that is fundamentally altering the geopolitical landscape,” they write.
“The group is not an exclusive bloc and certainly not an alliance. It is, instead, a collection of dissatisfied states converging on a shared purpose of overturning the principles, rules, and institutions that underlie the prevailing international system.”
Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine assert that Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the catalyst for enhanced co-operation between the four countries. They note that Iran has supplied Russia with drones, North Korea has sent soldiers and ammunition and China has provided technology that can be used for military as well as civilian purposes.
They complain that China’s export of semiconductors to Russia is undermining the effectiveness of western export controls and that all four countries are moving their economic transactions out of reach of US financial sanctions. And they worry that the four countries could use their shared borders and littoral zones to build trade, transport and energy networks safe from US interdiction.
“The axis of upheaval represents a new centre of gravity, a group that other countries dissatisfied with the existing order can turn to. The axis is ushering in an international system characterised by two orders that are becoming increasingly organised and competitive,” they write.
Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine predict that competition between these two orders will increase instability around the world and they blame the rise of the non-western powers for a proliferation of coups in recent years. They also call for more defence spending to confront the new challenge to US hegemony.
[ Hot mic catches Putin and Xi discussing organ transplants and immortalityOpens in new window ]
“This is a group bent on upheaval, and the United States and its partners must treat the axis as the generational challenge it is,” they write.
The problem with this analysis is that the emerging alternative order is neither an axis, nor is it interested in upheaval. When Iran was attacked by the US and Israel this year, the other members of this putative axis looked the other way. In addition, although China has given Russia diplomatic and economic support during the war in Ukraine, it has not offered military help.
Xi’s speeches this week and the joint declaration by SCO leaders in Tianjin emphasised their commitment to stability, avoiding conflict and upholding the United Nations charter. What they reject is western powers imposing their policies on the rest of the world through use of sanctions that are not authorised by the UN.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is clearly in breach of the charter, while Kim has developed a nuclear weapon in breach of UN security council resolutions.
But it is a mistake to conclude that the changes to global governance advocated by groups like the SCO and the Brics, both of which include India as well as China and Russia, are designed to destroy the international order.
“While western leaders gather in diplomacy, an autocratic alliance is seeking a fast track to a new world order. Looking at president Xi standing alongside the leaders of Russia, Iran, and North Korea in Beijing today. These are not just anti-western optics; this is a direct challenge to the international system built on rules,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on Wednesday.
The defiance towards the West on display in Tianjin and Beijing this week is not a sign of the emergence of a new bloc to counter the US and its allies. It is evidence that much of the world outside the US and Europe recognises a new, multipolar reality and wants to adapt the international system into one that can accommodate it.
