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CHAPTER 2

Rogue Regimes: How the Axis Uses Proxies to Win

“I’ve been known to be an optimist, but here are the Russians sending [the Syrians] up-to-date missiles, continued flights of arms going into Syria. Putin keeps our secretary of state waiting for three hours. . . . It doesn’t lend itself to optimism, all it does is delay us considering doing what we really need to do. The reality is that Putin will only abandon Assad when he thinks that Assad is losing. Right now, at worst it’s a stalemate. In the view of some, he is succeeding.”

—JOHN McCAIN¹

“China should be named and shamed for its role in enabling North Korea to remain and grow as a threat. North Korea is one of the most sanctioned countries on the planet, but Beijing (with only brief exceptions) has effectively watered down and otherwise dulled the impact of international sanctions on North Korean ‘stability.’”

—STEPHEN YATES²

“Moscow has formed partnerships with China, Iran, and Venezuela to prevent the U.S. from consolidating a regional order under its auspices. Like the USSR, its predecessor and inspiration, today’s Russia pursues key allies in the Middle East and Latin America, such as Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, with whom it can jointly frustrate American and Western efforts to consolidate a peaceful regional order.”

—ARIEL COHEN AND STEPHEN BLANK, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION³

“For more than a decade, Pyongyang and Tehran have run what is essentially a joint missile-development program.”

—GORDON G. CHANG⁴

The setting was elegant: the dining room of New Century, the richest equestrian club in Moscow. The fare was extravagant: smoked trout, duck liver, venison soup, rhubarb sorbet, veal cheeks, and pear soup with caramel. The audience was distinguished: a gathering of members of the Valdai Club, a group of international academics and journalists that had flown in for the annual dinner with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once and future president. It was December 2011, and Putin was poised to retake the reins of power, once the formalities of the March 2012 elections were completed.⁵

Putin conducted a wide-ranging discussion with his audience, covering everything from the Russian government’s loss of public trust to his own indispensable leadership. He lambasted the United States’ plan to build a missile-defense system that, in his view, posed a deliberate threat to Russia’s national security. “You ask me whether we are going to change,” he said, directly addressing the Americans at the event. “The ball is in your court. Will you change?” Then Putin said something that could not help but make headlines around the world.

The only reason the United States had any interest at all in relations with Moscow, he said, was that Russia was the only country that could “destroy America in half an hour or less.”⁶ It would be difficult to find a statement more revealing about Putin’s true position regarding the United States.

By this, we do not mean to suggest that Putin has any intention of launching a nuclear attack on America. We refer to his general disposition toward the United States: We are not only an adversary; we are an enemy. Moreover, as Putin well knows, one can pursue the destruction of one’s enemy without initiating an Armageddon. And perhaps the most effective means of doing so is to facilitate and support the tactics, policies, and general well-being of rogue nations hostile to the United States. As the record of the last few decades shows, Russia and its Axis partner China have become expert at doing just this.

For many years now, Russia and China have directly facilitated the interests of North Korea, Iran, and other rogue nations such as Syria and even, in America’s backyard, Venezuela. Notwithstanding moves like that of the Russians to write the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons or that of the Chinese to rein in North Korea on nuclear testing, both nations believe it is in their long-term good to undermine American interests and power.

They do this under the cover of a doctrine they call “non-interference”: States should be able to do what they wish, whenever they wish, inside their own boundaries. The two nations that benefit most from this seemingly high-minded doctrine are Iran and North Korea, both of which enjoy extensive economic, political, and military ties with the Axis nations—Russia in particular with Iran, and China in particular with North Korea. As this chapter will show, the Axis nations have played an ongoing role in strengthening and facilitating the interests of these regimes.

Making matters even worse, Russia and China, by supporting these rouge states, have also facilitated terrorism. It is beyond dispute that Hezbollah has gotten weapons from Iran—in many cases, almost certainly Russian-made weapons. North Korea almost certainly sent to Syria the technology that built the nuclear plant that Israel destroyed in 2007. The non-interference doctrine has made it much easier for traffic in arms and military technology to flourish between these regimes. As if Russian backing of Iran and Chinese support for North Korea weren’t bad enough, there is also compelling evidence that Iran and North Korea, in concert with their sponsors and independently, have begun working together on developing nuclear-weapons technology.

In short, whether around the world or closer to home, Russia and China have done the bidding of forces inimical to U.S. interests, democratic values, and international stability. This chapter will explore how each key rogue regime has thrived with Axis backing and will examine the motivations that drive Russian and Chinese support of them.

NORTH KOREA

China wanted a “new type of great power relationship” with the United States, said Chinese president Xi Jinping in June 2013, as he prepared to meet President Obama for the “shirtsleeves summit” in Los Angeles. Xi wanted to make clear, he said, that China, as the world’s rising power, could work constructively and profitably with the U.S., the world’s established power. In part, his message was cautionary: He wanted the Americans to take China seriously and to understand that the relationship between the two nations had to be forged on mutual respect—not the mutual fear that, he said, had often led to wars between established and rising states.

As a sign of his good faith, he pointed to the “big gift” he had recently given Washington: his public pressuring of the North Korean regime to enter nuclear talks, very much against Pyongyang’s wishes.⁷ Xi’s intervention with the North Koreans was indeed welcome, as far as it went. But even the wording Xi used—a “big gift”—gives away that from his perspective, reining in North Korea is an American interest, not a Chinese one. More crucially, Xi’s apparent change of heart about Pyongyang and his assurances to Washington are part of a long historical pattern in which both China and Russia say one thing to America’s face and then turn right around and resume their support of rogue regimes.

It is well known that only one country can exert any serious influence on the behavior of the North Korean regime: China. The alliance between the two nations dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when Mao famously described the relationship as being as “close as lips and teeth.”⁸ Since then, it’s gone through its share of bumpy patches, but China has never fully abandoned Pyongyang—and it has a decades-long track record of supplying the North Koreans with weaponry, economic aid, and diplomatic cover. If every rogue nation had that kind of support from its sponsor, the world would be more unstable than it is currently. At best, China acts as a braking influence on Pyongyang, and even then, only when the North Koreans’ behavior becomes so volatile that it threatens China’s broader interests. For the most part, this happens when the Kim regime acts recklessly on the nuclear issue, as it did repeatedly in 2013.

In February 2013, the Hermit Kingdom launched its third nuclear test, this time of a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear device with greater explosive force than previously.” In April, the regime ratcheted up its threats against the United States and its “puppet,” South Korea, with a series of moves. It warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea so they wouldn’t be caught in a “thermonuclear war.” The country’s KCNA news agency predicted that once war broke out, it would be “an all-out war, a merciless, sacred, retaliatory war to be waged by North Korea.”⁹ That warning followed on the heels of the North’s decision to suspend the activity of its 53,000 workers at the Kaesong industrial park that it runs with South Korea, the last vestige of cooperation between the two countries. Kim also threatened to scrap the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War and to abandon the joint declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Then in April and May, Kim’s regime launched a series of short-range missiles into the East Sea (just off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast) and at least one missile into the Sea of Japan.¹⁰ The regime even released a hysterical, but disturbing, fictional video depicting missile strikes on the White House and the Capitol in Washington. From its graphics to its music and almost parodic voice-over, the video was absurd; it might even have been funny, in a Team America sort of way. As another manifestation of the regime’s madness, though, it left few observers laughing.

Kim’s behavior got so out of hand that in March, China and the U.S. co-authored UN sanctions against Pyongyang covering banking, travel, and trade.¹¹ Xi’s foreign minister, Yang, stood alongside Secretary of State John Kerry in April 2013 and said, “China is firmly committed to upholding peace and stability and advancing the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula.”¹² In May, Xi told the North Koreans to return to diplomatic talks about their nukes.¹³ As Xi put it bluntly: “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world in chaos for selfish gain.”¹⁴ His tough words made clear how exasperated the Chinese had become with North Korea—what some call China’s “Pyongyang fatigue.”

The U.S. was encouraged. But a closer look at China’s North Korean track record makes clear that the Chinese never truly move against North Korea. Xi’s gestures notwithstanding, they continue to support the regime in all the ways that really matter. Without the Chinese, Pyongyang couldn’t even keep its lights on. Beijing supplies nearly all the fuel for the outlaw regime and 83 percent of its imports: grain, heavy machinery, consumer goods, you name it. The Chinese also supply the luxury goods, including pleasure boats and glamorous vehicles for the North Korean elite. Despite its leading role in authorizing the 2013 UN sanctions, China has kept this trade going—much of it in violation of those same sanctions. In light of all this, it’s hard to see China’s decision to cut off the North Korean bank accused of weapons dealing, mentioned in Chapter 1, as much more than a throwaway gesture.¹⁵

The North Koreans, if anything, are “doubling down,” as the Wall Street Journal put it in April 2013, on their Chinese dependence, suggesting that they have confidence in the steadfastness of their Beijing sponsor. Almost all of the nation’s recent economic development, such as it is, is owing to Chinese support, including deals signed by Chinese mining firms eager to get in on North Korea’s largely untapped mineral wealth, which some recent reports estimate may be worth as much as $6 trillion. Other Chinese investments have included transportation, power generation, and infrastructure. Roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s joint ventures with foreign partners are Chinese.¹⁶

“North Korea’s lifeline to the outside world,” says the Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, is the port city of Dandong, on the Chinese border.¹⁷ About 70 percent of the $6 billion in annual trade between the two countries flows through Dandong. The black-market economy, meanwhile, may be even larger than the official trade. Even after the 2013 sanctions, trade continued unimpeded in Dandong, despite China’s shuttering of the Kwangson Bank, which had channeled billions in foreign currency to Pyongyang.

Only the Chinese can enforce what the UN has put in place. But, as Moore writes, North Korea’s elites continue to get whatever they need in Dandong: “Their shopping list includes luxury food and fine wine, Apple iMacs for Kim Jong Un, 30, as well as Chinese-built missile launchers and components for their nuclear arsenal.”¹⁸ Trucks leave the city every day transporting grain, fertilizer, and consumer goods to North Korea.

The 2013 UN sanctions also stipulated weapons seizures. But as one Western diplomat put it, “that will remain a largely ineffective measure until the Chinese implement it.”¹⁹ Don’t bet on that happening. North Korea still makes money off its lone export—weapons. The regime sells Soviet-era technology on the black market, especially to some bankrupt African nations. Although this trade is often intercepted during inspections of North Korean ships, some of it gets through, and it almost certainly couldn’t do so without Chinese acquiescence.²⁰

In September 2013, Beijing released a 236-page list of equipment and chemical substances banned for export to North Korea—“fearing,” as the New York Times noted, “that the North would use the items to speed development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb on top.”²¹ This seemed an encouraging sign of Beijing’s willingness to clamp down on Kim’s regime and his nuclear ambitions, especially as Western officials have long known that sanctions cannot work without Chinese enforcement. But the list also revealed just how extensive Beijing’s knowledge is of the North Korean nuclear program. And it’s one thing to make a list, another to enforce it. Finally, these embryonic gestures of cooperation, if cooperation it is, must be balanced against a much longer and ongoing track record of adversarial behavior. (Just two months later, the New York Times reported on a U.S. study detecting new construction at a North Korean missile-launch site—including satellite imagery suggesting that North Korea may have begun producing fuel rods for its recently restarted five-megawatt reactor.²²)

“Washington is looking to China to rein in the North Koreans. Unfortunately, Beijing has been busy giving the Kim regime the means to rock the world,” China scholar and security expert Gordon Chang writes. Case in point: the KN-08, an intermediate-range ballistic missile.²³ The KN-08 presents a special threat to the U.S. While it lacks the range of some other missiles in Pyongyang’s arsenal, it does not require the weeks of transport, assembly, and preparation of those longer-range missiles. Rather, it is mounted on mobile vehicles more difficult to destroy before they fire their missiles.

“And guess what?” Chang asks. “It is China that recently transferred to North Korea those mobile launchers, a clear violation of UN Security Council sanctions.”²⁴ When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced in March 2013 that the Obama administration would deploy 14 additional interceptor missiles in Alaska, he cited the KN-08. In effect, as Chang and others have pointed out, in selling this system, the Chinese have given the North Koreans the means to target American cities. China’s transfer of the KN-O8 to North Korea makes clear that Beijing really has no serious intentions of restraining Kim.²⁵ Those who see the Chinese as a willing partner with the U.S. in the effort to rein in the outlaw Pyongyang regime must contend with this consistent pattern of behavior. The U.S. should not be surprised. Beijing did not move against Pyongyang in 2010, either, when the regime sunk a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan, killing 46, and when it shelled Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island. The Chinese response in both cases was to stand by North Korea, its longtime ally. And in February 2014, China blasted a UN report on North Korea’s systematic human-rights violations, indicating that it would use its Security Council veto to prevent any legal action against North Korea or its leaders.²⁶

Clearly, China wants the North Korean regime to survive more or less intact. Why? China’s support for North Korea is purely strategic and self-interested. Keeping the Korean Peninsula divided, and remaining an ally of North Korea, helps China maintain its authority in the region. Keeping Pyongyang in business not only staves off the possibility of facing a democracy on the border (or worst of all, a unified, pro-Western Korea), it also avoids regime collapse, which would lead to a host of problems China wishes to avoid: a refugee crisis at its doorstep, for one; the possibility that nuclear material would fall into the hands of the black market or terrorists, for another.²⁷

Would China prefer to deal with a more stable actor in Pyongyang? Certainly. But China benefits even from today’s unwieldy North Korean regime, which keeps its neighbors off balance while presenting a constant challenge to U.S. influence in Asia. From China’s perspective, these benefits offset a multitude of sins. China’s history makes clear that it does not share Western goals with regard to North Korea.

Unfortunately, policymakers in Washington still seem unable to recognize this. As U.S. State Department spokesman (now assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia) Victoria Nuland put it in 2012: “[Kim] Jong Un can plot a way forward that ends the isolation, that brings relief in a different way of life and progress to his people, or he can further isolate them. . . . He can spend his time and his money shooting off missiles, or he can feed his people, but he can’t have both.”²⁸

But Nuland is precisely wrong: Chinese support makes it possible for Kim Jong Un to “have both”: to threaten the world while also getting what he needs to stay in power. Kim’s regime “is like a honeybee,” Michael Totten writes. “It can sting only once, then it dies. But it’s like a honeybee the size of a grizzly bear.”²⁹ That it can do so owes entirely to Chinese facilitation, influence, and support—all of which continue, despite cosmetic gestures and words.

The other half of the Axis does its fair share to support North Korea as well. Russia is pursuing a wide-ranging plan to boost its economic presence in Asia, which includes a proposal to build a gas pipeline through North Korea, providing the isolated country with $500 million in transit fees each year. In September 2012, Russia agreed to write off nearly all of North Korea’s $11 billion in debt, accrued during Soviet times when the Kremlin worked overtime to bolster ties with its neighbor. Years in the making, the deal will forgive 90 percent of the debt and reinvest $1 billion as part of a debt-for-aid plan to develop energy, health care, and educational projects in North Korea. Free of debt, North Korea will also be able to engage in more commerce with Russia.

Russia’s status as the world’s other nuclear superpower, and North Korea’s unquenchable interest in nukes, makes Moscow’s relationship with Pyongyang a crucial issue to U.S. security. Some, like the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer and Michael O’Hanlon, see U.S. pursuit of nonproliferation agreements with Russia as essential to ensuring that these weapons don’t wind up in North Korean hands. “Pursuing one more U.S.-Russia bilateral treaty,” they write, “can further reduce long-range or strategic nuclear systems to perhaps 1,000 deployed warheads on each side.”³⁰ Perhaps, but Russia has a poor record of compliance with such agreements. The U.S. must understand that Moscow is no more interested in reining in Pyongyang than China is.

IRAN

“I would rather have a nuclear Iran than a pro-American Iran,” scholar Georgy Mirsky once heard a Russian diplomat say.³¹ If there is a single phrase that sums up the Axis attitude toward Tehran—especially the Russian attitude—this is it.

Those words describe more eloquently than any diplomatic communiqué or policy brief how Russia sees its interests when it comes to Iran’s ongoing nuclear-weapons showdown with the United States. Along with its partner China, Russia has steadily argued against a military strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure while thwarting the effectiveness of UN sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions that Moscow itself has voted for.³² Sergei Ryabkov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, even published a 2012 study in a Russian security journal titled “Further Sanctions Against Iran Are Pointless.”

That’s a handy self-fulfilling prophecy: Sanctions against Iran have proved as pointless as Russia and China can make them. Neither power supports sanctions that would genuinely force the Iranian regime to reconsider its nuclear policies; they block sanctions that would impose embargoes on energy or arms. Instead, Russia and China put their stamp of approval only on narrowly tailored penalties that would supposedly prevent Iran from weaponizing its nuclear energy.³³ Yet even this goal has not been achieved.

“Today is a historic day and will be remembered in history,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization in August 2010, as he marked the start-up of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a core component of Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program.” As Salehi spoke, trucks rumbled into the site, carrying tons of uranium to be loaded into the reactor, signaling the beginning of its operational capacity. Over the next two weeks, the trucks loaded 80 tons of uranium fuel into the reactor core.³⁴ The 1,000-watt reactor began providing electricity to Iran in 2011.

The Bushehr reactor, situated on the Persian Gulf coast, wouldn’t exist today without Russia. Its construction, development, and operation are the product of nearly two decades’ worth of Iranian cooperation with the Russian business and scientific establishments. And Russia is considering whether to help the Iranians build a second reactor there.

Meanwhile, clandestine Russian involvement has been essential to Iran’s development of a heavy-water reactor in Arak, which at full capacity will be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. Russian support for the Iranian program is so extensive that some Iranian facilities are simply adapted from Russian designs. This is the case for the Arak reactor, based on a design by NIKIET, the same firm that designed the Soviet Union’s first reactors. The Arak reactor, and the enlarged version of it planned at Darkhovin, will be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.³⁵

Iran has refused to cooperate with UN inspectors’ requests for information about the Arak reactor’s design and other specifications while insisting that it has no intention of weaponizing these capabilities.³⁶ The United States is asked to take such claims on faith—despite Iran’s long history, especially under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of making threats to annihilate Israel and otherwise confront the Western democracies.

The Russian-Iranian alliance is rich in irony, given a long history of antagonism between the two nations that lasted until the end of the Cold War. After the Cold War, however, the old adversaries came to realize that they had more goals—and more fears—in common than not. Today, three core concerns hold the alliance together:

• A mutual wish to reduce American influence in Central Asia, where both countries would like to increase their clout—a goal that seems more attainable with the U.S. strategic retreat under President Obama

• A mutual interest in opposing radical Sunni movements, such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Though these organizations are best known for their opposition to the West, their historical and religious roots make them anti-Shia (Iran is a predominantly Shiite nation) and anti-Russian as well.

• A mutual desire to oppose and defeat secessionist movements—in Iran, from the Kurds, and in Russia, from the Chechens—and to clamp down on internal dissent against their own regimes³⁷

Understanding these shared interests is crucial if the United States is to grasp fully why the Russians act as they do. From the U.S. perspective, Iran is simply a rogue regime: It is working to develop nuclear weapons, despite UN sanctions; it is the world’s leading nation-state sponsor of terror, especially of Hezbollah in Lebanon; it is the staunch ally of the Assad regime in Syria; and it oppresses and even kills its own people when they attempt political expression. To be sure, President Rouhani has made substantial headway in dispelling this image of Iran. In pitching a new, moderate Iran, Rouhani told the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013, “No nation should possess nuclear weapons, since there are no right hands for these wrong weapons.”³⁸ He made a sharp contrast with his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to New York last year to criticize Israel, deny the Holocaust, and suggest that the 9/11 attacks were the handiwork of Americans. That said, Rouhani called on Israel to give up its nuclear weapons and sign the Nonproliferation Treaty while insisting on Iran’s right to a civilian nuclear program.

The Obama administration has tried repeatedly to get Moscow’s help in increasing pressure on Iran. And although the Russians cooperated at the negotiating table in connection with the November 2013 Iranian nuclear accords, the agreement, as we noted in Chapter 1, is fatally flawed and will do nothing to halt or even hamper Iran’s nuclear program. Benjamin Netanyahu justifiably called the agreement “the deal of the century” for Iran.³⁹ Somehow American negotiators saw fit to allow Tehran to continue enriching uranium and proceed with major components of its nuclear program—centrifuges, weaponization, and ballistic missiles—all while Iran continues to deny access to its military sites, particularly the Parchin base, where weapons work is believed to have taken place.⁴⁰ Yet the United States is moving ahead with its $7 billion in sanctions relief.

But the Russians see things differently. For them, Iran is a bulwark against American meddling and influence. Tehran’s intransigence and its challenge to U.S. regional prerogatives force the Americans into enormous expenditures of capital, resources, and diplomatic energies. As Russian scholar Alexei Arbatov notes, Moscow views Iran as a growing “regional superpower” that can balance the power of Turkey and American military and political encroachment in the Black Sea/Caspian region and the Middle East.⁴¹ Vladimir Putin also places Iran at the center of American plans to intervene in the Middle East. He believes, according to former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov, that the U.S. is actually trying to destabilize the region, and he is convinced that the best policy is to bolster Iran and assure its leadership that it will not meet Libya’s fate.⁴²

The Russian-Iranian relationship has many components. Economically, the two countries have a trade relationship worth about $4 billion annually, much of it military trade. Russia is Iran’s biggest source of foreign weapons, supplying $3.4 billion in arms sales since 1991. The trade has helped Iran modernize its defenses while serving as a shot in the arm for Russia’s military-industrial sector, helping it survive many lean years.⁴³

Putin and the former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not only collaborated to protect the Assad regime in Syria, they also worked “to dominate Iraq—Russia, by signing oil and arms contracts; Iran, by bribing politicians and tribal chiefs and maintaining sleeper cells in the Shiite-majority provinces,” argues Amir Taheri. He points out that Iran hosted a Russian naval task force that was making a “goodwill” call on the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a quarter of the world’s oil. If Russia and Iran together gain the upper hand in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, they could secure “a contiguous presence from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.” All of this would also put more pressure on NATO ally Turkey and weaken the West in the region.⁴⁴

But the nuclear alliance is most worrisome. The Russian-Iranian nuclear relationship began in the 1990s, when a troubled Russia began transferring nuclear technology and expertise to Iran. Russian scientists were soon traveling to Iran as part of an extensive, clandestine network, offering the Iranians assistance with missile and nuclear-weapons programs. A mid-2000s CIA report issued this finding: “Despite some examples of restraint, Russian businesses continue to be major suppliers of WMD equipment, materials, and technology to Iran. . . . Specifically, Russia continues to provide Iran with nuclear technology that could be applied to Iran’s weapons program.” The head of Israeli intelligence accused the head of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry of using Iran as a source of employment for Russian nuclear scientists and also as a source of foreign reserves, desperately lacking in Russia at the time.

At the urging of the U.S., Russia scaled back some of its work with Iran in the late 1990s, cancelling a number of technology-related contracts. And as more information came to light about Iranian intentions to acquire a nuclear bomb, Russia became more hesitant—at least in public—about its support. Iranian nuclear engineers continue to train in Russia, but under tighter protocols.⁴⁵

Still, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees here. By the time Russia began scaling back its support of Iran, it had already transferred significant quantities of information to Tehran. The ongoing work at Bushehr proceeds under the older contracts, and the Iranians have accumulated enough expertise to carry it on for years. Moscow trained hundreds of nuclear scientists to operate the plant, despite the urging of the U.S. and other Western nations to abandon the project. Hundreds of Iranians have been trained in Russia.⁴⁶ The Russian nuclear-energy firm Rosatom operates the Bushehr plant today, supplies all fuel from Russian sources, and recovers all spent fuel, which is processed and disposed of in Russia.⁴⁷ The Russians have no intention of walking away from Bushehr. If anything, they will expand their presence: Rosatom suggested in May 2012 that it would consider Iran’s request to help construct a second reactor there. In April 2014, Iran announced that it has signed a protocol with Russia to start construction of the second reactor.⁴⁸

Just as China’s scolding of North Korea by no means suggests a fundamental shift of policy, Russia’s role in brokering the Iranian nuclear accords should not be read as a serious rupture in the Russia-Iran nuclear alliance, which has endured many bumps in the road. Perhaps the low point came in 2010, when, under President Dmitri Medvedev, the Russians voted for another round of UN sanctions against Iran. But as noted earlier, those sanctions were weak and watered-down at Russian insistence.⁴⁹ And even this agreement came only with enticements from the U.S., including the lifting of bans on Russian arms exports and an agreement not to block sales of Russian arms to Iran.

The 2010 sanctions, along with the Russians’ agreement not to sell Iran the SS-20 missile-defense system, represented the high-water mark for the U.S.-Russian “reset.” Since then, and especially since Vladimir Putin retook presidential power in 2011, the Russians have resumed their strong support for Iranian nuclear and military procurement while making only occasional complaints. In January 2011, the Russians did voice disapproval over reports that the Iranians were enriching uranium at Qum. The foreign ministry said that Iran was “continuing to ignore the international community’s demands on dispelling concerns about its nuclear activities.”⁵⁰

But these toothless public statements cost the Russians nothing, and they generally do nothing to interfere with Iranian nuclear pursuits. The Russians can gesture toward international cooperation on Iran, as they have recently, but as we’ve noted above, the accords do not necessarily mean that Iran’s nuclear program will be diminished—let alone destroyed—by the new rules and regulations. It follows that Russia’s real attitude is well summarized by Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Moscow-based Middle East Institute. The Russians are frustrated, he says, because their cooperation with various Western initiatives in the past produced nothing positive, from Moscow’s perspective. “The West has no credibility here anymore,” he writes. “The view is that Russia must chart its own course based on its own interests; if we don’t look out for ourselves, who will?”⁵¹ Indeed, after the Russians repossessed Crimea in early 2014, and the Americans levied sanctions in response and then expanded their scope, Moscow made clear that it would look out for itself. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that if the West didn’t back off, the Russians would link their cooperation on Iran negotiations with the Ukraine situation. “If they force us into that,” Ryabkov said of Western officials, “we will take retaliatory measures.”⁵²

*****

“China will not hesitate to protect Iran, even with a third World War,” said Chinese Major General Zhang Zhaozhong in 2011.⁵³ The general’s stunning statement came during the same month that China provided Iran with the most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles the nation had ever obtained, along with the technical expertise needed to operate them.⁵⁴ Where most American observers tend to think of Russia as more closely aligned with Tehran, they can no longer overlook the substantial and growing Chinese-Iranian alliance—particularly on military and economic matters.

According to Gordon Chang, Chinese companies have violated international treaties and UN rules by selling equipment and materials to Iranian companies. Indeed, Beijing regularly exploits its dual role as Iranian benefactor and permanent member of the UN Security Council. Since 1991, China has sold more than $2.2 billion of arms to Iran.⁵⁵ China’s exports to Iran include fighter jets, main battle tanks, and naval vessels, as well as roadside bombs, landmines, air-defense systems, and armored personnel carriers.⁵⁶

The most disturbing interchange involves nuclear materials. China remains Iran’s top source of nuclear and missile technology.⁵⁷ Chang traces the trade back to 1974, when China began helping Pakistan develop an atomic weapon as a hedge against Indian nuclear ambitions. Chang believes that Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan sold China’s nuclear technology to rogue states—including Iran and North Korea—almost certainly with Beijing’s knowledge. Indeed, a North Korean engineering team took up residence at Khan’s lab and stayed for years, with the approval and assistance of senior Pakistani military and political leadership. And an Iranian team of scientists, returning from a visit to Beijing, paid a visit to Khan’s lab in 1995, which strongly suggests Chinese involvement in facilitating personal contacts between Pakistan and its customers. Moreover, Chinese companies played a leading role in Pakistan’s development of the P2 centrifuge, the core mechanism of enrichment technology in Iran and North Korea.

In 2012, Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran, attended the SCO summit, where Iran has observer status, to emphasize economic and strategic ties and to appeal for political support as Iran dealt with pressure from the U.S. and the West over its nuclear ambitions.⁵⁸ Ahmadinejad found a receptive audience. Much like Russia, China sees an anti-U.S., potentially nuclear-armed Iran as strategically useful in balancing American regional ambitions in the Middle East.⁵⁹ As with Russia, China’s role in the P5+1 negotiations over the Iranian nuclear deal amounts to less than meets the eye.

China’s support for Tehran goes well beyond the nuclear issue. China’s main rationale for supporting Tehran, even more than political self-interest, is economic self-interest. For China, energy security is paramount, and energy has become the foundation of Chinese-Iranian relations. In 2011, China was the largest importer of Iranian crude oil, taking in 543,000 barrels per day.⁶⁰ The oil connection is particularly vital: The Iranians have enough oil to remain a key China supplier for years to come. Meanwhile, due to its limited oil-refining capacity, Iran is also heavily dependent on China for refined oil and gasoline imports. China has proved loyal, making up sanction-induced shortfalls in Iranian gasoline imports. For instance, in the summer of 2010, when the U.S. and EU sanctions lashed Iranian gasoline imports, China upped its gasoline sales to Iran, providing the regime with half of its gasoline imports for July—approximately 45,000 barrels per day.⁶¹

In recent years, China has become Iran’s largest trading partner.⁶² Between 2001 and 2010, Chinese exports to Iran grew almost sixteen-fold, to $12.2 billion, while Iranian exports to China in 2010 totaled $16.5 billion.⁶³ China has also ramped up its economic investments in Iran. About 70 Chinese companies now operate in the country. As of 2010, China was financing $1 billion worth of city-improvement projects in Tehran, including the expansion of its subway and highway system.⁶⁴

The Chinese economic powerhouse has proved vital to Iran’s survival as the West’s crippling sanctions—which include expelling Iran from the global banking network—have pushed the regime to what some see as an impending breaking point. Iranian oil sales, which account for 80 percent of the government’s revenue, have been cut in half by the sanctions. Since the sanctions permit Iran to use its oil-sales revenue to buy products only from those nations to which it sells, a flood of cheap Chinese products has inundated the country.⁶⁵ Without those cheap products, Iranian consumers would doubtless be struggling even more. At the same time, the situation plays right into China’s hands, increasing Beijing’s political influence and economic power within Iran.

“THE AXIS OF PROLIFERATION”: THE IRAN–NORTH KOREA–PAKISTAN PIPELINE

“It’s very possible that the North Koreans are testing for two countries,” a senior American official told the New York Times early in 2013—the other country being Iran. He spoke after an Israeli publication ran an article, “Why Iran Already Has the Bomb,” which argued that North Korea and Iran were working together to develop nuclear weapons. By this line of thinking, North Korea’s successful nuclear test meant that, for all intents and purposes, Iran had acquired a nuclear weapon as well.

Sound far-fetched? Not to close observers of the situation.

Iranians have been present at every North Korean nuclear and missile test.⁶⁶ Iranian engineers attended the North’s April 2012 launch of the Unha-3 long-range missile. That launch failed, but the Iranians helped analyze the failure and address the problems.⁶⁷ “For more than a decade, Pyongyang and Tehran have run what is essentially a joint missile-development program,” says Gordon Chang. And North Korea “almost certainly provides missile flight-test data to Iran.”⁶⁸

Are the Iranians using North Korea as a conduit for their own nuclear ambitions? Hard evidence so far is lacking, but the connections and circumstances all point to the fact that North Korea is selling the Iranians nuclear technology in a mutually beneficial relationship that gives the Iranians the know-how they need while providing Pyongyang with economic and political assistance. Despite some advancement on this front, at least vis-à-vis Iran, an Iran–North Korea nuclear-proliferation nexus would negate American efforts to restrict Iran’s weapons-development programs, because North Korea already has a nuclear weapon and could transfer it at will.⁶⁹

The likely Iran–North Korea collaboration underscores an important point: The United States is up against a series of Axis relationships, not just that involving Russia and China or those involving their rogue-state clients. The rogues themselves work together, both in concert with and independent of their sponsors.

In 2011, Al Jazeera reported on a leaked UN report indicating that “North Korea and Iran have been exchanging ballistic-missile technology in violation of UN sanctions.” The report suggested that the two countries transferred prohibited technologies “on regular scheduled flights of Air Koryo and Iran Air.” Even more explosively, it indicated, through several diplomats who insisted on anonymity, that a third country had served as an outlet for the transfers—China.⁷⁰

The growing Iran–North Korea partnership masks the fact that, on the surface at least, the two nations appear about as different from each other as can be imagined. North Korea is an impoverished, secular dictatorship in Asia, while Iran is a Middle East theocracy with a growing middle class. The basis of their relationship is not history or culture, but rather a common enemy and a willingness to work with each other in spite of international isolation. Iran provides North Korea with foreign currency, which, due to oil sales, it has in reasonable abundance, while North Korea sends Iran missiles and other weapons technologies unobtainable elsewhere.⁷¹

It is this nexus that Claudia Rosett refers to as the “axis of proliferation.” As Rosett points out, the two nations make nearly perfect partners:

Iran, with its visions of empire, has oil money. Cash-hungry North Korea has nuclear technology, an outlaw willingness to conduct tests, and long experience in wielding its nuclear ventures to extort concessions from the U.S. and its allies. Both countries are adept at spinning webs of front companies to dodge sanctions. Both are enriching uranium. The stage is set for North Korea, having shopped ever more sophisticated missiles to Iran, to perfect and deliver the warheads to go with them.⁷²

In September 2012, a North Korean delegation traveled to Tehran to attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit. During the summit or shortly afterward, North Korea and Iran signed a Scientific Cooperation Agreement, described by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency as covering “cooperation in science, technology, and education.” The agreement strongly resembled the one North Korea signed with Syria in 2002, which led directly to the Syrians’ development of a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. That reactor, based on the North Korean one in Yongbyon, was nearly finished by 2007, when Israel destroyed it with an air strike.⁷³

At the NAM summit, North Korea was represented by the same official—head of North Korea’s parliament, Kim Yong Nam—who headed the North Korean delegation to Syria in 2002. Parties to the agreement signed between the two countries included not only Iran’s former president, Ahmadinejad, but also the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani—blacklisted by the UN in 2007 for his involvement in “nuclear or ballistic missile activities.”⁷⁴ As the agreement was signed, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, told Kim Yong Nam: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and North Korea have common enemies since the arrogant powers can’t bear independent governments.”⁷⁵ No one needed to be reminded of who the arrogant powers were.

Troubling as all of this is, it gets worse: Strong evidence points to both countries’ participation in what Rosett calls “the evolving global webs of illicit proliferation activities.” Both countries were involved, for example, in the nuclear-proliferation network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. These proliferation webs depend heavily on Chinese influence, and Beijing has facilitated these procurement efforts in multiple ways, whether as direct provider or middleman.

There is also compelling, if not yet confirmable, evidence that Iran and North Korea have shared expertise on tunnel construction for military purposes. In 1974, South Korean forces discovered a highly sophisticated system of massive tunnels located under the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Equipped with railroads, electricity, and vehicle transports, it was 35,000 meters long.⁷⁶ A generation later, in the wake of the Israeli–Hezbollah war of 2006, Israeli forces discovered large networks of tunnels close to the Israeli border that were extraordinarily similar to those constructed under the Korean DMZ. As part of its schemes to bring in foreign capital, North Korea in the past has been known to lend out its tunneling expertise for a price.

Ronen Bergman, a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who defected, said, “Thanks to the presence of hundreds of Iranian engineers and technicians, and experts from North Korea who were brought in by Iranian diplomats . . . Hezbollah succeeded in building a 25-kilometer subterranean strip in South Lebanon.” Indeed, Beirut officials believe it likely that Iranian sources passed the tunnel-construction blueprints on to Hezbollah, having obtained them first from North Korea.⁷⁷

Barring an almost impossible coincidence, the tunnels in Lebanon were based on North Korean plans—meaning that either the North Koreans built the tunnels or Iran passed the plans on to Hezbollah. Either way, the tunnels episode makes clear how Iran and North Korea, already dangerous enough themselves, can serve as enablers of technology proliferation for still more dangerous, unpredictable third parties. In this case, the technology involved only tunnels. Next time, it might involve nukes.

SYRIA

“We have never changed our position on Syria and we never will”—thus Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, summarized Moscow’s outlook in December 2012, just as the international community seemed to be moving toward a consensus that Assad’s days as Syria’s president were numbered. Like the Russian diplomat who said he’d rather have a nuclear Iran than a pro-American Iran, the statement reveals Russia’s true priorities and loyalties. They may talk encouragingly and make a few half-helpful gestures, but in the end, they will stay on the side of their ally and client.

Recent developments—including Russia’s move to author the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons—don’t change the reality of Lukashevich’s words. The resulting UN resolution contained no threat of force if Syria failed to comply with the disarmament terms. And while Assad will have to surrender his chemical weapons, Putin also took steps to keep the Syrian regime well armed otherwise. A major Reuters report in January 2014 reported that Russia had “stepped up supplies of military gear to Syria, including armored vehicles, drones and guided bombs, boosting President Bashar al-Assad just as rebel infighting has weakened the insurgency against him.” The supply of arms from Moscow came shortly before peace talks were scheduled to begin in Switzerland.⁷⁸

Such behavior has been par for the course for Putin. He continues to insist, for instance, that the chemical-weapons attack in August 2013 may not have been the work of Assad. He said: “We talk all the time about the responsibility of the Assad regime if it turns out that they did it, but nobody is asking about the responsibility of the rebels if they did it. We have all the reasons to believe it was a clever provocation.”⁷⁹

Neither the U.S. nor the UK and France have expressed the slightest doubt that Assad perpetrated the attack. Russia’s ties to Syria make it difficult to take Moscow’s skepticism seriously. Putin has brilliantly used the crisis to paint himself as international peacekeeper. He also tapped into American war exhaustion. “At the time we tried to talk to the UK prime minister about our doubts on Iraq, but they didn’t listen, and look at the result,” he said. “Every day dozens of people die. Do you understand? Every day. What’s the result?”⁸⁰

Russia is a longtime supplier of weapons to Syria, and throughout the civil war, Moscow sold Assad enough arms, both offensive and defensive, to help the dictator stay in power. The Russians’ arming of Assad not only took place at the same time they were publically calling for peace talks, but it also flew in the face of their own statements warning the West not to arm the rebels. “In our point of view, it [arming the Syrian opposition] is a violation of international law,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in March 2013.⁸¹ By Russian thinking, international law has nothing to say about arming the Syrian regime. The significance of Russian weapons in Syria has implications far beyond Syria’s borders; because the Russian shipments may also be shared with Assad’s terrorist ally, Hezbollah, they also have the potential to cause widespread havoc in the region. “If Hezbollah and Iran are supporting Syria and propping the [Assad] regime up, then why shouldn’t it transfer those weapons to Hezbollah?” asked senior Israeli defense official Amos Gilad. “You don’t even have to be an intelligence expert, it makes sense that they will. If Hezbollah can put its hands on them, it will.”⁸²

Russian (and Chinese) support for Assad is perhaps the most blatant example of the double game that Moscow and Beijing have played for years. In public, they call for peace conventions and author UN resolutions; behind the scenes, they back the Syrian regime to the hilt. Russia and China have stood with Syria for years, undermining the efforts of international institutions to mediate the conflict and bring an end to the bloodshed.

The Syrian saga has moved quickly since the chemical-weapons attack of August 2013, but all along, Russia and China have remained unswerving in their efforts to protect an important ally. By July of 2012, the two nations had blocked three UN resolutions since the uprising against Assad began. Among these were a British-sponsored initiative that would have placed sanctions on the Syrian government for failing to go through with a peace plan, including a cease-fire and demands that the Syrian government stop using heavy weapons against the opposition. The British plan also suggested the basis for a political transition. The Russians blocked a Security Council fact-finding trip to Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon to deal with the refugee crisis. Moscow said the trip was beyond the Security Council’s mandate.

“I don’t believe Syria would use chemical weapons,” Lavrov said in February 2013. “It would be a political suicide for the government if it does.”⁸³ Six months later, Assad proved Lavrov wrong.

The Russians did all they could in the immediate aftermath of the attack to help Syria. They made only the most grudging concessions: They issued a public statement urging the Assad government to cooperate with UN investigators, while in the same breath they alleged that the Syrian opposition, not Assad, was behind the attack. “It is now up to the opposition, which should guarantee safe access for the mission to the alleged place of the incident,” said the statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry.⁸⁴ Lukashevich also fingered the opposition for the attack, saying, “This criminal act had an openly provocative character.” As evidence, he pointed to a YouTube video about the chemical attacks, time-stamped hours before they began in Syria. “So the talk here is about a previously planned action,” he concluded.⁸⁵

Lukashevich overlooked something embarrassingly obvious: YouTube, run out of California, time-stamps all its videos, regardless of the time zone where they originate, by U.S. West Coast time, which is 10 hours behind Damascus.⁸⁶

Even after the YouTube confusion had been explained, Foreign Minister Lavrov hammered away at the same theme. “There is information that videos were posted on the Internet hours before the purported attack, and other reasons to doubt the rebel narrative,” he said days later. “Those involved with the incident wanted to sabotage the upcoming Geneva peace talks. Maybe that was the motivation of those who created this story. The opposition obviously does not want to negotiate peacefully.”⁸⁷

Lavrov was right about one thing: After the chemical attack, any hope for a Geneva peace conference was gone. But even Russian advocacy for the peace conference had amounted to less than met the eye. One reason they felt comfortable organizing the conference was that they knew it would fail, in no small part because they had insisted on Iran’s participation. “One must not exclude a country like Iran from this process because of geopolitical preferences,” Lavrov said. “It is a very important external player.”⁸⁸ All the while, Russia maintained its assistance to Assad.

Lavrov’s advocacy for the peace conference came almost simultaneously with news that the Russian navy was bulking up its military and naval presence in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, sending more than a dozen warships to patrol waters near Tartus, home to Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean. Analysts called the buildup one of Russia’s “largest sustained naval deployments since the Cold War.”⁸⁹ Observers in the U.S. and Europe saw the Russian deployment as less about defending Syria and Assad per se—though it would certainly help do that—and more about warning the West, and Israel, not to make another Libya out of the Syrian conflict.

The naval show of force wasn’t only about ships. At the same time, the Russians announced that they would proceed with sales of advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, known as Yakhonts, to the Syrians. Russia had provided an earlier version of the missiles years before, but the new models are equipped with state-of-the-art radar systems. The updated Yakhonts would allow Assad’s military to “deter foreign forces looking to supply the opposition from the sea, or from undertaking a more active role if a no-fly zone or shipping embargo were to be declared at some point,” said Nick Brown of Jane’s International Defense Review. “It’s a real ship killer.”⁹⁰

If that weren’t bad enough, it became clear in May 2013 that the Russians would almost certainly go ahead with the delivery to Syria of the highly advanced S-300 surface-to-air defense system. Thanks to Russian construction, technology, and know-how, Syrian air defenses were already highly advanced, but the new system could shoot down guided missiles and present a formidable, perhaps prohibitive, obstacle to warplanes trying to enter Syrian airspace. The U.S. persuaded Moscow to back off selling the S-300 to Iran—for which the Iranians eventually sued Moscow—but the Americans could not convince Russia to do the same regarding Syria.⁹¹

The issue of Syrian air defense bears on another threat: the likelihood that the Assad regime is transferring Russian arms, including the Yakhont missiles, to Hezbollah in Lebanon—a transfer that Israel, for one, regards as a fact. In late April 2013, Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met in Beirut with Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah. Sources close to the meeting said that it concerned “the role of Russia in protecting the forces that are close to it” as well as the “matching ideological, economic, geostrategic, and security-related interests of Moscow and local forces” in the region.⁹²

For Israel, the meeting was dispositive. The Israelis reportedly conducted airstrikes inside Syria in early 2013 targeting suspected weapons shipments to the terrorist group.⁹³ But it was later revealed that the Israelis had never entered Syrian airspace; they had instead used a tactical maneuver called “lofting” to launch bombs across the border to the target about 10 miles inside Syria.⁹⁴ If the Israelis were unwilling to challenge the regime’s existing air defenses, imagine the difficulties of doing so when Damascus is able to deploy the S-300 system. Israeli incursions into Syrian airspace may become prohibitive—and the Assad regime’s ability to move weaponry to its Hezbollah allies will be strengthened. Thus, supposedly “defensive” Russian systems enable Assad and his terrorist allies to go on the offensive.

American policymakers need to understand how the Russians see the situation in Syria. To the U.S., Assad is a bloody dictator who has to go. But the Russians have much at stake in keeping Assad in power. Moscow stands to lose up to $5 billion in arms sales if or when the regime falls. Russian companies have major investments in Syrian infrastructure and tourism. Taken together, Russia has close to $25 billion worth of interests in Syria. Syria is not only home to the Russian naval base in Tartus; the two countries have also agreed to return the former Soviet naval base in Latakiye to Russian control.⁹⁵ Currently, more than 600 Russian technicians are working to update these Soviet-era bases.

Russia also sees compelling geostrategic reasons to support Assad. These include fear of “the spread of Islamic radicalism and the erosion of its superpower status in a world where Western nations are increasingly undertaking unilateral military interventions,” as Russian defense analyst Ruslan Pukhov explained it in 2012.⁹⁶ There is no question that Russia and China remain bitter that Western forces ignored their opposition to intervention in Libya and the ousting of Colonel Qaddafi. Desperate to stay in power, Qaddafi offered China and Russia a stake in the Libyan oil industry in exchange for support in 2011. For years before Qaddafi’s fall, Moscow had close military and commercial relations with Libya⁹⁷—and since Qaddafi’s demise, Russia has lost $4.5 billion in contracts.⁹⁸ Both Russian and Chinese representatives told the Financial Times that they would have vetoed UN Security Council Resolution 1973—the one establishing a no-fly zone over Libya—if they had known how broadly it would be interpreted. Then-President Dmitri Medvedev publicly stated that the West “simply deceived Russia” with its Libyan intervention.⁹⁹ “Russia’s current Syria policy,” wrote Pukhov, “basically boils down to supporting the Assad government and preventing a foreign intervention aimed at overthrowing it, as happened in Libya.”¹⁰⁰ Forcing Assad to turn over his chemical weapons through the UN resolution does nothing to change the fundamental calculus.

Some, like Georgy Mirsky, say that Russia’s anti-Western animus is like a reflex, a resurgence of the old Soviet mentality.¹⁰¹ It’s not all anti-Westernism, though. The Russians are pragmatic skeptics, contemptuous of American democratic aspirations. What they see in Assad is a secular (if brutal) dictator fighting off forces of radical Islam that, if they prevail, could destabilize the entire region. Its long experience with Islamists in Chechnya and elsewhere has motivated Moscow to protect Assad from that outcome. “In Moscow,” Pukhov wrote, “secular authoritarian governments are seen as the sole realistic alternative to Islamic dominance.”¹⁰²

Finally, the Russians know that if Assad falls, then Iran, their most important ally in the region, will be weakened—as will Russian influence. Moscow has already seen the ouster, over the last decade, of its allies Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi. It cannot afford to stand by and watch another Western intervention weaken its regional interests.

Beijing’s support for Assad, meanwhile, seems comparatively mysterious to outside observers. China enjoys a healthy $2.2 billion annual trade relationship with Syria—no match for what it does in trade with the other Gulf Arab states (roughly $90 billion annually). China’s Iran commitments dwarf its Syrian investments. But China opposes a repeat of the Libyan model as strongly as the Russians do, and Beijing vetoed the UN resolutions alongside Russia in order to stand in solidarity against the West generally and the U.S. more specifically. Beijing also worries about the repercussions of regime change in Syria, as an op-ed in the Chinese People’s Daily newspaper, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party, made clear:

Though China has a less direct stake in Syria than Russia, the collapse of Syria will result in the West further controlling the Middle East, and Iran taking direct strategic pressure from the West. If war broke out in Iran, China would have to rely more on Russia for energy, bringing in new uncertainty to the Sino–Russian strategic partnership.¹⁰³

Like Russia, then, China backs Assad for self-interested reasons that have little to do with actual support for the Syrian president. But while Russia has major economic and strategic interests to protect in Syria, China’s stake is less vital. Rather, Beijing is standing in solidarity with Moscow in their mutual opposition to interventionism, while also supporting Russia’s notion of regional “stability.” Beijing knows what it’s getting in Assad, and it is content with his remaining in power. Finally, in blocking U.S. and Western efforts to intervene, the Chinese help support a regime that, at little cost to themselves, causes their American rivals nothing but trouble.

VENEZUELA

“I like kitties and puppies and little animals,” Vladimir Putin said matter-of-factly in 2012. It’s true: The Russian strongman has a soft spot for animals, as a trove of Web photo galleries makes clear. And so it stands to reason that he wouldn’t give puppies as gifts to someone unless he felt strongly about them—and Putin felt very strongly about Hugo Chávez, the longtime Venezuelan dictator. In the last year of their long partnership, Putin gave the Latin American strongman a three-month-old Russian black terrier puppy, along with a private message. When Chávez died in March 2013, Putin’s condolence telegram was striking for its heartfelt praise: “He was an uncommon and strong man who looked into the future and always set the highest target for himself.”

Although it’s too early to predict the shape of post-Chávez Venezuela, the early signs are for continuity—and that means a strong Venezuelan relationship not only with Russia but also with China. Both countries have sent signals that they wish to work closely with Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. The feeling seems to be mutual.

“We are not going to change one iota of the fundamental themes of President Chávez’s policies,” Venezuela’s energy minister, Rafael Ramirez, told a local TV station not long after Chávez’s death. “We have a very important strategic relationship with China, which we’re going to continue deepening and cultivating. It’s the same with our cooperation with Russia. . . . Chávez’s policies are more alive than ever, and we will push ahead with them.”¹⁰⁴

During his tenure, Chávez made Venezuela an archenemy of the U.S., and he possessed the means and the motivation to harm the United States like few others could. He built strategic alliances not only with Russia and China, but also with Cuba, Iran, and Syria. While much of the international community was busy condemning Bashar al-Assad for massacring his own people, Chávez sent large shipments of oil to the Syrian leader, in defiance of international sanctions. Venezuela became deeply involved in drug trafficking and money laundering while providing staunch support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Chávez severed ties with Israel in 2009 to protest its offensive against Hamas, and in 2010, he hosted an extraordinary secret summit in Caracas for senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, along with Palestinian Islamic Jihad.¹⁰⁵ “Hezbollah’s presence in Latin America is growing significantly with the support of the Chávez regime in Venezuela,” Roger F. Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs under President George W. Bush, told the Committee on Homeland Security.

Chávez called Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad his “brother,” partnered with him in a joint Iranian-Venezuelan bank, and declared that he would consider any attack on Iran an attack on Venezuela. And indeed, should the U.S. take military action against Iran, the quickest route of retaliation would be through Venezuela—close enough to the U.S. that intercontinental missiles wouldn’t be needed. Ahmadinejad placed agents from the Iranian intelligence apparatus in Venezuela to advise the army as well as the intelligence service. For years, Venezuela operated a weekly flight from Teheran to Caracas, bringing untold numbers of Iranians into the country.

Chávez’s Venezuela had few stronger allies than Putin and Russia. The two countries forged a joint Russian-Venezuelan bank venture in 2009 to pursue bilateral projects, especially involving energy; Pdvsa, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, partnered with Russia’s Gazprom. The bank was headquartered in Moscow with an office in Caracas. On military matters, cooperation was close. Before Chávez died, Russia granted Venezuela a $4.4 billion loan to purchase Russian weaponry and “defend its sovereignty,” in Chávez’s words. Venezuela pursued a separate $6 billion loan for infrastructure. Russia also sold Chávez battle tanks and missile systems.

Russia’s investment in the Venezuelan oil industry grew steadily during Chávez’s tenure. In May 2013, two months after Chávez died, Venezuela and Russia formed a joint venture to produce 120,000 barrels of oil a day by 2016 in two fields of the Orinoco Belt of heavy oil, regarded as the one of the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves. That agreement came with another Russian loan, this one for $1.5 billion, to finance the development of the field. Some critics are skeptical that the relationship can survive post-Chávez, but Russia has much to lose in Venezuela by allowing the alliance to languish and everything to gain by remaining committed. The projects that Moscow signed with Chávez are worth at least $30 billion. Venezuela has reason to stay close to Moscow, too: It is Russia’s largest importer of arms, and Moscow promises to maintain its arms deals with Caracas.¹⁰⁶

“As for our future relations with Venezuela,” Putin said, “they will depend primarily on the Venezuelan people, the future president, and the country’s leadership.”¹⁰⁷ Time will tell, but don’t bet on this relationship breaking up.

Meanwhile, China has pledged to continue its “strategic alliance” with Venezuela, post-Chávez, which includes increased oil exports to China and massive Chinese investment in Venezuelan oil-producing infrastructure. Without question, oil is the key driver of this relationship, though it is not the only one.

As late as 2005, Venezuela was sending only a few thousand barrels of oil per day to China. But China’s thirst for oil and Chávez’s hunger for loans drew the two nations closer. After getting a $36 billion loan from Beijing, Chávez stepped up shipments drastically. Venezuela now provides 500,000 barrels a day to China, a total projected to reach 1 million barrels per day by 2015. In addition, China National Petroleum is a key player, along with the Russians, in developing the Orinoco oil field. After a series of deals with the Chinese that would help him expand Venezuela’s oil production, Chávez said, “Never before has Venezuela had such a fruitful and positive relationship with a great power like China.” ¹⁰⁸

At the same time, China has also stepped into the breach left by the U.S. ban of arms sales to Venezuela. Beijing has sold Caracas new military transport planes as well as Chinese-built trainer jets and ground radar. The two countries have hundreds of other bilateral agreements not involving military technology specifically, but a wide range of infrastructure projects. These include mining deals, satellite construction, irrigation systems, agricultural-processing plants, housing complexes, and railway infrastructure.

The questions for the Chinese post-Chávez are the same the Russians are asking: Can the relationship survive the leader’s death? Early indications show a strong commitment by both countries to keeping the alliance going. In May 2013, the Chinese vice president, Li Yuancho, visited Caracas to meet with Maduro and discuss a host of ongoing and future projects, including ventures involving telecom and other technologies. “This visit has been very fruitful,” Maduro said. “We will never forget the loving support that China gave to our Comandante [Chávez]. We will be loyal to the work that has been done.”¹⁰⁹ Like the Russians, the Chinese have strong incentives to keep a good thing going.

CONCLUSION

While much of what we’ve discussed in this chapter has a gloomy cast, we’d like to close on a somewhat more hopeful note. The U.S. should recognize that when it takes concrete action—even if insufficient and not sustained—it has produced results. Not dramatic results, necessarily, but results: American pressure convinced the Chinese to rein in the North Koreans in the spring of 2013, at least to some degree, defusing what had been an increasingly tense situation. Dogged American diplomatic efforts persuaded the Russians to agree to a Geneva conference to mediate the Syrian conflict. More recently came the UN resolution requiring Assad to turn over his chemical-weapons supply. As we’ve made clear above, we’re skeptical that these efforts represent genuine changes in Russia’s and China’s postures toward these rogue regimes, but in all cases, they were better than nothing. Broader and more sustained action should prove even more effective. (Of course, U.S. engagement doesn’t always lead to positive outcomes, as indicated by the nuclear accord reached with Iran in November 2013. As we noted previously, by all indications, this accord is likely to prove hugely beneficial to Tehran but disastrous for the United States, Israel, and the Western democracies. We share the views of other observers who see the deal as part of a long-term strategy on Tehran’s part to “concede to interim demands in order to secure principles that will favorably define a final, comprehensive agreement.”¹¹⁰)

Still, America’s moderate recent successes should remind us of a timeless lesson: Applying pressure is the only way to achieve positive results. Russia and China are not to be persuaded by American “resets” or other conciliatory postures, but they will listen, because they must, when they understand that we are committed to actively defending our positions. There is no substitute for what Hillary Clinton called “coercive diplomacy,” or what might be called muscular multilateralism: American efforts, sometimes in concert with others, to defend our interest and principles around the world. There is no substitute, in the end, for American engagement. “Leading from behind” just doesn’t cut it.

Up to now, unfortunately, our leaders in Washington have not yet fully absorbed this lesson; they show intermittent signs of reengaging, but then they pull back again. Russia and China never pull back. They have always got the pedal down, full throttle, and we lose precious time and squander options with our dithering.

Russia and China are, to put it bluntly, playing a double game: They work with the United States and the international community on broad efforts and thus preserve their political deniability and their economic and political relationships with the United States; at the same time, they thwart the will of the international community by backing the world’s most dangerous regimes. Neither Iran nor North Korea could long survive without Axis support. Russia, Iran, and Syria are close partners economically and militarily, and their alliance only grows closer as the United States backs off from confrontation and engagement. American passivity not only emboldens our adversaries; it also leaves our partners unsettled and prompts them to look elsewhere for support or blame us for their troubles. President Putin has made himself an ally of General al-Sisi, Egypt’s top military officer, who will run for president in May 2014. Putin encouraged him to do so. It would be a “very responsible decision,” he said, “to undertake such a mission for the fate of the Egyptian people.” He made his support explicit: “On my own part, and on behalf of the Russian people, I wish you success.” Putin made these comments during al-Sisi’s February 2014 visit to Moscow, which was accompanied by news of impending arms deal with Russia worth $2 billion, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.¹¹¹ Meanwhile, feeling betrayed by American dithering on Syria, Turkey blamed Washington for its domestic unrest.

At every juncture, we seem to be losing, and it is not clear what we’re actually negotiating—let alone what our goals are. We will discuss specific steps that the United States can and should take in our concluding chapter. But more important, even, than our particular policies is the mindset behind them. Until Washington’s foreign-policy apparatus once again embraces America’s central role in the world, the United States and its allies will operate at a disadvantage.

Of course, the Russian and Chinese effort on behalf of rogue regimes is far from the only avenue in which they threaten American security. Both countries are actively pursuing an entire range of policies designed, if not wholly, then at least in substantial part, to negate or transcend U.S. influence. Unfortunately, Washington has been no better at recognizing these other threats—the most immediate and troubling of which is cyber warfare.