Interview
Stopping the authoritarian onslaught

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pyongyang, June 19, 2024. (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The last few years have been good ones for authoritarianism. As democracy has declined (for 18 consecutive years, according to Freedom House), authoritarian powers – especially the increasingly interconnected axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (CRINK) – have gained in strength and aggression. To better understand the threat and what to do about it, The Catalyst’s Jonathan Tepperman spoke to Victor Cha, a professor of government at Georgetown University, President of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Senior Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. If you want to learn more about the issues underlying their conversation, click here for the Bush Institute’s Policy Brief on countering CRINK. 

For years, a lot of analysts argued that we shouldn’t make too much of cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, because that cooperation was largely tactical and based on mutual hostility toward the United States – not on any deeper ideology or a durable bond. Has all that changed? Has the nature and substance of the relationship among these four countries deepened? 

Although the relationships among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea may have started out as very tactical, they have turned into something more akin to a strategic bloc. Of course, each party has certain things it wants out of the relationship; that is not unusual in any sort of strategic relationship. But we’ve seen a sea change in the level of cooperation and the way this cooperation has manifested. 

So, for example, Russia and North Korea now have a bona fide security treaty that has been ratified by the legislatures of both countries. And, of course, North Korea is sending ground troops to Russia to fight against Ukraine. That is just about the strongest commitment one country can give another in a time of war. And I don’t think it’s just tactical or transactional.  

There are other examples too. China has been providing industrial support for Russia’s war machine, and I don’t think that will go away anytime soon. There is much more to this than four actors just using an opportune moment to try to take advantage of Europe and the United States. 

Is it possible to identify specific goals that they share beyond, as you said, opposition to the United States? 

I would categorize their goals in two ways. The first is to disrupt the Western liberal rules-based international order – not necessarily to replace that order with something else, but just to disrupt it, to create disorder. Second, each of these parties is seeking to achieve predatory gains out of that disorder.  

What do you mean by predatory gains? 

Well, Russia is trying to gain territory. North Korea is trying to improve its ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] and nuclear weapons capability to be able to threaten the U.S. homeland. China wants to take advantage of the economic opportunities that have been created by the ejection from Russia of many Western-based companies. In addition, Russia and China have completely disrupted the ability of the U.N. Security Council to do any sort of global governance. Since 2020, Russia has vetoed 14 draft U.N. Security Council resolutions, and China has aided and abetted at least five of those vetoes. This shows how they seek to create disorder, which will allow them to operate more freely and according to their own self-interest.  

One of the arguments that some analysts used to make for why one shouldn’t lump Russia and China together was that if you do that, you risk obscuring the possibility that, if the West played its cards right, it might be able to pull one of these countries away from the other – generally China away from Russia. Do you think that was ever possible? 

It’s an interesting question, because it evokes the historical analogy of the beginning of the Cold War, when the United States lumped the Soviet Union and China together and very few experts or scholars recognized that there was a split between them that could be exploited. That split was recognized later, of course, particularly after the 1969 border clashes between the Soviet Union and China.  

In this case, certainly there may be fissures in the Russia-China relationship, but what is different now is that a strategic template has been set with regard to U.S.-China competition. The current state of U.S.-China relations makes it harder to think about splitting China from Russia. 

I also think that the idea of trying to exploit a split between China and Russia would be a distraction from the fact that it’s China, not Russia, that is the long-term strategic competitor of the United States. Russia and the war in Ukraine is certainly our proximate concern, but the long race with China is the long-term strategic threat.  

Newspapers in Seoul covering North Korea’s decision to deploy soldiers to Ukraine, October 21, 2024. (Photo by ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Have events such as the U.S. failure to respond when Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons in 2013 – which Washington had previously called a red line that would trigger U.S. action – and America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 weakened the West’s overall ability to deter authoritarian countries?  

I think the failure of deterrence could certainly be linked to certain critical moments, such as the one you mentioned with regard to Syria. But a more concerning aspect of this to me is that if Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are successful in undermining the global order, the resulting disorder may give them so much confidence that no matter what the United States then does, they will not be deterred.  

In other words, we may do things to enhance our reputation and resolve and show that we can deter, but whether that works is determined by what the target of deterrence thinks. And if the target of deterrence has already decided that the order has been disrupted and that the United States is isolated, and that no matter what the United States says or does, it cannot gather the capabilities or the allies to draw a line in the sand, then the target will remain undeterred. So the answer to your question is linked to specific actions that the United States does or doesn’t take, but it’s also linked to the future of global governance. 

Have Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, and China’s recent actions in the seas around Taiwan shown that we’ve already gotten to the point where deterrence has failed? 

I think we are getting closer to that point. In the case of the Indo-Pacific, China has not made the big aggressive move yet. They’re using a gray zone strategy, doing incremental things to change the status quo. But certainly in Europe, deterrence has failed. I think that there is growing confidence among the authoritarian countries that they can cross lines and not expect to face consequences. Because the international order has been fundamentally disrupted and it’s not clear that countries in the West, led by the United States, are willing to stop those who cross the line in the sand. 

What then would be your main recommendations for the new administration on how it can restore its ability to deter China, Russia, and other authoritarian states? 

Part of the answer, as I said, involves restoring global governance and at least some aspects of the Western liberal rules-based international order. Of course, there could be changes to that order, in terms of who participates in rulemaking, that sort of thing. And the United States is not the world’s policeman anymore; we know that. So finding the right global institution to restore the core of the order is important. It could be a reinvigorated U.N. Security Council, or groupings like the G7, or an expanded version of the G7, or NATO and the Indo-Pacific Four (NATO plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea). 

But the U.S. role remains absolutely essential, and the United States needs to continue to focus on strengthening its alliances in Europe and Asia, not retrenching from them. 

As you know, some analysts argue that while all of what you’ve said may be true, at the end of the day, deterrence comes down to cold hard military power and your willingness to use it, and the United States no longer has the military capabilities it needs. What do you think? 

Deterrence is both about resolve and capabilities. The United States has to demonstrate that it has the political resolve to deter and it needs to have the capabilities. It may be the case that the United States doesn’t have the preponderance of capabilities that it used to have. But at the same time, its allies have become much stronger. Just compare the situation in Asia today to the Cold War, when the United States was the preponderant power and its allies there had the resolve to counter communism, but they didn’t have the capabilities, because they didn’t have the economies to support them. Today, U.S. allies in Asia are among the most industrialized economies in the world and are greatly advancing in terms of their defense-industrial capabilities.  

Given what you’ve said about resolve, do you think that if the United States ends or significantly reduces its military aid to Ukraine, that move will further reduce its ability to deter China from acting against Taiwan, thereby increasing the risk of war there? 

Yes. If the United States reduced its commitment to Ukraine, or did not renew it, the first order of consequence would be that it would create a great deal of uncertainty about the credibility of the U.S. security commitment. And other countries like China might see an opportunity in that.  

I also think that our allies and partners would try to adjust, and that could mean increasing their own defense spending. Right now, in the Indo-Pacific, there are no U.S. allies or partners that are spending more than 3% of their GDP on defense. In fact, only one of our NATO allies is over 3%. So I think that the second-order consequence would probably be increased defense spending among U.S. allies, and perhaps more regional cooperation. We might see that between South Korea and Japan, for example – two countries that would be threatened by China and North Korea. We might see more regional cooperation in Europe or between NATO and Indo-Pacific countries. Countries are not going to lie down and play dead. 

NATO troops completing Dragon 24 military exercises on March 5, 2024 near Gniew, Poland.  (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

How will we know if our ability to deter authoritarian countries has been restored, since if they don’t do bad things, it may be hard to know why they’re refraining?  

It’s a hard question to answer. Part of the issue is that with deterrence, it’s hard to measure success. It’s easy to measure failure; failure is when they cross the line. Success is much harder to spot, because deterrence is about a nonaction, about preventing aggression by another. The tricky thing is that the absence of aggression could be the result of your deterrence, or it could (in the case of China, say) be a result of a slowdown in the Chinese economy or a leadership struggle within the Chinese military. It could be for any of a host of reasons.   

The conventional wisdom these days is that the U.S. public is not very supportive of an internationalist foreign policy or more military spending. Do you agree that that’s true? And if so, how can Washington rally public support for the fight against authoritarian states? 

When it comes to foreign policy, the politics in the United States have changed and become much more insular. Americans feel the United States needs to consolidate its base, consolidate its power, and not overextend itself. That’s not a new argument in the history of U.S. grand strategy, of course; we’ve heard it before. But those moments have always seen the most disorder in the world, and in some cases world wars. 

Both parties in the United States are now moving in that direction, unfortunately, whether we’re talking about security commitments or trade. What might be different this time, however, is that there may be more allies and partners willing to fill the gap, to take up the slack. 

I know you think that human rights should be a substantial part of the Western pressure campaign against authoritarian regimes. How do you respond to skeptics who argue that emphasizing human rights in foreign policy doesn’t actually make much difference? 

I would point skeptics to President Ronald Reagan and the broad, almost human rights-first foreign policy he pursued toward the Soviet Union. I would also point them to President George W. Bush, who made human rights and meeting with dissidents an important part of U.S. foreign policy. What is distinct and unique about American preeminence and America’s role as a global power is that this has often been an important aspect of our foreign policy. It is what makes us different from other big powers that have a lot of money and influence, like China. To remove human rights from our foreign policy would be another sign and cause of the global order falling apart. If the global order has no values-based backbone, then it becomes a vulgar, realist self-help game in which everybody’s out for themselves and there is no principle in foreign policy.  

As the new Trump Administration moves forward, are there any other tools, beyond those that we’ve already discussed, that it should emphasize in order to counter authoritarian regimes? 

My view is that right now, the United States cannot do this on its own. When we think about the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis, the conventional foreign wisdom is to respond by consolidating U.S. alliances in Europe, with NATO, or in Asia, with Japan and South Korea. But it’s not inconceivable that President Trump could think about different arrangements.  

The other thing that the administration could do, now that the U.N. Security Council is completely incapacitated, would be to pursue an alternative structure of global governance. Even the U.N. secretary-general has said the Security Council is incapable of acting on the two most important issues facing it today – the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East. So there needs to be another grouping in which countries come together to make declarations and coordinate policy, coordinate sanctions, coordinate rulemaking.  

So far I think countries are gravitating to the G7. That’s where we’ve seen recent decisions on frozen Russian assets, on coordinating sanctions on North Korea, on the Taiwan Strait. In President Trump’s first term, his team didn’t like the fact that the G7 is currently so heavily European. So there might be some thought given to how to expand this group. The G20 is too big. The BRICS [the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, and China], obviously, are interested in disorder. The World Trade Organization is way too big and focused on different issues.   

As you think about the ongoing campaign to counter China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, what gives you hope? 

Two things. The first is that, as we said, even though there are tactical and strategic benefits to this axis, there is very little trust. The countries involved may be thinking about the grouping in longer terms than they used to, but there is no trust among them. So the axis could collapse. 

The other is that the United States could end up pursuing some form of power consolidation at home, but at the same time still act to encourage allies and partners to step up and do more. President Trump might use different language than I’m using; he might say they need to pay up or they need to stop cheating us. But if the world has confidence that the United States remains committed, is still vested in sustaining the global order, and wants to work with partners to do that, that would be a very powerful framework for trying to deter this axis and achieve some sort of sustainable rules-based international order.