Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, China’s Xi Jinping made a call to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout, the two leaders pledged to deepen their “strategic coordination” and “practical cooperation” and “firmly support each other.” 

Just a few days earlier on January 17, Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement, pledging a wide range of military cooperation. 

Meanwhile, North Korea is pledging to send more troops to Russia, where they have been fighting alongside Russian forces against Ukraine since last October, taking shockingly high losses.   

It’s clear that America’s principal global adversaries are increasingly cooperating, and policymakers and experts are increasingly treating these four countries in particular — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — as a cohesive unit. They’ve been called the “axis of upheaval,” the “quartet of chaos,” or simply the “CRINKs.”

The cooperation between the four is hard to deny, and while some of these countries have been erstwhile friends since the Cold War, the relationship has certainly deepened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what does this “axis” actually stand for? Is it just an alliance of convenience or something deeper? And how will a new US administration, one that takes a much more transactional approach to foreign policy and is far less invested in promoting democracy abroad, deal with the quartet?

What do these strange allies have in common?

The four members of this group are all autocracies, but they don’t share an official ideology. China is a one-party communist party state with capitalist characteristics. Russia is a conservative, nationalist oligarchy. Iran is a Shiite Islamic theocracy, and North Korea is a hybrid of state communism, radical self-reliance, and racial supremacism. 

Nor do they have much in common economically: China is the world’s second-largest economy, largest exporter, and an inextricable centerpiece of the global economy, while North Korea is basically an economic nonentity (unless you count cybercrime).

But as Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New America Security (CNAS) argued in an influential article for Foreign Affairs last year, the four countries “are united in their opposition to the prevailing world order and its US leadership.” What Western countries see as the “rules based international order” established out of the ashes of World War II, these countries see as a cloak for American power.

There are other commonalities. 

“They share a belief in state-based political rights rather than any kind of individual rights or human rights,” Kendall-Taylor, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at CNAS, said. “They share a vision of spheres of influence.” In other words, it’s countries’ interests on the world stage that have to be respected, not those of their citizens. 

Or as Xi and Putin put it in their joint communique issued shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they “stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions.” 

All four also view themselves as the inheritors of important historical civilizations. Putin’s arguments for the invasion of Ukraine at times seem to refer more often to events in the ninth century than to recent grievances. North Koreans are taught that their country is one of the cradles of world civilization. And China has sought to promote an “Ancient Civilizations Forum,” composed of countries deemed to have inherited “great ancient civilizations” — one of which is Iran.

Kendall-Taylor and Fontaine have dubbed the alliance the “axis of upheaval” — a term that brings to mind the “axis of evil” — referred to by President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, where he built a case for the war in Iraq. That “axis” of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea never made much sense. For one thing, at the time, the Iranian and Iraqi governments were mortal enemies, and only became much closer as a result of the American invasion of Iraq.   

By contrast, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea actually are working together. But the “axis of evil” association is one reason why Peter Van Praagh, founder and president of the Halifax Security Forum, a high-profile annual national security gathering, prefers “CRINKs,” an acronym he coined in 2023. 

Van Praagh contrasts the term to BRICS (the economic grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which he told Vox “evokes strength and sort of the action of building something, whereas CRINK has a certain stench to it.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped cement the alliance

Iran and North Korea are generally viewed as the junior partners in the quartet, due to their relative size and economic clout. China is undoubtedly the most powerful and influential of the four, as reflected in America’s most recent National Defense Strategy, which defined the People’s Republic of China as the “pacing challenge” for American national security. 

But Russia is in many ways the catalyst driving the group forward and bringing it together. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine accelerated the deepening of ties that had already been developing for years. 

Shortly after Russia’s invasion, Putin and Xi meant to proclaim a friendship with “no limits,” including Russia affirming its support for Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China. Though China is not believed to have directly provided weapons to Russia since the war began, trade between the two countries has grown dramatically over the course of the war as Western countries have imposed increasingly draconian sanctions on the Russian economy. 

China is now Russia’s key supplier of civilian consumer goods like cars and clothing as well as “dual use” materials, like the microchips and machine parts that Russia uses to sustain its war machine. China, in return, has been buying massive amounts of Russian oil at a discount — thanks to sanctions. According to US officials, China has been receiving Russian technical help with its submarine and missile programs as well. 

In September 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rode his private train to Russia for talks with Putin amid reports that the Russians were buying millions of North Korean artillery shells and rockets. North Korea and Russia signed a mutual defense treaty last summer, and last October, thousands of North Korean troops were sent to Russia to help retake territory in the Kursk region which is currently occupied by Ukrainian forces.

Russia and Iran were the principal backers of Bashar al-Assad’s now-toppled regime in Syria. Iran has also long been a customer of Russian military hardware, notably including several S-300 air defense missile systems as well as tanks and submarines. Since the invasion, however, Russia has been the customer, particularly of Iran’s Shahed “kamikaze” drones. According to the Ukrainian government, Russia has launched more than 8,000 Iranian drones since the start of the war. The US also says Iran has been sending Russia short-range ballistic missiles.

At times, the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have seemed increasingly intertwined. Russia was reportedly in talks last year to send missiles to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, while Ukraine provided aid to the rebels fighting Assad in Syria. In 2023, Iran was invited, along with several other countries, to join the BRICS, which Russia in particular has sought to promote an alternative to Western-led groupings like the G7. 

To explain the alliance that has developed since the war in Ukraine, Yun Sun, a senior fellow and director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center, said Chinese commentators often use the phrase: “They form a circle and they keep each other warm in a harsh winter. That’s the mentality. They’re looking for someone to have their back when they’re in this strategic competition with the United States.”

Is this just a coalition of the sanctioned?

One other thing these countries have in common is that they’re all the target of a US-led economic sanctions regime, and extremely eager to find ways to overturn that regime. Putin, in particular, has been keen to develop a global payment system as an alternative to the dollar, which he argues the US uses as a political weapon. 

Some experts argue that it’s actually US economic pressure that has created the axis. 

“This is an alliance of United States’ making,” says Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “It’s not that these countries have natural affinities or strategic convergence. But going back several presidents, the US has basically followed the same strategy against all these countries at the same time in a way that brings them together.” 

For example, a so-called “shadow fleet” of opaquely registered and insured oil tankers that has emerged to transport Russian and Iranian oil around the world, including to China, effectively creating a parallel global oil market. 

Others question whether the four countries should really be grouped together this way. “I don’t think it’s a useful construct, because our relationship with Russia is very different from our relationship with China,” said Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment and a critic of the axis concept. “In order to deal with these countries effectively, the threats that they pose to us, I think we need to look at them in a more disaggregated manner.”

Framing global politics as a competition between ideologically opposed blocs also risks raising the ire of non-Western democracies such as India, Brazil, and South Africa, all of whom have also sought to maintain good relations with Washington. 

Some would say that’s the point: a country like South Africa can’t claim to uphold international law when it comes to Gaza while also effectively helping to enable Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

But leaders of these countries, suffice it to say, don’t see it that way. “Many insist on dividing the world into friends and enemies. But the most vulnerable are not interested in simplistic dichotomies,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said at a recent BRICS summit. 

Kendall-Taylor acknowledged that US economic pressure and other pressures may have deepened ties between the axis countries, but asked, “What would have been the alternatives to the US policies that were pursued? When Russia invades Ukraine, should we not sanction them?”

Trump vs. CRINKs?

Even if these countries form a coherent grouping today, many don’t expect it to last. 

Rumer points at the Russian-Iran relationship as an example of the fragility of ties between these countries. The recently signed partnership between the two countries is notably not a mutual defense agreement — they’re under no obligation to help each other if they come under attack. In fact, it’s more or less an open secret that Russia, which operated air defense systems in Syria,

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