How Trump Can Capitalize on Autocrats’ Setbacks
By Will Marshall

The defanging of Iran — chiefly by Israel, with a strong assist from President Trump and the U.S. Air Force — doesn’t just signal a dramatic power shift in the Middle East. It is also a setback to Iran’s senior partners in the anti-American axis — Russia and China. 

Neither has offered their battered ally anything more than boilerplate denunciations of Israel and the U.S. for violating international law. For now, at least, the fearsome “Axis of Autocracies,” bent on disrupting the U.S.-led global order — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — looks rather brittle.  

Dictators rarely make reliable allies. Apart from coveting absolute power, each has little in common with other nations’ despots. Their pacts tend to be opportunistic and fleeting. Even as the tide of war turned against them, for instance, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan never found a way to align their strategic goals or military strategies. 

Alliances between liberal democracies seem to have more tensile strength. That’s because they are bound together by shared political beliefs and institutions, not just common adversaries.

Even Trump, the arch-realist, may be stumbling into that reality.