The War in Ukraine Has Created a New ‘Axis of Evil’
Beaming at every turn, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un toured the jewels of Russia’s military industries in September. A guest of President Vladimir Putin, he gawked at the plant making Su-35 jet fighters, inspected a Russian Navy frigate and examined the Kinzhal missiles at the Vostochny spaceport. Soon thereafter, trainloads of North Korean artillery shells started rolling to Russian troops in Ukraine—by American calculations, as many as one million munitions, or roughly three times what European nations had been able to supply in a whole year.
Another increasingly important partner of Russia, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, visited with Putin this month. Iranian ammunition and drones have played a major role in the Russian war effort. Now Raisi discussed the desired payback: sophisticated Russian aircraft and air defenses that would make it much harder for the U.S.
or Israel to strike Iran and its nuclear program. President George W. Bush used the term “axis of evil" to describe North Korea, Iran and Iraq in 2002, in his first State of the Union speech after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The idea was ridiculed by many at the time. But now an axis uniting Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang has become a geopolitical reality—and with a revisionist and reckless Russia at its center, it poses a growing threat to the U.S. and its allied democracies.
“These countries are showing an excellent burden-sharing. And when it comes to Ukraine, there is an unholy alliance of these forces which have achieved a war economy, whereas we in the West are unable to achieve an increase in the production of ammunition," said Roderich Kiesewetter, a German lawmaker and a former senior officer of the German General Staff. This new axis is
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