The Emergence of a Complex New Threat
U.S. Foreign and Domestic Issues
It is very rare when a U.S. Secretary of Defense or Director of the Central Intelligence Agency issues a warning to the American people through the public media. Having served under three U.S. presidents, Robert M. Gates used strong language in September 2023 to describe the breakdown in bipartisan agreement among our nation’s political leadership about America’s role as a global leader.
The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four different allied antagonists at the same time – Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran – whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia.
Gates told his readers that American leadership “provided 75 years of great-power peace – the longest stretch in centuries . . . A world without reliable U. S. leadership would be a world of authoritarian predators, with all other countries potential prey.”
Despite this sober warning about the threats facing the United States from Secretary of Defense Gates and defense analysts at leading think tanks, neither presidential team – Democrat or Republican – paid much attention to these observations in their 2024 presidential campaign speeches. There was a surprising tone deafness in both political parties.
When Donald Trump won the election in 2016, he faced a series of remarkable changes in global politics, changes few people anticipated. Sensing the weaknesses in American and Western European capitals, a charismatic group of populist politicians came to power, as was discussed in my last essay, and once elected, they began to consolidate their political power by undermining democratic checks and balances. A radical nationalism sprouted up all over the globe, as populist despots used language that elevated the achievements of their nation’s history.
By 2024, when Trump became president for his second term, the full impact of his “Make America Great Again” became clear. His radical nationalism resulted in dramatic changes in America’s alliances, as a result of his harsh criticism of some of America’s long-term allies and his aggressive talk about Canada and the Panama Canal, among other surprises. These significant changes in global politics were made even more threatening by another new danger – the emergence of the “Axis of Evil.”
Anne Applebaum’s essay, “The Autocrats Are Winning” was a stunning wake-up call for me. Her insights are deeply significant and should be carefully read by Americans who are concerned about our country’s future and the threats we face:
All of us have in mind a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial institutions, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance) and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt state-controlled companies in another. The propagandists share resources . . . and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where the bad guys meet. . . Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. . .No one country leads this group. . . what really bonds the members of this club together is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. . . the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies – call it Autocracy, Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals – deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts or make them personally rich – which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.
For an in-depth understanding of the “Axis of Evil,” embedded in the repressive regimes in Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia, Applebaum’s book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is an excellent resource. These autocrats and their supporters have a common enemy, and that enemy includes “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own internal dissidents, and liberal ideas like accountability and transparency that inspire democrats.
This is a dangerous time – one in which all Americans must hold our new president and his staff accountable to rebuild our nation’s defenses, support our allies, and strengthen our country’s alliances. We need to tell our political representatives that this is what we desire as citizens, and we will oppose any actions from the White House that weaken our defensive resolve. President Trump promised to “un-unite” China and Russia during his 2024 re-election campaign, but Alexander Gabuev and other international experts insist Russia will never be a country that does not pose a threat to Europe and the United States. Putin has made confrontation with the West the organizing principle of Russian life, while for American leaders Putin should be made to pay for launching the criminal war against Ukraine.
Anne Applebaum has written that “isolationism is an instinctive and even understandable reaction to the ugliness of the modern interconnected world,” but it has particular appeal to the indifferent. What we need, she argues, is to link those who value democracy to one another — because in today’s world, nobody’s democracy is safe.
Helpful Resources:
Robert M. Gates, “The Dysfunctional Superpower,” (Foreign Affairs, September 29, 2023).
Anne Applebaum, “The Autocrats are Winning,” (The Atlantic, December 2021).
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (New York: Doubleday, 2024).
Alexander Gabuev, “The Russia That Putin Made: Moscow, the West, and Coexistence Without Illusion,” (Foreign Affairs, May-June 2025).
Dr. John A. Bernbaum
Writer and Educator
Co-Author with Philip Yancey:
What Went Wrong?: Russia's Lost Opportunity and the Path to Ukraine
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