WASHINGTON -- The world's leading autocracies -- China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea -- are increasingly drawing on one another's resources, military capabilities, and geopolitical leverage to withstand Western pressure.
For Washington, the strategic dilemma is no longer simply whether the four countries are cooperating, but the extent to which their alignment alters the balance of power across multiple theaters simultaneously.
The urgency of that question has been laid bare on the battlefront in Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia used North Korean ballistic missiles in an August 11 attack on the city of Zaporizhzhya that killed seven people and injured two dozen others. The attack came amid reports indicating that a North Korean missile unit equipped with up to 120 ballistic missiles has begun deploying to western Russia.
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Zelenskyy Says Russia Wants To Bring More North Korean Troops Into Ukraine WarMeanwhile, Pyongyang test-fired another ballistic missile on August 11, just days ahead of major US-South Korean military exercises, prompting a joint response from the US and 40 other nations -- underscoring the dual security pressures facing Washington and its partners in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
David J. Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and a former senior US diplomat, told RFE/RL that while cooperation among the four states -- increasingly referred to by the acronym CRINK -- is already operational, it falls short of a formal alliance comparable to NATO.
“It is operational, and it’s selective,” Kramer told RFE/RL.
His assessment captures a nuanced reality gaining traction among Washington policymakers: CRINK is neither a tightly integrated military bloc nor merely a rhetorical convenience. Instead, it functions as a flexible network in which members cooperate where their interests overlap, allowing each regime to offset some of its strategic vulnerabilities.
The war in Ukraine has become a major arena for the exchange of military capabilities among CRINK members.
Iranian-designed Shahed drones played a critical role in Russia's offensive campaign during the early stages of the full-scale invasion launched by Moscow in February 2022.
North Korea's involvement in the conflict, meanwhile, has expanded significantly. Pyongyang has dispatched troops to support Moscow's war effort, with estimates rising from an initial 12,000 to 15,000 personnel to reports suggesting as many as 50,000, while North Korea has also supplied ballistic missiles.
Practical Cooperation
China's role remains less overtly kinetic but significant.
Beijing has helped fund Russia's war by purchasing Russian energy while also providing dual-use technology to Moscow.
“All of these countries have been supporting and reinforcing each other,” Kramer said.
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North Korea Is Honoring Some Of Its Soldiers Killed In The Ukraine War. But What About The Rest?The cooperation also creates opportunities for military learning and technology transfers. Kramer noted that Russia developed its own version of Iran's Shahed drones, while North Korea has benefited from providing troops and missiles and appears to be receiving technology from Russia in return.
The four countries do not share a mutual-defense treaty, unified command structure, or binding strategic doctrine and analysts say there appears to be no underlying ideology connecting them beyond their opposition to the West, especially their shared opposition to the US-led order.
"This collaboration has already paid dividends, sustaining war efforts, propping up embattled regimes, and chipping away at democratic norms. Yet its reach is constrained: the grouping is transactional, leaderless, and riven by competing interests, with no shared blueprint for an alternative order," according to analysts at the Lowy Institute, a nonpartisan international policy think tank located in Sydney, Australia.
China remains the dominant partner in its relationship with Moscow, leaving Russia far more dependent on Beijing than the reverse.
China has stopped short of providing the level of direct support the Kremlin may have sought when the two countries declared their "no-limits" friendship in 2022.
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Putin Gets Show Of Unity, But No New Pipeline Deal In Beijing SummitBeijing is also watching closely as Russia deepens its relationship with North Korea, a development that Kramer said China is not particularly pleased with.
Yet those differences have not prevented practical cooperation.
“I think it poses a bigger challenge because where they do seem united is trying to weaken whether it’s neighboring states or democracy or the role and reliability of the United States in particular,” he said.
That does not make CRINK a unified geopolitical bloc. Rather, its members have demonstrated an ability to identify areas of common interest and provide one another with support when doing so advances their individual strategic objectives.
Kramer points to the BRICS, noting that efforts to bring the broader group of countries together in a unified way have not been tremendously successful. CRINK, by contrast, has been most effective when its members identify specific “targets of opportunity” and areas of need where they can bolster one another.
Connecting The Dots In Washington
This broader threat perception is reshaping debate in Washington, where lawmakers and national-security analysts increasingly view regional conflicts through an interconnected strategic lens.
Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stressed that the outcomes in Eastern Europe carry direct strategic implications for deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
“Letting Putin have a victory in Ukraine would dramatically impact many other areas around the world,” Curtis told RFE/RL, pointing specifically to Beijing's ambitions toward Taiwan. “There’s no doubt they’re watching our reaction.”
Senator Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, echoed that perspective, telling RFE/RL in a recent interview that defeating Russian aggression is integral to deterring the broader network of authoritarian states.
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US Is Underestimating The Iran-Russia-China-North Korea Axis, Warns Mark MontgomeryRetired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and co-author of Axis of Aggressors, told RFE/RL that his research has documented more than 600 instances of cross-cooperation among the four nations.
Montgomery offered a stark assessment: Ukraine is effectively confronting elements of all four adversaries simultaneously. Tehran has supplied drone capabilities; Pyongyang has provided manpower and munitions; Beijing has supplied dual-use components; and Moscow has provided tactical experience and appears to be offering military technology in return.
This feedback loop creates an adaptive system. Because each member can help compensate for another's economic, technological, or military weaknesses, pressure on one country can be partially offset through cooperation with the others.
Meanwhile, Moscow and Beijing have used tools such as UN vetoes and other actions to block international efforts to pressure their clients.
Countering The Network
Th CRINKs aren't, however, invincible, according to analysts.
Their lack of a formal alliance structure is one source of vulnerability.
China has its own interests and has limited the degree of direct military support it provides Russia. Beijing is also uneasy about the deepening relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang, while the four countries do not share a unified strategic doctrine.
Kramer argued that the US and its allies should respond by working more closely across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East rather than treating the threats posed by the four countries as separate problems.
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Kyiv Critically Short Of Air Defenses As Questions Swirl Over US Patriot StockpilesHe also called for more aggressive actions such as using the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows the United States to impose sanctions on officials and others involved in gross human rights abuses and corruption. Broader sanctions, he said, can also be used more aggressively against the four regimes.
But Kramer emphasized that military assistance to Ukraine remains central to the Western response.
“Supporting Ukraine with military assistance is absolutely vital,” he said, pointing to Russia's continuing cruise- and ballistic-missile attacks and Ukraine's urgent need for interceptor missiles.
The immediate test of Western resolve remains centered in Ukraine, where shortages of air-defense systems leave civilians and infrastructure vulnerable to Russian attacks involving Iranian-designed drones and North Korean missiles.
The implications extend beyond Europe. Kramer noted that Taiwan is among Ukraine's biggest supporters because Taipei recognizes that the way the West responds to Russia's war will be important to China's thinking toward Taiwan.
That creates a strategic connection between the European and Indo-Pacific theaters. The United States and its allies may face separate crises geographically, but the governments behind those challenges increasingly have the ability to support one another.
As Washington confronts threats across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East, treating each theater as an isolated problem risks overlooking the ways in which Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea can reinforce one another.
CRINK does not need to become a formal alliance to pose a significant challenge to Western interests. As Kramer's analysis underscores, its members need only continue identifying pragmatic areas where cooperation can strengthen each of them against what they perceive as pressure from the United States and its allies.