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Legion of doom

In September, U.S. officials said Iran had sent about 200 ballistic missiles to Russia—Fattah-360s, with a range of up to 120 km (75 miles), which the Russians could easily fire into Ukraine. And now, U.S. and U.K. authorities say they’re concerned the Kremlin might be sending secrets for building nuclear weapons back to Iran, which has a stockpile of uranium ready for purpose.

If these reports are right, they’re just the latest illustrations of growing cooperation between Moscow and Tehran. In 2015, the two countries worked closely together in Syria to help President Bashar al-Assad crush a popular uprising that existentially threatened his dictatorship. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Iran began supplying the Kremlin with delta-winged Shahed drones—and helped Russia build a factory to produce more of them.

Meanwhile, Iran-Russia is just one axis of increasing cooperation among of the world’s most powerful autocracies. In late September, Reuters reported that Russia had established a drone factory in China. In June, Russia revived a long-dormant mutual defense treaty with North Korea, while North Korea—according to Western intelligence estimates—has supplied Russia with millions of artillery shells. And with conflict spreading in the Middle East, China recently announced that it supported Iran. What is this?

Lucan Way is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism. Way says the growth of this alliance is largely driven by one thing: Moscow’s wartime military needs. Apart from a shared desire to undermine U.S. power, which they all see the opportunity and imperative for in Ukraine, these autocratic states have few interests in common. Over the long term, he says, their bonds are much weaker than those of the Soviet-led global bloc, in all its ideological and formal cohesion, during the Cold War. Today, Way says, there’s more to Western fears about a growing autocratic threat to democracy than there may have been even a year ago—but there are also longer-term trend lines that cut the other way …

• “[A] big shift from the Cold War is in the relative positions of these allies. Russia used to be the dominant power, but now it’s basically pleading for ammunition from North Korea—a very poor country. Now, China is now the dominant power. True, Russia is driving most of this autocratic cooperation today—but that’s purely out of the other powers’ geopolitical interest in supporting Russia’s military necessities. Meanwhilhe, Moscow isn’t only subordinate to Beijing, but strangely dependent on Pyongyang, even.”
• “It’s not obvious … that this is an alliance against democracy. They don’t like democracy, sure. But Russia cares only about how other countries treat it, not about their political systems. Moscow was very happy to work with Germany in many areas of trade for decades. The Kremlin cares about countries’ policies, not their political systems.”
• “To get these autocratic countries’ influence in perspective, it’s important to keep in mind, the West is still much more powerful than them as a group. The combined GDP of the U.S. and EU is about US$45 trillion, while the combined GDP of these four autocracies is about $22 trillion. Now, $22 trillion ain’t nothing, but the West is still much more powerful, and its military technologies are considerably superior. The balance of power still very much favors the West.”

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The Hollow Parties

These different paths might seem to represent the essence of what separates the two parties’ current identities: the former outsider and disruptor vs. the consummate insider and defender of the establishment.

But as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld illustrate in their recent book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, the different paths also illustrate a transformation common to both parties.

Schlozman and Rosenfeld show how, over the past half-century, both major parties have lost what previously defined them—their roots in American civic life. Previously, the parties had lively local branches across the whole country, where party members would come together to organize local political initiatives—be it housing policy or reforms to trash collection—but now, they serve that function less and less. Now, the parties themselves don’t mobilize voters or fundraise for political campaigns; that’s mostly left to organizations aligned with the parties but not controlled by them.

This transformation enabled Trump’s rise, Schlozman and Rosenfeld write. The Republican Party’s hollowness, as they say, meant its leadership couldn’t control its base as it had in the past. And the Democratic Party’s hollowness has left it largely immobilized, splintered by competing internal factions that struggle to come together in the pursuit of common goals—which, paradoxically, has strengthened the party’s leadership at the expense of its rank and file.

This book was published before Harris became the Democratic nominee; but as Schlozman and Rosenfeld have said since, the Democrats’ months of passivity about Biden’s faltering campaign—followed by their suppression of any competition to succeeded him—is only symptomatic of the same hollowness.

—Gustav Jönsson

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