But Iran is now doing just what Washington said not to and China is pushing the line. Indeed, the US and its allies are increasingly worried by the speed and intensity with which the three, along with North Korea, are deepening ties to challenge American dominance despite facing some of the most sweeping sanctions the West has ever imposed, according to officials who asked not to be identified discussing matters that are not public.
The defiance fits a pattern of what outside experts — and increasingly, US and allied officials — see as the growing struggle Washington faces as its seeks to get what it wants around the world.
The examples, they say, are legion.
"US influence is waning, and it’s waning rapidly,” said Martin Kimani, former Kenyan ambassador to the UN and director of NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. "There are rising powers that want to assert themselves more within the multilateral space — from China to others — and the Global South increasingly has a voice.”
That’s the reality President Joe Biden faces as joins more than 140 other world leaders in New York for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
Moscow, meanwhile, is deepening relationships as it shares more sensitive military knowhow with Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang in return for their war aid. That process has accelerated as the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine drags toward a fourth year.
"There is a perception in both China and Russia that the United States and the West are in inevitable decline,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former senior US intelligence official now at the Center for a New American Security. "Now they see the momentum moving in their favor and so they’re willing to lean in and take more risk in order to accelerate that decline.”
Russia and China’s alignment with North Korea and Iran "is of a completely profoundly different quality to the type of relationship that we have,” Richard Moore, head of Britain’s MI6 Secret Intelligence Service, said in early September, speaking of British collaboration with the US and Europe.
"The thing that’s driving it - the cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea - is not based on shared values,” he said. "It’s on a sort of rather dark and more pragmatic basis.”
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