Legion of doom

On the evening of October 1, Iran fired some 180 ballistic missiles toward Israel. While Israel managed to intercept nearly all of them, there’s a lot more where those came from—and Iran has apparently been exporting some of it beyond the Middle East.

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 …

Michael Bluhm: What do you see cooperation among the world’s big autocracies looking like today?

Lucan Way: Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it’s ramped up a lot—specifically among four of them: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. The pace of it’s been fairly remarkable, largely spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine—and most of it’s focused on undermining Western sanctions and efforts to hobble Russia’s war machine.

Tehran has now given Moscow about 400 ballistic missiles and thousands of Shahed drones. North Korea has provided somewhere between maybe 1.6 million and 6 million artillery shells. Which was critical, because the Western allies had hoped that Moscow wouldn’t be able to keep the war on account of having run out of ammunition.

China, the most powerful country in this autocratic alliance, has played a more complex role in helping Russia than the other two allies. That’s mostly because Beijing has a stake in good relations with the West, whereas the others are much more isolated from it. China’s economy depends heavily on Western trade.