Notes

Something doesn’t seem right. This past week, Polish authorities arrested 32 people they suspect of coordinating with Russia on sabotage operations within Poland—remarkably direct evidence, if the cause for the arrests is true, of Moscow’s clandestine activities against a NATO member state. But it’s not an isolated campaign—and it’s not just Russia in the broader pattern. Earlier in July, Ukraine detained two Chinese nationals spying on missile programs, while China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi privately told EU officials that Beijing emphatically does not want Russia to lose the war—fearing it would free the Americans to focus on China.

Meanwhile, reports in February exposed Chinese companies rebuilding factories and infrastructure in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, helping legitimize territorial conquest through economic investment. Throughout 2025, European intelligence sources have reported to Reuters, Chinese factories have been producing Russian attack drones for the war effort. In Georgia, months of democratic backsliding culminated in the government awarding strategic port contracts to sanctioned Chinese firms—while also courting Iran, which has been rearming proxy groups across the Middle East with advanced weaponry, disrupting oil production in Kurdish Iraq through drone attacks, and ending months of calm in the Red Sea with strikes on commercial ships.

Each incident might seem isolated. Russian saboteurs here, Chinese spies there, business deals elsewhere. But the pattern suggests something potentially more systematic: autocratic powers dividing labor to undermine democratic institutions. China provides economic muscle and technology, Russia delivers military aggression and sabotage, Iran offers regional destabilization.

Is this an emerging, coordinated anti-democratic axis?

—John Jamesen Gould