“U.S. Insiders See Iran War Hurting China-Backed ‘Axis of Chaos’” reads the headline in Bloomberg. In the New York Times: “Iran’s Friends Include China and Russia. But Where are They Now?” According to Miles Yu, once Pompeo’s China adviser, “Beijing has worked quietly and methodically to turn Iran into the keystone of its Middle East strategy. That strategy has now collapsed.”

Meanwhile, Nicholas Burns, Biden’s ambassador to China, says: “China, as well as Russia, is proving to be a feckless friend for its authoritarian allies.”

In the wake of the ongoing U.S.–Israel assault against Iran and decapitation of its top leadership, American pundits and former foreign policy officials of both parties are celebrating China’s pathetic weakness. The formidable Axis of Upheaval (or perhaps Axis of Autocracy, or maybe Axis of Aggressors, or if you prefer Axis of Chaos, don’t forget the venerable Axis of Authoritarians, or the less mellifluous CRINK Axis) — supposedly composed of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and (in some versions) Venezuela, Syria, or Belarus — had grand plans to overthrow American power. But with the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela’s transformation into an American client state, and now the devastation of Iran, the United States has eliminated two members of that exclusive club with ease. China has dared not defend its fellow members, and its nefarious plans now lie in ruins.

This narrative is a complete fantasy. China once sank substantial sums in Venezuela but lost patience with the government’s mismanagement and malfeasance over a decade ago, writing off the relationship even before Trump applied the death blow to Venezuela’s economy in his first term. China–Iran ties were more important, but massively less significant than China’s trade and investment with Saudi Arabia or the UAE. Over the last few years, China grew increasingly jaded on Iran and might welcome a new regime with relief if it stabilized the region.

That the Axis of Autocracy (or whatever) readily circulates in American thinking reveals not only a troubling inability to understand the nature of China’s foreign policy and the sources of its strength, but also dangerous new dynamics shaping U.S. foreign policy. As Trump showcases a far more brazen approach to foreign relations, sections of the foreign policy establishment well beyond MAGA are throwing off previous inhibitions on the use of coercion. They may reject Trump’s erratic and unstrategic application of violence, but establishment elements in both parties are eyeing the possibilities he is revealing because they promise to smash through the frustrations of the last decade.

Trump does not share the foreign policy establishment’s aim of systematically subordinating and excluding China. But on the back of the gratifying delusion that China will not fight back, he may be showing future top officials a new and explosively dangerous path to pursue those aims.

The idea of a powerful anti-American alliance has assumed a superficial plausibility in recent years. Up until the 2010s, the U.S.-dominated world order of neoliberal globalization more or less aligned the interests of ruling elites across the world. Only a handful of “rogue states” (North Korea, Iraq before 2003, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela) and terrorists resisted American primacy. U.S. foreign policy focused on regulating and perfecting the system for those inside while isolating and attacking the few weak outsiders.

The complex fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis undid this settlement. While leaders in all the major powers sought to hold the system together, the mechanisms of positive-sum growth that had maintained elite interests and popular consent no longer functioned. The cosmopolitanism and fragmented individualism that undergirded social life gradually lost its attraction and populisms of left and right gained disruptive appeal.

Facing a crisis of legitimacy and a suddenly zero-sum global landscape, elites in all the major countries turned to nationalist assertion, centralization of politics, and state intervention in the economy. The outcomes—Russia’s attacks on Ukraine beginning in 2014, the “Made in China 2025” plan of 2015, Trump’s trade war starting 2018—marked the end of great power accord.

The disoriented foreign policy establishment in Washington, which had previously cherished the “end of history” saw all of this as inexplicable atavism. The barbaric forces of the past had seemed contained but were now abruptly emerging all over the world and even in the United States. Suddenly great power enemies were back, and the hatred of everything truly American was animating them. The Axis of Aggressors (or whatever) was born.

What was this axis? A coalition of states devoted to “overturning the principles, rules, and institutions that underlie the prevailing international system.” The first Trump administration characterized this as a battle between “those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.” The Biden administration agreed, specifying that U.S. adversaries were “waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order.”

China was little involved in the many failures that occasioned official Washington’s crisis of self-confidence, but the symbolic representation of China in Washington played a crucial role in redirecting U.S. foreign policy. Though China was as much a product of the globalization system as the United States, U.S. leaders saw it as the opposite of everything America stands for: authoritarianism rather than democracy, state interference rather than free markets, strategic independence rather than submission to American primacy.

Moreover, as the world’s second most powerful country militarily and economically, China posed real challenges to U.S. power. That not only allowed the strategic class to shrug off responsibility for the disasters they created in the War on Terror, it also offered them clarity in the midst of their bewilderment, an action agenda to overcome their paralysis, and a shared national project they hoped could unite the fractious population and calm partisan politics.

With this newly achieved (false) clarity, the first Trump administration directed an unprecedented level of coercion against all the members of the Axis of Chaos (or whatever), imposing “maximum pressure” sanctions on North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela while significantly increasing restrictions on both Russia and China.

The Biden administration largely maintained these policies, slightly reducing pressure on the weaker countries while massively increasing it on Russia after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and systematically strengthening and expanding it against China.

As the United States increasingly battered and isolated the countries of the Axis of Upheaval (or whatever), those countries increasingly turned to each other to gain access to weapons or diplomatic support. China, however, was the outlier. Far more integrated into the global system, with a deep interest in maintaining stability in order to secure the ties of trade and investment on which Chinese prosperity depends, Beijing was little interested in provoking aggression from the United States or in devoting its energies to economically ruined countries.

China was willing to extend a lifeline to other members of the nonexistent Axis, but consistently declined to tip the balance in their favor.

One might have expected that those selling the idea of an Axis of Authoritarians (or whatever) would have faced some doubt with the advent of the second Trump administration, given its deep hostility to the rules-based international order and liberal values, its wars of aggression, its unprecedented forms of state intervention in the economy. If the defining feature of the Axis is its desire to overturn the existing global order, where does that leave conceptualization and policy now that the United States is even more effectively pursuing that goal?

No such self-reflection has been forthcoming. The debate is instead between those who think Trump is successfully dismantling the Axis on one side and, and the other, those who agree with the goal and are intrigued by the unrestrained use of violence but worry about Trump’s chaotic methods.

Since the crisis of U.S. foreign policy thinking was resolved around great power conflict in the 2016–2018 period, the foreign policy establishment has faced a procession of frustrations in turning American power against China. The first Trump administration was too disorganized; the Biden administration too deferential to allies’ fears and the checks and balances of American governance; the second Trump administration too eager for a deal with Beijing.

It is too soon to say how degraded American power will be by the end of this administration: the attack on Iran turned into a fiasco almost immediately; the U.S. economic and technology position against China is rapidly eroding; pressures toward financial instability are steadily building. One foreign policy lesson that could be drawn from all this is the need to build a sustainable multipolar framework that would reduce pressure on the United States by focusing on shared international interests rather than exacerbating existing conflicts.

Yet across a quarter century of such failures, the U.S. strategic class has consistently shunned such a conclusion. Trump’s conduct — so obviously unguided by any kind of forethought, planning, or strategy — can easily make his failures seem to be self-imposed rather than an indication of the limits of American power or the dangers of aggression.

If foreign policy direction falls back into the hands of primacy-oriented officials like those who led under Biden, the lesson they may carry into the next administration is that justificatory ideologies, alliance niceties, and worrying about the costs of violence are all unnecessary restrictions on the need to rebuild American supremacy — a need made all the more desperate by the debacle under Trump.

They may see confrontation with China not only as a matter of great urgency but, in light of the weakness demonstrated in China’s betrayal of its (imaginary) Axis commitments, a winning gamble. The depth and duration of self-delusion displayed in the Axis idea makes such a frightening scenario all too easy to imagine.