When Iran launched a brazen attack on Israel Tuesday, lobbing close to 200 ballistic missiles at America’s closest Middle Eastern ally, it did so in the comforting certainty that its actions would be supported by two nuclear powers and members of the United Nations Security Council.
Russia reacted to the barrage by condemning not Tehran, but the United States in a statement parroted by Iranian state media.
China, meanwhile, had already pledged “to support Iran in safeguarding its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, and national dignity” against unnamed, but easily discernible, “external forces.”
The convergence of world leaders on the UN’s headquarters in New York last week made plenty of headlines.
Yet the most notable moment from last week’s gathering in Earth’s equivalent of the “Star Wars” Mos Eisley Cantina was best captured in a photograph: a posed portrait of the foreign ministers of Iran, Russia, and China alongside Pakistan’s defense minister.
Ostensibly, the photo was taken to commemorate a meeting between the four men about the ongoing instability and humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan.
But the disturbing subtext was the public debut of a dangerous new coalition.
Following the meeting, Iran issued a press release that denounced “the destructive role of the US and NATO in Afghanistan.”
“Washington and other NATO members must be held accountable for the current disastrous situation in Afghanistan,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote, blaming America’s just war against the Taliban for causing a parade of horribles that began long before it.
The statement was merely a pretense for such anti-West drivel, but it served to solidify the burgeoning alliance between Iran, Russia and China.
Despite their differences, these three revisionist powers share a hatred of America, the values it champions and the world order it upholds — and they’re willing to spill blood to destroy it.
The events of the last several years should have been more than enough to alert American politicians, national security officials and media to this threat.
After Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 massacre of Israeli civilians last year, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin called the atrocity “a clear example of the failed policy in the Middle East of the United States.”
Then he invited Hamas leadership and an Iranian diplomat to Moscow.
Meanwhile, the Chinese never even gently criticized Hamas over Oct. 7.
Around the same time, the censored Chinese internet began displaying maps that featured Israel’s conspicuous absence, and The Wall Street Journal reported on a sharp rise in antisemitic commentary on Chinese social and state media.
Hamas elder Khaled Mashal at least had the guts to put things forthrightly when he declared that “Oct. 7 paved a wide highway towards the removal of Israel,” and boasted, “We have friends in the world.”
“Moscow and Beijing are striving for an international balance of power that will abolish unipolarity,” Mashal said just weeks after the slaughter. “Well, this is your opportunity.”
All that’s to say nothing of these rogue regimes’ efforts to arm each other and other evil actors across the globe.
So when their top diplomats proudly pose for a picture with a representative of a nuclear power on American soil, it should be taken for the statement it is.
On both ends of our domestic political spectrum, small, shrill minorities deny the sobering reality we face as they insist against all available evidence that it is in America’s best interest to leave Ukraine, Israel or both to the wolves.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
Every concession to any member of this unholy alliance is a message to all of them that the United States lacks the resolve to stand up to them.
Such weakness doesn’t endear America to its enemies, it only invites their further aggression.
It’s no coincidence that the world has been burning ever since Biden surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.
President George W. Bush first identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil” in January 2002, just months after 9/11 — and rightly so.
Now a more powerful, more interconnected, and more unpredictable axis is rearing its ugly head.
It’s a moral as well as a strategic imperative that the United States head this one off before it sows more death and destruction across the globe.
And that means not only believing the hard truth staring us in the face, but rebuking those who deny it.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.