The Long Brief: Axis in the Shadows

A strategic intelligence brief on how Iran, Russia and China have built a sanctions-proof network that constrains Israel’s freedom of action—and how Jerusalem must fight, think, and survive inside it.

The war has not ended; it has metastasized. While Israel fights in Gaza and braces in the north, Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing continue to move the next pieces. Iranian drones hum over Ukraine, Russian air defenses watch over Syria, and Chinese yuan bankroll both. Together they have turned sanctions into scaffolding — a structure that keeps each other standing.

Jerusalem now operates under their umbrella whether it wants to or not. Every airstrike in Syria risks a Russian glare. Every cyber move against Iran risks a Chinese countermove. Every American supply line runs through a world the axis built to ignore American pressure.

This is the real front line of the next decade: an anti-system alliance that buys time, tests boundaries, and chips at Israel’s freedom of action one strike at a time.

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Axis in the Shadows: Israel’s New Strategic Cage

Iran, Russia, and China have fused into a working anti-Western network — not an alliance of ideology, but of need. Each covers the other’s weaknesses: China buys sanctioned Iranian oil, financing Tehran’s regional aggression. Iran sells Russia drones and ammunition for Ukraine and helps Moscow build them domestically. Russia offers diplomatic protection and military know-how. Around them orbit North Korea, Belarus, and a constellation of proxies that move weapons, oil, and money through opaque corridors of barter, crypto, and yuan. Together they have built a sanctions-resistant system that functions in the gray zone.

For decades, Tehran’s Islamist revolution, Moscow’s revanchism, and Beijing’s one-party pragmatism developed on parallel tracks. Now those tracks have converged under shared hostility to U.S. power and liberal norms. Putin calls his relationship with Xi “better than an alliance.” Tehran calls it providence. All three now speak the same language at the UN — sovereignty, multipolarity, anti-imperialism — a moral lexicon masking an authoritarian compact.

For Israel, this is not merely an academic nor just a diplomatic issue. Iran’s proxies now operate under Russian air umbrellas and Chinese economic shelter. Hezbollah’s supply lines run through Russian-patrolled waters. Iranian factories hum on Chinese components. The regime in Tehran, once isolated, now enjoys major-power insurance against pressure. Israel’s defense planners face a region where every Iranian advance is amplified by Russian protection and financed by Chinese demand.

The United States and its allies confront a more elastic enemy than any single nation — a dispersed cartel of revisionist states that learns under fire. Its members share not command but instinct: endure pressure, exploit Western law, weaponize time. The West still plays by the rulebook. The axis just writes in its margins.

Bottom Line: The Iran-Russia-China axis is a functioning anti-system network. Its power lies in asymmetry, patience, and the ability to absorb sanctions that once deterred it. Israel and the West must treat it as the operating environment of the next decade — a bloc that won’t collapse under pressure but adapts to it. Countering it will require the same traits it prizes: flexibility, coordination, and clarity under fire.

From Cold War Realpolitik to a Sanctions-Proof Axis

In the mid-20th century, Moscow acted as the senior patron of anti-Western movements while Beijing, after its own revolution, competed for influence among the “non-aligned.” Iran under the Shah was a loyal outpost of the U.S. order until 1979, when Khomeini’s revolution replaced American alignment with militant independence. His doctrine of “Neither East nor West” was defiance in both directions—until geopolitics intervened. The new Islamic Republic, isolated and at war with Iraq, discovered that survival required hypocrisy: Soviet overflights were tolerated, Chinese weapons were welcomed, and even Israeli intermediaries moved spare parts through the Iran-Contra pipeline.

The end of the Soviet Union erased ideology as an obstacle. The 1990s opened a marketplace of grievance and convenience. Russia sold Iran the arms and nuclear expertise it could no longer afford to hoard; Iran paid in cash and oil. By 2001, over two-thirds of Tehran’s imported weaponry came from Moscow, while Chinese firms quietly embedded themselves in Iran’s energy sector and missile development lines. When the U.S. proclaimed unipolar supremacy after 9/11, all three regimes felt the tremor: Washington’s reach looked limitless, and their own vulnerability obvious. Out of that fear emerged the first rule of what would become the new axis—never again allow the West to isolate one without the others stepping in.

Strategic Implications

Syria provided the field laboratory. Between 2011 and 2016, Russia and Iran turned the defense of Assad into a joint venture of survival. Iran supplied the flesh; Russia the firepower. Together they broke Western deterrence and demonstrated a division of labor the axis still follows: Tehran bleeds, Moscow shields, Beijing profits. China stayed offshore but made itself indispensable through diplomacy and logistics, vetoing the effect of sanctions while its corporations filled the reconstruction contracts the West vacated.

By the late 2010s, this pattern had institutional form. Tehran signed a 25-year strategic accord with Beijing and a 20-year one with Moscow. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the disastrous JCPOA forced Iran’s complete economic pivot eastward, which Moscow and Beijing were happy to monetize.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and sanctions boomeranged, Russia copied Iran’s methods: ghost fleets, shell companies, crypto wallets, barter trades. Tehran even boasted publicly that Moscow was “learning from our experience.” It was accurate. Within months, Russian oil sailed the same clandestine routes Iranian crude had used for years, while China absorbed both flows under new flags and old excuses.

The Ukraine war sealed the realignment. Iranian drones darkened Ukrainian skies; Russian engineers trained Iranian pilots on Su-35s; Chinese yuan became the axis’s blood type. Iran had moved from dependent client to indispensable partner. Russia, sanctioned and cornered, provided the recognition Tehran had long craved. And China, by keeping both supplied and solvent, became the quiet banker of the bloc.

Why It Matters: The “axis in the shadows” is the cumulative result of decades of Western overconfidence and authoritarian learning. Each stage of confrontation taught these regimes how to survive pressure—and how to convert it into partnership. Sanctions no longer isolate—they integrate. Every future policy toward one will be answered by three.