The U.S. should use the tools at our disposal, including support for our Israeli allies in defanging the Iranian nuclear program, to further weaken it.

It is not a great strategic idea, as I have noted in the global trade-war context and many other contexts, to fight all your enemies simultaneously. The sensible thing is to isolate them one at a time, starting either with the weakest link in the chain or at least the strongest of the weak links. Spotting the weak links entails one careful assessment: with whom can you pick a fight without bringing the stronger players onto the table against you? Vladimir Putin, for example, very shrewdly calculated that he could invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 without significant interference from the West; he made a similar calculation in invading Ukraine in 2022, and he was wrong.

In dealing with the new Eurasian axis, there are numerous important steps we can take (some of which we are already taking) against China and Russia, ranging from supplying money and arms to Ukraine to banning the Chinese company ByteDance from running a surveillance and propaganda app (TikTok) within the United States. But we also need to be realistic about the limits of our power. As I wrote two years ago:

Sure, if you look at the strategic situation in board-game terms, it would be great to repeat the Nixon-to-China or Italy-to-the-Entente moves of breaking off one the members of the Axis and having it defect to our side. But a realistic assessment of the modern Axis members’ incentives should have made it obvious some time ago that their regimes can get a lot more out of one another without the West’s pesky interest in liberties and rights…At least in the case of China and Russia, we should also abandon the neoconservative illusion that spreading our culture and values will lead their people to demand changes that fundamentally alter or overthrow the regimes from within. China’s culture is too ancient and deep-rooted, its mood too nationalistic, its propaganda machine too sophisticated; and the West is too consumed with its own ills to manage that. Russians, likewise, are unlikely any time soon to replace the Putin regime with something that looks Western. This has implications for U.S. immigration policy: We should be thinking more about granting asylum to people wishing to permanently break with China and Russia and less about allowing Chinese and Russian nationals to study in American universities, spy on us, and return home with what they’ve learned (while their families are effectively held hostage to ensure their loyalty). Iran is a different story: There remains a more reasonable hope of breaking the mullahs’ grip, which remains deeply unpopular with the urban, educated segment of the population.

Assisting the domestic opposition in removing hostile regimes is still something we can do in some of the vassal and proxy states in the orbit of these three nations. We’re already reaping benefits from the fall of the Russia-backed Assad regime in Syria; there are even reports that Syria’s new regime allowed its airspace to be used by Israel in last night’s strike on Iran. While there may be little immediate hope for regime change in North Korea or Cuba, the regime in Venezuela may be the next-best target, especially given that all it would likely take to end the Maduro regime is to hold elections that are not (unlike the ones held two weeks ago) hopelessly tainted by force and fraud.

But among the three members of the axis, Iran is the weakest link. China and Russia, while they are happy to help the mullahs make mischief, seem very unlikely to expend significant resources bailing them out of their trouble with Israel. And the Iranian regime is not only potentially very brittle at home; unlike the regimes in China and Russia, there are reasons to believe that a different regime in Iran — one more responsive to its own population — could be significantly less aligned against the United States and its allies. That doesn’t mean that the United States should be gearing up soldiers to invade the place anytime soon; it does mean that the tools at our disposal, including support for our Israeli allies in defanging the Iranian nuclear program, should be wielded with an eye toward weakening that link.