American foreign policy is always something of a hostage to the domestic politics of the moment. While this might be the unavoidable byproduct of democracy, it can greatly distort our understanding of the world and the coherence of strategic planning.

The Israel-Iran-Ukraine-Russia linedance provides a steady stream of examples, but never has it brought as much clarity to the mismatch between U.S. partisan politics and American grand strategy as it has in recent days. Republicans tend to favor Israel but not Ukraine, and Democrats, the reverse. Our enemies, of course, see it very differently.

Just before the weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Russia has supplied the Houthis—the Iranian proxy in Yemen that has been shooting missiles at commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea—with “targeting data” to help sink ships, kill civilians, and sabotage the supply chain. “The data,” the Journal explains, “was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen.”

That sentence is a handy organizational chart. The Houthis aren’t merely supported by Iran, the Houthis are Iran. And the Russia-Iran alliance has become so tight that Vladimir Putin is helping the Iranians retaliate against the U.S. and Israel for having the temerity to counter Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and, more specifically, for America’s modest support for Ukraine’s existence against Russia’s eliminationist war machine.

Russia wants to bleed Western resources in the Middle East because Moscow is bleeding resources in trying to destroy part of Europe. Russia is angry that it is bad at war, so it is making more war.

And birds without feathers flock together, so Moscow and Iran have expanded their partnership wherever possible. That includes Russia’s provision of air-defense systems to Iran and Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles to Russia.

Both of which took a literal hit over the weekend.

As the Times of London reports, one of Israel’s targets in its recent strikes included fuel mixers for missile production: “Early analysis of the impact of the strikes suggests that Iranian missile production has been badly affected, reducing Tehran’s ability to export weapons. Without the ability to mix fuel, Iran may be forced to appeal to China or other suppliers to help it restock, a process that could take many months.”

The Times saw the records for one Iranian missile delivery to Russia, in late August, about three weeks after Reuters reported that the two countries had signed a contract for Iran to provide several hundred to Putin’s forces. That could be delayed by as long as two years now.

And what of the air-defense systems provided by Russia to protect Iranian airspace? Gone. Israel destroyed one in April, and “on Saturday Israel systematically destroyed the remaining three S-300 batteries at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and the Malad missile base.”

The fact that Iran might become dependent on China to rebuild its ballistic missile stock is another piece of the puzzle. China already buys most of Iran’s oil exports. Beijing has also been boosting Iran in the propaganda war, especially on social media where China has the largest user audience and a repressive censorship regime.

There’s one last player in this lineup: North Korea. And wouldn’t you know it, Pyongyang has begun sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine alongside the Russian army. About 10,000 troops, according to the AP’s count from earlier today, are on their way to Russia to train before they can be deployed to the Ukrainian battlespace. “Adding thousands of North Korean soldiers to Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II will pile more pressure on Ukraine’s weary and overstretched army. It will also stoke geopolitical tensions in the Korean Peninsula and the wider Indo-Pacific region, including Japan and Australia, Western officials say.”

Safe bet. These are complex conflicts, but there is a simple theme. The world is organizing along two lines—an alliance of democracies on one, and a gang of expansionist authoritarian powers on another. The authoritarian class—China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—is currently in the process of trying to destroy two Western-aligned nations: Israel and Ukraine. Those two democratic allies of ours, in turn, are keeping the wolves at bay with unsteady support from the U.S. and European powers, some of whom have begun pulling military support from Israel while it is under attack from the authoritarian axis from at least six directions.

Meanwhile in the U.S., neither presidential candidate is terribly enthusiastic about supporting both our allies under fire. We are splitting our own coalition over politics.

The world order isn’t constructed along artificial Red Team-Blue Team partisan lines, and thank heavens for that. But it would be nice if our politics reflected that reality.

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