China, Russia and Iran are acting in an organised formation to damage the US and its key allies, including Australia. Increasingly, it is important for democracies and sympathetic nations to act in concord to promote the values and interests of democracies.
This is the view of Elliott Abrams, who was Donald Trump’s special envoy on Iran. It is also a view widely shared at the highest levels of the Australian national security establishment.
Abrams is a distinguished Washington foreign policy figure. He is not a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpist. He held senior positions at the State Department under Ronald Reagan and was deputy national security adviser under George W Bush. He criticised Trump during the 2016 electio
His view of what we might term the axis of authoritarians is sobering: “This is a combination that is visible in many pars of the world — Russia and Iran in Syria; Russia and China and Iran in Venezuela. It has as its target the US and the free world, to use the old terminology. It wants to damage the US alliance system that is built around NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia. That is what they’re trying to weaken.n campaign and is one of very few mainstream Republicans who did so to later serve at a senior level in the Trump administration. He is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Read the article by Greg Sheridan in The Australian.