By Frederick Kempe

Atlantic Council

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian provided US President-elect Donald Trump a pre-inaugural gift that he ignores at his peril.

The timing was as significant as the Russian-Iranian “comprehensive partnership agreement” itself.

Three days before the US inauguration, Pezeshkian and Putin met in Moscow to sign the deal that covers trade, military cooperation, science, education, culture, and more. It also underscores the growing four-way relationship of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—an “axis of aggressors” whose combined challenge the US president-elect has not yet acknowledged as a priority.

Yet nothing sets apart Trump’s first-term challenges from those of his second term more than this axis’s burgeoning defense industrial, economic, and political cooperation. “This treaty is not only a key turning point that strengthens our bilateral ties,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Telegram. “This is not just a political agreement; it’s the road map to the future.”

Russia, Iran, and China have been growing steadily closer since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. Iran has sent short-range ballistic missiles, as well as drones and drone technology, to Russia. A CNN investigationin December found that a factory in Russia’s southern Tatarstan region is mass producing Iranian-designed Shahed drones with Chinese components. In the first nine months of 2024, the factory manufactured nearly six thousand Shahed drones, more than double what it had the year before.

In June 2024, Putin signed a partnership agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Pyongyang followed this in November by providing Moscow with ten thousand troops to fight the Ukrainian offensive in Russia’s Kursk region. Earlier this month, two North Korean soldiers were captured by Ukrainian forces near the border. Then in December, Putin concluded a security treaty with Belarus that included the Russian deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the country.

That followed the continued expansion and enhancement of the “no limits” partnership that Putin concluded with Chinese President Xi Jinping shortly before Russia’s Ukraine invasion in February 2022. China’s leadership has resisted all efforts by both European and US officials to persuade Beijing to reduce its support for Russia, without which Moscow would not have been able to sustain its military campaign.

For all of Trump’s recent focus on regaining the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, and adding Canada as a fifty-first state, how he addresses the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea collaboration will be of infinitely greater historic and geopolitical consequence.

Yet the newest Iran-Russia deal is as much about the weaknesses among the four partners as it is about their combined strength, which offers Trump opportunities to disrupt their common cause. Iran hasn’t been this weak economically and militarily in thirty years. Its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah are decimated, its air defenses are eroded, and its unprecedented missile strikes on Israel last year failed to weaken Israel militarily. It’s telling that Russia didn’t provide Iran the mutual defense deal that was part of its agreements with Belarus and North Korea. 

The Russians have “a great nose for someone in trouble,” Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNN. He added that Moscow could be thinking “we can help them a little bit, but we can get them where we need them and extract more from them that we want.”

So how will Trump respond to this pre-inaugural gift? One of US President Joe Biden’s failings was excessive caution in addressing the rising Russia-China challenge, alongside Iran and North Korea, though he was ground-breaking in diagnosing the “inflection point” that such autocratic collaboration signaled. Trump may be more willing than Biden to take action to enforce US interests, but I will be listening to his inaugural speech for an early indication of how he diagnoses the largest global challenges.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.