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The world's leading autocracies, notably China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, are increasingly pulling in the same direction but the grouping is transactional, leaderless, and riven by competing interests.
The rise of authoritarian cooperation: A new illiberal order?
About the author
Nick Bisley
Nick Bisley is Pro Vice-Chancellor Research and Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University.
The world's leading autocracies, notably China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, are increasingly pulling in the same direction. Their partnership now spans multiple themes and theatres, reaching across battlefields, multilateral forums, the contest over information, and the global economy. This collaboration has already paid dividends, sustaining war efforts, propping up embattled regimes, and chipping away at democratic norms. Yet its reach is constrained: the grouping is transactional, leaderless, and riven by competing interests, with no shared blueprint for an alternative order. For Australia and like-minded states, this paper suggests a counter strategy that involves reforming ageing institutions, fortifying the social and civic foundations of open societies, blunting foreign interference, and fragmenting the loose ties that keep the authoritarian states aligned.
In 2025, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Second World War’s end at a vast military parade showcasing its cutting-edge hardware and legions of troops marching in highly disciplined formations. The Stalin-era aesthetics were complemented by a who’s who of the world’s authoritarian powers invited to mark the occasion. The absence of Western leaders and indeed almost complete lack of any democratically elected heads of government gave the carefully choreographed gathering the feel of an authoritarian club’s coming out party. The cheerful camaraderie among Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un in particular was widely broadcast.
The gathering appeared to confirm a trend that has increasingly worried scholars and policymakers: the growing cooperation among the world’s leading authoritarian powers. Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, collaboration among authoritarian states has become more pronounced. This has led some scholars to sound the alarm about an “axis of authoritarianism” and to draw attention to an “illiberal international” that is on the march. A rather unlovely acronym has been coined to capture the putative grouping: CRINK, comprising China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
The decades between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2007–08 global financial crisis were notable for the dominance of liberal ideas at the international level and an expansion of democratic regimes domestically. Since then, liberalism has experienced an ebb tide. Politically, the past decade or so has been a period of “democratic recession”, while on the economic front, globalisation is in retreat as states seek to rein in market dependence in many areas. The country that designed and underwrote the liberal order — the United States — has twice elected a president who is openly antagonistic to many facets of liberalism both at home and abroad.
Meanwhile, authoritarianism has been on the rise. As existing institutions creak, an energetic set of authoritarian and illiberal powers is working to advance its shared interests, undermine liberal ideas and institutions, and lay the foundations of an illiberal world order. These efforts affect the key interests of Australia and other liberal powers, and challenge the institutional and normative underpinnings of the international order. Authoritarian cooperation has been catalysed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but its dynamics pre-date 2022 and will survive the conclusion of that conflict.
There can be no doubt that liberal ideas and institutions face a more challenging environment than at any point since the Cold War. Equally, illiberal powers are collaborating in a wide range of ways that demand a coherent response. The liberal international order, such as it is, will not defend itself, and while the “illiberal international” is unlikely to prove transformative in the near term, there is a palpable ambition to push back against the ideas at the heart of the current order and erode the strategic advantages of Western powers. This paper assesses the scale and impact of the challenge and what can and should be done in response.
The first section entails an analysis of the nature of illiberal and authoritarian collaboration. This includes a definitional framework and a systematic assessment of the broader types of cooperation currently underway. The second section assesses the importance of the phenomenon: what is its scale and impact to date and what potential does it have over the medium to longer run? The final section presents recommendations for how Australia and others who value the liberal international order should respond.
Multilateral cooperation is one of the defining features of the post-1945 world. In the years following the Cold War’s end, cooperation expanded further. In Asia and Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, states created a wide array of institutional mechanisms and modes of collaboration. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 was emblematic of that period. Even those of a gloomy bent felt the ability of those outside the liberal tent to resist, subvert, or recast the status quo was limited. China had bound itself to the global economy and, many presumed, would find it impossible to wall itself off from the system’s dominant norms and ideas. Others, such as North Korea and Iran, were seen as backward-looking states out of tune with modernity. They were a threat to guard against, but were combustible curios, not a real challenge to the institutions and values of the system. The liberal order was underwritten by a hegemonic power whose economic and military might was unmatched in the modern era. The order generated opportunities for prosperity and peace and, in Asia, it underpinned the greatest economic expansion in recorded history. It seemed to have a bright and enduring future. As Princeton University’s John Ikenberry argued, the liberal system was too easy to join, and too hard to overthrow.
Since 2022, cooperation among illiberal and authoritarian states has become much more visible. The Russian invasion of Ukraine surfaced a wide range of ways in which illiberal states have been working together to promote shared interests, roll back liberal values, and advance their ambitions to dilute Western advantages on the global stage. But authoritarian collaboration pre-dates 2022. The “colour revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia and the Arab Spring saw authoritarians challenged by pro-democracy movements that spurred cooperation to fend off the threat.
That earlier phase of authoritarian coordination was largely defensive. States such as Egypt, Russia, and China shared ideas and techniques, and collaborated on diplomatic initiatives to defend themselves from threats they perceived stemmed from Western states propagating liberal ideas and supporting democracy movements. Today, cooperation is more multifaceted. Its defensive dimensions persist, now drawing on sophisticated technologies and online mechanisms. To those have been added more proactive elements in which illiberal and authoritarian states take the initiative to advance their interests, expand their space to operate, and defend their values beyond their borders.
In this paper, the terms “illiberal” and “authoritarian” cooperation are used interchangeably, even though there is a distinction between them. Authoritarian polities are political systems marked by high concentrations of power in an autocratic elite, where citizens lack core democratic rights and freedoms, and in which power is not checked by an independent judiciary or held to account by a free media. They are, analytically, different from illiberal states. These states have constitutional structures that provide some limits to state power, whether through elections or the judiciary, but where the full gamut of liberal governing principles is absent. For example, suffrage or political participation may be limited, judicial independence undermined, or particular rights reduced or removed altogether. The PRC and Russia, for instance, are authoritarian states, while the Islamic Republic of Iran is illiberal, as was Hungary under former prime minister Viktor Orbán.
The focus here is not just on the basic ways in which illiberal and authoritarian states work together but on a particular type of cooperation. After all, these kinds of polities have been productive participants in multilateralism for decades. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — Asia’s longest-lived regional institution — was founded by five authoritarian states who sought to stabilise their relations in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Equally, many are part of the WTO and adhere to their treaty obligations in the same way their liberal peers do. Rather, the focus here is on how these states work together to advance shared interests and illiberal goals beyond their borders. Cooperation within ASEAN, for example, is not intended to reject or replace the larger set of liberal rules and norms that have become entrenched at the international level. The activity discussed here entails efforts to advance distinctly illiberal ambitions. The states undertaking this collaboration are content with neither the liberal qualities of the international order nor the prevailing distribution of power.
The term “cooperation” describes how states coordinate policy and broader international activity to advance illiberal goals. This includes bilateral, multi-state, and institutional forms of collaboration. It is both formal and informal, involving states as well as private actors linked to them or sharing their objectives. In some cases, cooperation is opportunistic, while in others one sees more strategic attempts to contest the liberal order. There are four categories that are of particular salience to the dynamics of international relations and which the paper examines in turn: military and security cooperation; institutional collaboration; the contest over liberal norms and ideas; and economic coordination outside formal institutions.
The wars in Ukraine and Iran have intensified military and security cooperation among illiberal powers, most notably China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to support Russia’s combat operations in Ukraine is the most striking example. But it is only one of the ways these powers support each other’s operations. China, for instance, has provided satellite intelligence to help Iran fend off US and Israeli attacks. They are also undertaking longer-term efforts to advance shared military goals. China and Russia’s 2022 partnership is but the most prominent and consequential of these. Russia and North Korea established a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in June 2024. It deepened Moscow–Pyongyang ties and created a mechanism to expand cooperation in Ukraine. It also has consequences for Asia, with the new linkages further complicating the regional strategic environment.
There are four main ways in which military and security cooperation occurs among illiberal powers. The first is the transfer of weapons and war-fighting equipment, which has been most evident during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the various attacks on Iran, especially the February 2026 joint Israeli–American operation. This is, in some ways, a logical outgrowth of the Cold War patterns in which each side had their own defence industrial systems centred on the United States and Soviet Union respectively. However, this time “junior” partners, Iran and North Korea in particular, are sending equipment and technology to help Russia. Tehran has shared its drone technology so that Russian factories can manufacture their own versions of Iran’s highly effective weapons, while North Korea has provided missiles and other munitions. It also appears that Russia has refined some of this technology and passed it back to North Korea, improving Pyongyang’s ability to project force in Asia.
The second form of military cooperation is the provision of non-lethal equipment and resources. Examples include access to intelligence and communications systems such as the satellite information the PRC provided Iran during the recent conflict. It also includes technology and capabilities to support the production of military equipment. Here, China has been particularly active in its support of Russia. Beijing has been careful to avoid the direct supply of military equipment to its “no limits” partner, mindful of the political and strategic problems this would create. The provision of parts, components, and other elements of the military supply chain has provided clear benefits to Russia’s armed forces.
These first two forms of military cooperation relate directly to the exigencies of conflict and are not yet routine. The third entails a longer pattern of collaboration and is typical of the ways states coordinate security policy: through structured military exercises. While institutional forms of cooperation are discussed in the following section, the military exercises that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has held under the aegis of its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) are a longstanding example. These have run since 2005 and have ranged from relatively small anti-narcotics manoeuvres to full-scale military exercises. With Iran’s accession (alongside India and Pakistan), the 2025 exercise held in Iran marked the first multilateral manoeuvres between Russian, Chinese, and Iranian militaries, and was as symbolically significant as it was operationally useful. According to a CSIS report, there were 61 exercises involving at least two of Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia between 2003 and 2021; in the three years from 2022 to 2025 there were 35. Other examples include exercises under the auspices of Central Asia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and regular Sino-Russian military exercises, including joint submarine drills that support Russia’s role in modernising China’s submarine fleet.
While the number and scale of joint exercises have been growing, their operational significance should not be overstated. Even well-established and regular groupings do not display the level of interoperability or joint capability that should cause liberal powers much concern in the short term. Tellingly, no deployment of the kind that has been trained for has occurred, and there seems little chance of one in the next five years. The CSTO is a case in point. It is more than 25 years old, holds exercises every year, and yet has no meaningful joint capability. But as a measure of intent, these exercises are notable, and while more symbolic than strategic, symbolism matters. Multilateral military operations in the modern era are highly complex, and joint action must begin somewhere.
The establishment of formal pacts among illiberal states is a final and prominent form of security cooperation. Here, the inking of the “no limits” partnership between Russia and China in 2022 and the treaty between Russia and North Korea in 2024 have caught most attention. Their significance should not be downplayed. Nonetheless, one of the most important facets of authoritarian cooperation, both in the security domain and more broadly, is the way in which it is largely advanced in a fluid and often informal manner rather than through grand diplomatic agreements.
While the range of military cooperation is striking, these activities fall short of alliance or alliance-like partnerships. The 2024 Moscow–Pyongyang agreement includes a commitment to come to one another’s aid in the event of conflict. This has been interpreted by Asia’s security analysts as ratcheting up pressure and risks in Northeast Asia. Yet its impact should not be overstated. It is a diplomatic signal of heightened mutual commitment, but much of this existed already. Equally, each side’s ability to provide significant leverage to the other’s security ambitions remains limited. Russia’s military is stretched by its invasion of Ukraine, and Pyongyang’s operational capacity outside of the Korean Peninsula region is constrained. Ultimately, security cooperation is reactive and opportunistic rather than coordinated and strategic. There is no nascent Warsaw Pact able to coordinate mass military force at continental scale. At least not yet.
While the military component of authoritarian collaboration has limits in scale, reach, and consistency, it should be taken seriously. It is likely to persist even beyond the catalysing experiences of Ukraine and Iran. It has shown that these states can amplify their strategic weight, and the incentives to continue to cooperate are significant. Through this work, illiberal powers can sustain military operations and have a much higher impact than if they are going solo. Russia would have found waging its war in Ukraine much more difficult without financial, logistical, and military support from China, Iran, North Korea, and others. There is a danger that, because it offers greater resilience, cooperation may encourage more risk-taking in key areas of friction, especially in “grey zone” contingencies. China’s actions in the East and South China Seas could take a more assertive turn emboldened by expectations of support.
Illiberal polities are working together in international institutions, both global and regional, in two main ways. The first is the creation of new institutions and multilateral mechanisms. The other is the coordination of activity within extant institutions. This entails operating within the mechanisms of an institution to advance shared illiberal goals and interests, as well as providing leadership for or seeking to renovate or reform existing bodies.
The BRICS grouping has come to be seen by many as one of the most notable of these new entities. The acronym was coined, initially as BRIC, in a Goldman Sachs research paper that was intended to draw investors’ attention to the prospects of the major emerging markets. The term caught the foreign policy imagination of those countries; in 2009 its first summit was held in Yekaterinburg. South Africa joined in 2010. Driven by the 2007–08 global financial crisis, which hit emerging markets hard, BRICS also seized on a tangible sense that the dominant powers were in decline. It established what is now known as the New Development Bank in 2014, following a failed attempt to drive voting reform at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 2024, it significantly expanded its membership when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) joined. Indonesia followed suit in 2025.
For most of its 17 years, the BRICS grouping was not perceived as especially illiberal, and many observers felt it was ineffectual. This partly reflected Washington’s own diplomacy: the United States had spent nearly two decades working to build closer ties with India, and it saw Brazil as a key partner in the Western Hemisphere. Since the 2024 expansion, however, the drift in global leadership as well as the way the group has positioned itself has meant many now perceive BRICS as having an illiberal orientation. For some scholars, BRICS has been driven to this by the behaviour of the Trump administration. In its lengthy Rio Declaration, issued at the end of the 2025 summit, the grouping set out a carefully worded but clear criticism of the United States and the international status quo. That criticism carries weight given that the grouping contains about half the world’s population and around 40 per cent of global GDP.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a second body where authoritarian cooperation is finding institutional form. It was first established as the Shanghai Five in 1996, with a membership of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and became the SCO in 2001 when Uzbekistan joined. The group was focused initially on Central Asian stability with a particular emphasis on what the members called the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism, although it also had a focus on the transnational narcotics trade. Concerns swirled from the outset that it had an anti-Western orientation, and it positioned itself in contrast to the unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration. The SCO supported Uzbekistan’s 2005 decision to end its airbase leasing arrangement with the United States, and has repeatedly flagged geopolitical ambitions in leaders’ statements. Yet beyond signalling, it was not seen as of great geopolitical significance.
As with BRICS, it is the expansion of membership combined with geostrategic turbulence that has given the SCO greater weight and contributed to the sense of authoritarian entrepreneurship. In 2017, India and Pakistan became full members. Iran followed in 2023 and Belarus in 2024. Its membership covers two-thirds of the Eurasian landmass and around 40 per cent of the world’s population. It has one observer member, Mongolia, with 15 dialogue partners including Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It has attracted interest from the broader Asian region, with six members from ASEAN and its secretary-general attending the 2025 summit. That summit, held in China to coincide with celebrations for the 80th anniversary of the Second World War’s end, underscored the group’s geopolitical symbolism. Its expansion is part of an ambition to move beyond its continental focus to one that has genuine global heft. The 26th SCO summit will be held in Bishkek in 2026 and is likely to be closely watched for the geopolitical footprint it leaves.
Two further organisations round out the major new institutional creations. The first is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Founded a decade ago and headquartered in Beijing, it was initially linked to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure program, but it has become a properly multilateral financial institution. The United States campaigned to prevent its establishment and leant on allies and partners not to join for fear that it would dilute the Bretton Woods institutions and increase PRC influence. Yet the AIIB, about half the size of the World Bank in terms of capital, has proven more open and transparent than many had expected. It is an unusual example of an authoritarian-led but ultimately status quo form of cooperation — a counter-example to cooperation that advances illiberal aims. Indeed, it provides a generally accepted standard of international finance for states seeking to improve their infrastructure. And in that capacity, it shows that illiberal powers can create effective and durable international institutions.
The other new group is the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Comprising Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia, the EAEU is a Russian creation ostensibly intended to forge a common market in the former Soviet space. Since its establishment in 2014, building on efforts to create a customs union, it has largely failed to advance its market creation aims. However, it has proven useful to Russia, especially since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, providing a means to circumvent international trade sanctions. Interestingly, Indonesia signed a preferential trade agreement with the EAEU in 2025 that, according to Jakarta, was prompted by the desire to diversify Indonesian export markets that had been pummelled by the Trump administration’s tariff policies. The United States is Indonesia’s second-largest export market and Russia is its 25th — trade with the latter is around one-fifteenth the value of exports to the United States. In the short run, the move is more symbolism than economic substance, but it is indicative of the broader trends at play. India has also been considering a free trade agreement with the EAEU for more than a decade, and some observers think negotiations could be concluded in the coming year. India–EAEU trade is dominated by oil but would provide Indian exporters with good opportunities to access a sizeable market for trade diversification in a time of considerable volatility. Like many trade agreements, it also carries a component of political signalling as India looks to position itself as a major power in a more multipolar international system.
Illiberal states are adept at working within existing institutional frameworks. This involves, among other means, the coordination of policy positions and tactical voting to advance shared goals. It also includes providing leadership and efforts to reform, renovate, or recast institutions. Global entities, such as the United Nations (UN) or the WTO, have always included a wide variety of political systems among their membership. Historically, the combination of wealth and structural advantage gave liberal states outsized influence within them. That has begun to change. Perhaps the most notable example is the PRC’s drive to advance its influence in the UN and its various agencies. China is the second-largest contributor to the UN regular budget and places its nationals in key leadership positions. While scholars have shown some of the concerns about China’s efforts to staff UN agencies are overstated — no PRC national has led a security-related agency — the growth in leadership and staffing from mid-level to senior executive roles has nonetheless been significant. The retreat of the United States from global institutions under the Trump administration has accentuated this growth, leaving China with more influence almost by default.
Authoritarian states, particularly Russia and China, have used vetoes and other actions to block international efforts to pressure their clients, such as Myanmar and Syria, as well as each other. China was historically the Permanent Five (P5) member least likely to veto UN Security Council (UNSC) decisions, and its increasing use of the veto reflects the country’s growing interest in shaping the international environment. A key area in which this occurs relates to Beijing’s efforts, alongside other like-minded states, to roll back the liberal rights regime (discussed below). Cooperation at the UN also extends to corralling the Human Rights Council — coordinating to obstruct resolutions, collaborating on membership selection, and blocking civil society groups from participation and access.
Authoritarian states have also contributed to an acceleration of a trend established over some decades: regional organisations dominated by authoritarian powers coordinating activity to support authoritarian regimes. While the practice is not new — the Southern African Development Community helped then Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe fend off international pressure 20 years ago — it has increased in scale, volume, and influence. As well as shielding illiberal states from outside pressure, these groups provide resources and solidarity, and more broadly institutionalise pro-authoritarian norms and principles.
One of the surest signs that international order is in flux is that its operating components become the subject of open debate and contestation. The ideas that animate an order are at their most powerful when few question their validity or indeed existence. Authoritarian powers have been chafing against the dominant order and the expansion of liberal ideas since the early 21st century. Russia’s denunciations of the “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) as the coordinated action of Western powers inspired by liberal ideas were illustrative of this period. The liberal settings of the international order were seen as a security threat and potentially an existential challenge to authoritarian regimes. But the anti-liberal sentiment was defensive and largely uncoordinated. Today, things are different.
Illiberal powers are taking the initiative not just to limit the ways in which liberal principles can hurt their interests at home and abroad but to challenge the dominant ideas animating the international system. This advocacy for new ideas has taken four main forms to date. The first involves efforts to reinterpret key concepts in line with illiberal preferences. Here, they have not contested the centrality of human rights or democracy as such but have pushed for a different way of conceptualising them. Instead of human rights entailing a set of political rights vested in individuals that are fundamental and inalienable, authoritarian powers argue that they should be understood as something that inheres in collectives rather than individuals. From this perspective, rights are not indivisible but instead exist in a hierarchy. The PRC and other countries have argued that the rights to economic development, social stability, and political order are more important than individual rights to free expression, freedom of association, or the right to participate equally in the political process. By putting the state and the demands of economic development ahead of the rights of individuals, the liberal ideal of limiting state power is fended off. Unsurprisingly, this approach has adherents in many parts of the world. For example, ASEAN’s 2012 human rights declaration makes clear that human rights are limited where they clash with the state’s assessment of national security and societal need.
Democracy has similarly been subject to contestation and redefinition. Communist political systems have long argued that theirs is a different and superior way of representing the interests of the people in the political process. In recent years, advocacy for democracy by illiberal countries has found a new voice. The text of the 2022 partnership between China and Russia is telling. The entirety of the first section is dedicated to democracy and rights, going to some length to assert that their political systems are democratic. It is probably the clearest articulation yet of authoritarian states’ reconceptualisation of core ideas in the international system. That they did so jointly, and made the advocacy for and protection of these approaches central to their collaboration, gives the statement added weight. This is not window dressing or diplomatic trolling of the liberal world. Moscow and Beijing genuinely hold different views on these central ideas, and are working together not just to weaken the grip of liberalism but to make the international milieu more conducive to authoritarian and illiberal political systems. The two do not advocate for alternative norms on which international order should be fundamentally recast but instead seek to redefine core ideas that align them more directly with illiberal politics.
The second and related move made by illiberal states is to argue for a “back to the future” vision of the international order. Since the early 1950s, the UN-centred system has embodied a fundamental tension. In its core principles, it is state-centred and exists to serve the interests not of individuals but states — to manage their relations, prevent conflict, and facilitate trade and commerce. Principles of sovereignty and non-interference made this plain: states could do whatever they liked at home, and no one had a right to interfere in another’s affairs. Yet almost from its founding, the UN became the centre of a growing body of covenants, rights, and international law that muddied the waters. The order became one of states but also individuals. Over time this expanded, culminating in 2005 when the UN General Assembly (UNGA) accepted the R2P principle, which sets political limits on sovereignty and states’ rights. Authoritarian regimes want to turn back the clock to the UN’s founding, when the order served states and nothing more. Individual countries can determine what suits their culture and values best, with no system claimed as universal or superior. In this sense, efforts to recentre the old ideas of sovereignty and non-interference rest on solid ground, both codified in the UN Charter.
The third way in which illiberal states advocate for new ideas is through informational channels. Authoritarian powers are acutely aware of the risks and opportunities that the contemporary information space creates. In the early 2000s, many believed that the internet would constrain state power; the free exchange of ideas could not be limited. Bill Clinton once famously joked that the PRC’s efforts to control information online were like trying to nail jelly to a wall. That was a mistake. Authoritarian powers have proven highly adept at fencing in the freedoms of the internet and using cutting-edge informational and surveillance technology to control the information space.
Illiberal states are increasingly working together in this domain. Russia and China, for example, have convened meetings of state media organisations under the BRICS banner, explicitly framing media training and collaboration as a mechanism to advance a multipolar order. These programs bring editors, producers, and senior managers to centres in Moscow and Beijing to network, exchange ideas, and share techniques for advancing their informational agenda. TV BRICS produces and distributes content across a global network that includes China’s CGTN, Iran’s IRNA, and Vietnam’s News Agency, among many others. Beijing runs a similar operation focused more directly on the BRI. Its Belt and Road News Network disseminates party-approved content promoting the infrastructure initiative.
Authoritarians have also established think tanks, summits, and regular forums to spread ideas and shape international policy debate in line with illiberal interests. This includes the SCO’s Media and Think Tank Summit, Hungary’s Danube Institute, Russia’s Valdai Club, and China’s state-linked think tanks and summits including the Xiangshan Forum, styled as an alternative to the Shangri-La Dialogue run by the London-based IISS. Authoritarian powers also fund think tanks and thought leadership in liberal states to take the battle of ideas to what might be described as home ground.
The tidal flow of liberalism after the Cold War’s end and the hubris of that conflict’s victors meant that the dominant powers did not realise their ideas needed defending, or indeed that others might contest them. For some time now, authoritarian powers have sought to advance not just their interests but to reconstitute the principles that organise the international system. They have proven to be energetic, creative, and adaptive to the new information domains in ways that have caught liberal powers flat-footed. That many democracies are struggling with illiberal sentiments, economic challenges, and political sclerosis has not helped. That the battle of ideas has been joined is beyond doubt.
Finally, it is worth dwelling briefly on the ways in which illiberal powers help one another, both through simple favours for fellow autocrats and by building political support for illiberalism and the ideas they want anchored in the international order. One notable form this takes is sham election monitoring. An interesting feature of contemporary autocracies is the way in which they use elections as legitimating tools. While the PRC does not bother with such bourgeois niceties, most feel the need to stage elections that are neither free nor fair. Autocrats call in observers from a cohort of friendly countries to lend the electoral process an air of credibility. Recent examples include Russia’s 2024 presidential election where independent monitors were banned but which was endorsed by authoritarian observers, and Myanmar’s 2025/26 election.
Authoritarians also collaborate to silence critics and pressure overseas opponents. According to Action for Democracy, this includes “kidnappings and forced renditions in Africa, deportation and refoulement pipelines in East and Southeast Asia and detentions and removals in Central Asia”. The technology authoritarian powers use to monitor and control their own societies is also exported to support similar efforts abroad, through a mix of state and market channels. China’s Digital Silk Road is a centrally coordinated state infrastructure program that advances this agenda, while Chinese telecommunications firms profit from supplying information-control mechanisms alongside conventional systems.
The current geopolitical and geoeconomic flux is in part related to illiberal powers increasingly cooperating outside institutional structures and conventional mechanisms such as preferential trade agreements. Energy is a case in point.
The Iran war illustrated how a mix of old and new technologies now shapes the global energy order. Fossil fuels remain critical in many parts of the world, but renewables such as solar, hydropower, and nuclear form a growing share of the energy mix. Even when oil and gas markets are able to function free from physical interference, countries pursue differing energy mixes to suit their circumstances. The PRC, for instance, has spent years diversifying both its fossil fuel sources and its forms of energy production. China’s increased energy trade with Russia mainly serves this diversification but also has the side benefit of supporting its partner in illiberalism.
India is one of the world’s biggest importers of hydrocarbons. While it is not moving as swiftly down the diversification path as China, it aims for a wide array of suppliers. It has long imported oil from Russia, reflecting both established ties and more recent necessity — and those imports have grown since the Iran war, with each side keen to sustain the relationship. This diversifies India’s supply and reinforces a long-term strategic collaboration, while also keeping China and Russia from growing too close for New Delhi’s comfort. Sino-Indian animosity persists despite recent efforts to improve ties, and Indian elites worry that a tighter Russia–China axis would dilute their country’s influence.
The shifting dynamics of energy trade reflect longer-term changes to the global balance of power and the greater premium states now place on fuel diversity and the mix of renewables. This offers illiberal powers, as both buyers and sellers, opportunities to advance their interests.
A second area where illiberal powers are building mutually beneficial economic structures is payment systems. Although there has been speculation about the end of US dollar dominance, this is unlikely even over the medium term. No currency matches the US for the depth and liquidity of its bond markets, or for the US government’s comfort with the dollar’s global role. Illiberal powers have instead focused on smaller steps including the creation of payment mechanisms that can operate outside US-centred banking systems. The heavy financial sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 illustrated the vulnerabilities of illiberal powers, and as finance becomes another front line in geopolitical competition, the incentive to develop workarounds has grown. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), established in 2015, now offers an alternative to the US-dollar-dominated SWIFT system. De-centred financial systems, cryptocurrencies, and other digital technologies considerably widen the scope for payment mechanisms and other instruments that sit outside the US-dollar system.
Finally, while China’s BRI consists of bilateral lending deals, the program’s scale gives it real potential to reconfigure economic structures, particularly the digital components, in ways that may influence the wider international order. Much as the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe’s economy not just as an act of charity but as a means of ensuring it remained anchored in an American-centred economic order, the BRI seeks to align recipient countries’ physical and digital economic standards with the PRC’s. Over time, this is likely to align the interests of those countries with Beijing, while embedding a distinctly illiberal infrastructure in critical parts of the global economy.
In the breathless prose of some commentators, illiberal cooperation is the source of a new axis in world politics that presents a coherent and integrated challenge to the liberal international order. A weakened West, increasingly internally divided, beset by poor leadership and fragmented politics, faces an energised rising bloc working to destroy the old order. The preceding analysis has shown that illiberal states are coordinating in a wide range of ways — from the battlefield to the multilateral summit, from new media to development financing. But what is the impact of this cooperation, and what are its limits?
The most visible example of authoritarian cooperation’s efficacy has been battlefield resilience, evident in the four-year conflict in Ukraine and more recently in the 2026 Iran war. Without support from their authoritarian collaborators, both conflicts would have played out very differently. This is likely to remain over the long run, with the networks established now redeployable elsewhere — Asia’s flashpoints being a likely venue. Whether it is North Korea’s military supporting Chinese operations in Taiwan or Russian and Chinese backing for Pyongyang, the already fraught international security environment is made more complex by authoritarian collaboration.
Illiberal powers are also taking strides to reconfigure the global economy via energy markets, payment systems, and infrastructure investment. The spatial dimensions of this cooperation are notable. Some elements are global; BRICS sees itself as operating at the level of the international system, and military cooperation crosses continents and theatres. But other forms are more focused on regional influence, such as the SCO and BRI. They may, over time, exert influence at the international system level, but for now the challenge is more geographically focused.
Meanwhile, illiberal cooperation supports the survival of authoritarian regimes, increasing their capacity to monitor and control opponents, dominate the information space, and enforce social order. The relative ease with which US forces seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro might be seen as a counter-example — after all, Maduro had acquired the sophisticated air defence systems from Russia. However, the systems were not functional, whether due to Venezuela’s inability to sustain them or for other reasons such as elite fragmentation. The capture of the erstwhile dictator cannot be blamed on a lack of authoritarian support. And while Viktor Orbán’s April 2026 electoral defeat offers cause for optimism, authoritarian states are far from isolated as they try to manage domestic and international pressure.
Finally, cooperation should be recognised as mutually reinforcing: military support, energy networks, and payment systems, among others, all interact to give the whole more weight than the sum of its parts.
Illiberal cooperation has not, as yet, been driven by a strong sense of shared interests, ideological commitment, or effective institutions — a shortfall that is evident in four distinct limiting factors. First, while illiberal collaboration has to be taken seriously, it remains some way from providing an existential challenge to the core structures of international order or the vital interests of liberal states. Illiberal collaborative efforts rest, so far, on fragile foundations. While the CRINK acronym seems to have endured, there is no coherent bloc operating in a systematic manner. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are at the forefront of collaboration, but there has been no four-way leaders’ summit; there is no authoritarian Quad. As a 2025 CSIS report notes, diplomatic meetings and coordination among the four are primarily conducted bilaterally. This reflects the basic asymmetries of power among the group as well as the preference of Moscow and Beijing to act in ways that maximise their respective leverage. Just as importantly, Russia and China differ over leadership and influence, at times holding quite different views about their collaboration — a divide occasionally evident at the SCO.
Second, illiberal powers have diverging interests and priorities, seen most clearly within the BRICS grouping, and most recently at the 2026 BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, where differing views on the Iran war blocked a joint statement. Notwithstanding the incentives created by the Trump administration’s careless treatment, the group does not cohere in a way that can leverage its potential. There is an institutional framework for the authoritarian powers to mobilise, but, so far, they have struggled to turn this into anything substantive at the global level.
Third, authoritarian and illiberal powers have made real headway weakening the legitimacy of liberal ideas — aided by Western democracies’ own faltering commitment and the shortcomings of liberal economics, which generate wealth alongside inequality and disruptive social change — yet they struggle to move beyond critique. In the words of Oxford University scholar Dimitar Bechev, illiberalism has already “displayed its limits and inherent contradictions”. Linked to this is the absence of clear leadership. The PRC, the most important authoritarian power, occupies a quasi-leadership role given its wealth, breadth of interests, and activist foreign policy. Yet it shows no appetite for the kind of global leadership role that lurks in the minds of anxious analysts. There is no intention to create a Comintern (Communist International) for the 21st century. Beijing believes its model is superior to liberal democratic capitalism, but it lacks the evangelical impulse that drove the USSR to support revolutionary movements across the world. The liberal order was driven by the North Atlantic powers and led by the United States. Without leadership, an alternative order will struggle to emerge.
Fourth, the diversity of interests, values, and cultures among illiberal states makes it extremely difficult to build the kind of coherent, institutionalised, and ideologically animated bloc capable of reconstructing the international order. Iran is a theocracy, the PRC is a Leninist autocracy sitting atop a state-led capitalist economy, and Venezuela remains, even post-Maduro, an authoritarian state formally driving a revolutionary project. The ideological spectrum is extremely broad. Advocating a highly statist vision of international order gives authoritarian and illiberal states maximum domestic latitude. But the group has been unable to generate a set of common interests much beyond restoring a Westphalian order centred on state sovereignty at the expense of individual rights.
In short, illiberal cooperation is most effective when pushing against a shared set of pressures or ideas, and least effective when it has to coordinate policies among multiple states to generate momentum around a collective goal.
The levels, breadth, and institutionalisation of cooperation among illiberal states reflect not just a sense of opportunism or the ambitions of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, but deeper shifts in the forces shaping international relations. The distribution of global power has been swiftly reconstituted and the rules, norms, and principles of the post-1945 international order are straining under the weight of economic, military, and demographic changes. Multilateral institutions struggle with effectiveness and legitimacy, and consequently lack the impact their founders had hoped for. Most critically, the United States has drifted away from a position of global leadership and lurched inwards. All of this has created an environment conducive to entrepreneurial statecraft by autocracies. And what began as coordinated action to fend off an expansive global liberalism has developed into a more offensive mode that seeks to reshape the international system.
This paper has shown that illiberal states have greater weight and influence than they did a generation ago. They are also coordinating to advance their interests, both short and long term. From institutions to the rules of the road, from the battlefield to news media, authoritarian powers are working together to recast the settings of the global order. They are a long way from having the kind of influence they would like. The advantages of incumbency are significant, and liberal powers retain considerable structural and material strength. Nonetheless, cooperation among illiberal states is real, routinised, multidimensional, and increasingly well resourced. Moreover, their ideas have strong appeal in a rising global tide of illiberalism. It is critical that states that value liberal ideas, both political and economic, recognise that they face a challenge that was difficult to imagine at the turn of the millennium. And while it seems unlikely to lead to a fundamental change to the core structures of the international order in the near term, competition is very likely to persist.
For Australia, there is a pressing need to grasp the reality of authoritarian cooperation and the challenge that it entails. While it is clear from policy statements that the government understands the world has entered a more unstable geopolitical environment, it is not obvious that the challenge presented by authoritarian collaboration receives appropriate attention. Contestation is about a good deal more than Sino-American rivalry and potential spheres of influence in East Asia. Equally, illiberal cooperation operates at both the global and regional level, and the response must be calibrated accordingly.
What can Australia do in response? The first step is to take seriously the problems of the existing institutional structures and try to meet the needs of the emerging and illiberal powers through reform and renovation. The core international institutions embody a structure of power and influence that existed when they were established in the 1950s, and bear little relation to contemporary realities. The G20 was formed in 1999 to address concerns about the international financial institutions but has lost momentum in recent years, while UN reform remains sorely needed. This will require working with others who share the country’s interests and values, as well as those that do not, to rebuild institutions that better reflect contemporary distributions of power.
Washington’s inward turn demands that lesser powers do more to provide collective leadership and institutional reform of critical bodies, both at the global and regional level. This will be especially challenging given that the United States has been the load-bearing pillar in so many institutions. The achievement of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after Washington’s withdrawal from the TPP shows that liberal states can achieve major policy initiatives in the absence of US statecraft. But such efforts will require resourcing, leadership, and a sense of entrepreneurial purpose. By failing to address real concerns about representation, process, and outcomes, states on the status quo side of the ledger help create the conditions prompting authoritarians to fill the gap. There is a need to reconfigure cooperative institutions to better provide international public goods. Illiberal powers are taking small but not insignificant steps to advance their vision. Australia should mobilise a coalition of powers to begin the urgent and difficult task of renovation.
Beyond this higher-order imperative, there are at least three more specific steps that should be taken in response to the authoritarian challenge. The first is to develop collaborative networks that will support efforts to harden the underlying social and economic infrastructure of open societies. By their nature, liberal societies that are integrated into the global economy have multiple points of vulnerability and these need to be galvanised in the face of this pressure. From supply chain resilience to critical infrastructure and cyber security, there is a wide range of areas that require attention. Some of the work streams established by the Quad (made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) have identified this need, but policy action has not kept pace. The core idea is that this infrastructure requires greater security, achieved through deeper cooperation among states threatened by illiberal actors.
Second, illiberal states have collaborated to advance their goals in the new information spaces. It is critical that liberal states respond collectively to this challenge. Australia’s experience combatting foreign influence and interference means it is well positioned to rally a coalition of liberal states to develop defensive mechanisms to fend off informational assaults and efforts to interfere. They should also develop resources to build social trust and foster what might be described as a civic infrastructure that has been eroded by authoritarian states’ effective use of mis- and disinformation.
Third, Australia should work with others to fragment authoritarian alignments. The diversity of values and interests among illiberal powers provides opportunities to drive wedges between those states. Authoritarian cooperation should not be allowed to develop into firmer arrangements such as alliances or blocs. The relative thinness of these links makes it easier to draw individual illiberal states away from the grouping. Emerging states in the global South are not all comfortable with the authoritarian direction China, Russia, and others are taking. The turn towards groups such as BRICS and SCO comes from concerns about existing structures and their inability to meet the demands of many in the global South. Working with others to provide better options for countries such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia can reduce the salience of illiberal cooperation.
One of the curious features of Australian foreign policy of the past decade or so has been the paradoxical pairing of an expansive conception of the region with a narrowing of the country’s strategic focus. Canberra speaks of an Indo-Pacific but acts with a focus on Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The authoritarian cooperation challenge is global. To ensure an international order that remains liberal in orientation will require that Canberra lift its eyes to the horizon even as geopolitical competition pushes attention closer to home. The institutions and norms of the international order are being contested, and Australia must be in a position to contribute to the fight both in its region and on the global stage.
