As the war intensifies in Ukraine and the Kremlin’s nefarious actions spread to Europe (a so-called “hybrid” covert war), we need to revisit alliances between Russia and other revisionist powers opposed to the West and what it stands for. Their level of political and strategic coordination is already far superior to that of the Axis Powers before the Second World War. It is therefore important to name this grouping of hostile powers. A new “Axis of Evil”? Some prefer a less symbolically charged name. Their argument is understandable, but it also expresses the moral exhaustion of the West.
Paul J. Saunders, the President of the Center for the National Interest (USA), has coined the acronym “CRANK” (China-Russia-Iran-North Korea) to designate the quartet of revisionist powers led by Moscow and Beijing. The CRANKs, which are critical of the United States and Western hegemony, seek to rally the “Global South” (Russian leaders use the expression “world majority”). CRANK evokes the term “cranky”, and thus the general attitude of these countries toward American foreign policy. From the point of view of U.S. officials, CRANK leaders are considered “cranks ”, i.e. deranged personalities who live in a parallel world populated by paranoid conspiracy theories. Finally, “crank“ also means crank, the mechanical sense of the term referring to the CRANKs’ desire to turn the great mass of the international system in their favor1 (see the theme of the ‘post-Western world’).
The CRANKs rather than the Axis of Evil?
According to Paul J. Saunders, this acronym is preferable to the “Axis of Evil”, as the sanctimonious rhetoric of the “Bush years” (George W. Bush, President of the United States, 2000-2008) and the “war on terror” proved approximate, if not counter-productive. In the contemporary geopolitical context, the President of the Center for the National Interest insists that confrontation with the CRANKs will require the U.S. to cooperate with regimes that do not always respect the norms and standards of Western democracies, since fully democratic regimes represent only one seventh of the states on the face of the Earth. What is more, the CRANKs quartet does not constitute a geopolitical bloc, but rather an arrangement of bilateral alliances and cooperative ventures, leaving the USA free to maneuver in the interstices and divide the countries grouped under this name (this reasoned Machiavellianism leaves us dubious). Last but not least, the acronym CRANK is in no way meliorative; it is not likely to be taken up by the countries it designates, thus giving them more substance and surface (see in contrast the politico-semantic success of “BRICs”, now “BRICS+”).
In George W. Bush’s State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, the expression “The Axis of Evil” was used to designate “rogue states” such as Iraq, with Iran and North Korea as examples. In his eulogy delivered three days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the President of the United States expressed a world view based on “moral clarity”: “Americans, only three days after these events, do not yet have the benefit of historical hindsight. But our historical duty is already clear: to retaliate against these attacks and rid the world of evil.” This theme also inspired the presidential address to West Point cadets on June1, 2002. On the European shores of the North Atlantic, critics saw in the expression “Axis of Evil” an echo of the biblicism that permeates American geopolitical representations. Ronald Reagan’s famous tirade on the USSR, which he described as an “Evil Empire” before a gathering of Protestant vicars and theologians2 (Orlando speech, March 8, 1983), is a case in point.
David Frum, George W. Bush’s speechwriter, claims to have been inspired not by Ronald Reagan but by Franklin D. Roosevelt (State of the Union Address, January 6, 1942). The fact remains that the theme of Evil, recurrent in the United States, is at odds with the therapeutic language preferred by the media in post-modern Western societies. They speak more readily of discomfort and well-being than of evil or good. The fact remains that the “Axis of Evil” theme has been devalued by the way in which the Iraq war was decided from 2003 onward, and by developments in the war in Afghanistan launched in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The latter was presented by George W. Bush’s critics as a “war of necessity,” in accordance with international law and the rules of multilateralism, as opposed to the “war of choice” that would have been the new American military engagement in Iraq (the first corresponds to the 1991 Gulf War).
“It is wrong to speak evil of evil”
Generally speaking, the evolution of some Western minds is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s remark that “it is evil to speak evil of evil”. Yet things are changing. With Russia’s launch of a “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian armed forces, followed by Hamas’ terror attacks and massacres on Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, against a backdrop of strategic and geopolitical convergences between powers hostile to the West, the expression “Axis of Evil” has reappeared here and there in the politico-media field. It refers to the Moscow-Tehran-Beijing axis, extended as far as North-East Asia with Pyongyang’s “bunker regime” (North Korea is now engaged on the Ukrainian front).
Paul J. Saunders therefore proposes the acronym CRANK, which he considers more effective than moralistic rhetoric. In our opinion, this choice and what it expresses cannot be reduced to semantic games; they require further analysis. Given the current state of the world’s affairs, we can only marvel at observers’ obsessive return to George W. Bush’s speech of January 29, 2002, in which he spoke of the existence of an “Axis of Evil.” Today’s reactions to this seminal speech are particularly indicative of the involutions at the heart of post-modern Western societies. In a context of advanced secularization, the social sciences take the place of (cooled) “sociurgy” and seek to absorb political philosophy. Indeed, the social sciences’ claim to axiological neutrality and the developments of a hedonistic counter-culture combine to erect moral relativism as the yardstick for the problems of our time (“Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute”). In accordance with Gresham’s law, bad money drives out good: the euphemisms used by the media (malaise for bad; well-being for good) has replaced the vocabulary of philosophy, eclipsing the words that allow us to think and express clear ethical references.
So we need to return to people and things, in this case to George W. Bush’s famous speech3. On January 29, 2002, the American president was careful not to reduce the “good” to the limits of a secular state, which inevitably has to resort to physical force to fulfill its proper function (violence is the specific means of “politics”), but he did call a small number of liberticidal and murderous regimes as the “Axis of Evil.” There was nothing scandalous about that. Just as there is a negative theology (Dionysius the Areopagite) and a negative epistemology (Karl Popper), there is also a negative morality, with its political counterpart. Just think of Pascal: “Although we cannot define what is just, we can see what is not” (fragment 120). Of course, there is no such thing as an ideal society, or an ideal political regime, but not all evils are created equal, and the evil nature of the regimes solidarized by Russian and Chinese actions is obvious to any sensible person. This blindness to the nature of political regimes and the effects they produce, in the name of the well-understood “interests” of “partners” engaged in a common “dialogue,” sends the observer of international realities back to the nihilism foretold by Nietzsche (“God is dead” as the negation of fundamental principles and the proclamation of “nothing”). Under the influence of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, a whole school of conservative thought then focused on the developments of scientism and positivism, and certain forms of modernity, as the sources of the nihilism afflicting the Western world4.
To conclude
This philosophical “disputation” is beyond the scope of this analysis, but we can only make the following observation: the proclaimed relativism of values (a mask for the inversion of values?) leads to intellectual disarray and the denial of threats. When it comes to grasping the threats posed by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, the often-reaffirmed claim to disregard the nature of the regime is a major political handicap, leading to distorted perceptions and errors of assessment.
It may therefore be more appropriate or more skilful to use other terms to designate powers hostile to the West: expressions such as “Axis of Chaos” or “Revisionist Axis,” for example. The fact remains, however, that the problem of Evil is irreducible, something that the highly scientistic and positivist Freud, averse to metaphysics, agreed with. At a time when the theme of inevitable negotiations with Russia seems to be gaining ground, let us recall the old saying that he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
Associate professor of history and geography and researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics (University of Paris VIII). Author of several books, he works within the Thomas More Institute on geopolitical and defense issues in Europe. His research areas cover the Baltic-Black Sea region, post-Soviet Eurasia, and the Mediterranean.
Footnotes
- See Paul J. Saunders, “Meet the CRANKs: How China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea Align Against America”, The National Interest, May 28, 2024.
- In his March 8, 1983 speech, Ronald Reagan also mentioned the moral responsibilities that the American nation had to assume : “Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal”. Yet this sentence is systematically omitted by those who refer to Ronald Reagan’s words.
- The text is available on the White House website.
- With regard to Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), still little known in France, it should be remembered that at the same time as Leo Strauss was preoccupied with Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt with Saint Augustine, this German Catholic philosopher was analyzing the totalitarian phenomenon in depth, likening it to a resurgence of the millenarian theme and the divinization of the world. See Race and State (1933) and Political Religions (1938). Born in Cologne, Eric Voegelin taught in Vienna, then went into exile in the USA at the time of the Anschluss. He later returned to Germany to teach in Munich, where he took over Max Weber’s chair.
