An 'Asia first' strategy is intellectually attractive but suffers from serious liabilities, the first being that even if European NATO members magically doubled military spending today, this wouldn't solve the problem of sustaining Ukraine for the next three to four years because European defense industrial bases are not positioned to do that, nor would it solve the problem of dealing with a hyper-militarized, hypersonic-capable revisionist Russia that doesn't appear particularly patient in pressing against the Western security order.

The transatlantic relationship rests on the US playing a dominant security role in Europe because the US is not European—it is uniquely trusted precisely because it is not part of the old system of European rivalries and is not interested in where borders are drawn between specific European countries, making the US role fundamentally different from any European great power.

While pre-existing strategic and ideological convergences exist among the four autocratic powers, typically what speeds up the formation of such relationships is a crisis that overcomes barriers to collective action, and Ukraine has provided that crisis for the autocratic quartet by forcing them to deepen cooperation in response to Western pressure.

The great conflicts of the 20th century—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—can be explained at a high level by the dynamics of competing powers trying to control or prevent others from controlling Eurasia, with offshore powers like Britain and the United States trying to resist continental dominance.

Geography creates habits and patterns that are hard to break out of, so it remains true today as it was in 1913 that it would threaten America's geopolitical interests if a hostile country was able to take control over East Asia or Western Europe and turn that into a platform for projecting coercion into the wider world, but the ways in which those struggles play out differ over time because of technological change.

Franklin Roosevelt believed Nazi Germany was a bigger problem than Imperial Japan, but was willing to run a very high risk of war with Japan and ultimately went to war with Japan before going to war with Germany because he understood that Japan was also challenging the balance of power in a very important region in a fundamental way, providing a historical precedent for managing multiple regional threats simultaneously.

Countries can have relationships that do not bring them together in permanent or genuine love-match fashion but can still have serious strategic effects, which is exactly what is being seen in the relationships among the autocratic powers today.

Eurasia encompasses the combined landmass of Europe and Asia, running from the Atlantic coast of Europe to Asia's Pacific margins, and includes nearby offshore islands like the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Philippines, and is important because most of the world's people, economic resources, and military potential reside there.

If the US disengages from Europe and abandons its leadership role there, this creates a capability gap that 'no good actor can fill for the time being,' meaning the US cannot safely disengage even if it wanted to, because the geopolitical space would be left empty rather than filled by European reassurance.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, geopolitical thinkers like Alfred Mahan and Nicholas Spykman became concerned about Eurasia because technological advances—particularly the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1904 and the proliferation of railways across Eurasia—enabled a large aggressive power to move big armies over larger distances than at any time since Genghis Khan, opening new horizons of conquest.

10 to 15 years ago, most analysts argued that economic power in the 21st century had fundamentally changed from dominating mass manufacturing (as in the 19th and 20th centuries) to occupying key nodes in value chains, dominating high-tech industries, and leading in services, but the return of great power war dynamics is reminding us that the ability to make things is still really important.

Autocratic leaders understand Cold War history as well as Western policymakers do and know the US will look for opportunities to split them apart, so they are on guard against that and it will be tough for the US to exploit tensions between them.

Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are each individually trying to upset the balance of power in key regions (Eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia), but collectively they are trying to shift the balance of power in all of the key regions that make up Eurasia and to undermine the rules and norms that have structured the international order that the US and its allies put in place to contain Eurasian anarchy after 1945.

Just because the United States decides that the primary threat is in theater A (Asia) doesn't mean that problems in theater B (Europe) or theater C (Middle East) go away, and US officials have faced since the late 1930s the challenge of figuring out how to execute a global foreign policy even as one region may seem more important than others.

Russia is carrying out very violent and risky sabotage and subversion efforts within the West, and this aggressive behavior shows that Russia doesn't appear to be a patient actor that can be indefinitely deferred in Europe while the US focuses on Asia.

Russia and China have lingering historical frictions—China periodically prints maps showing large chunks of Russian territory as belonging to China, and China is uncomfortable with Russian dealings with North Korea due to fears of North Korean misbehavior blowing back on China—yet these frictions do not prevent relationships from shifting the strategic equilibrium and having serious strategic effects.

Putin would have lost the war in Ukraine by now if not for the economic aid, economic support, and trade he has received from China, which has sustained his war economy over the past three years, and also for military equipment and troops from Iran and especially North Korea, showing concrete instances of how challenges to the international order are being intensified and sustained by these relationships.

Increasing the costs to one party for supporting another can incentivize them to work harder to find alternatives to US dollar reliance, but more generally the more the US can make a party pay a higher price for supporting another party, the more it can introduce the possibility of tension into those relationships over time.

There might be one or two opportunities to begin a very long process of straining autocratic relationships over time, particularly by putting pressure on Iran as the weakest member of the quartet, which has had its air defenses degraded and proxy network set back, and can be shown that Russian support will not be forthcoming if the US and Israel decide to attack Iran's nuclear program.

China is not giving away support to Russia; it is driving a hard bargain in terms of economic and technological penetration of the Russian ecosystem, yet Putin is still willing to accept that bargain because he believes it increases his chances of prevailing in Ukraine and strengthening Russia against the West over the medium term.