Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF STRATEGIC SECURITY, cilt.18, sa.4, ss.19-37, 2025 (Scopus)
This article explores how Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea have adapted their strategies during the Ukraine war. Rather than forming treaty-based alliances, they have turned to flexible partnerships shaped by sanctions evasion, arms transfers, and coordinated diplomacy. The framework draws on concepts such as authoritarian solidarity, hedging, norm subsidiarity, and wartime strategic learning, and the analysis focuses on four domains of cooperation: defense industries, finance, information operations, and institutional platforms. Empirical cases highlight Iran’s drone supplies, North Korea’s transfer of artillery and munitions, and China’s provision of economic lifelines, with Russia serving as the central coordinator. These relationships display resilience, but they also carry clear constraints: China avoids deep military commitments, Russia and Iran remain tied to energy revenues, and North Korea struggles with its limited industrial base. Taken together, the findings suggest that authoritarian alignments operate less as fixed blocs than as adaptive ecosystems. They combine cooperation with divergence, shaping security dynamics in ways that demand new responses from liberal democracies.