In mid-January 2025, Iran and Russia further solidified their relationship by signing a 20-year strategic partnership.  The move formalized both governments’ promises to deepen military and technical cooperation.  Under the treaty, both sides agreed to provide assistance to each other to counter common security threats, though the wording stops short of a mutual defense pact where one side would come to the military assistance of the other (Russia and North Korea signed such an agreement last year.).  A heavily sanctioned Russia has made strengthening ties with China, North Korea, and now Iran, a focal point of its foreign policy to bolster not only its economy which has suffered during the Ukraine war but also provide a geopolitical and economic counterbalance to the United States and Western nations.  Notably, cyber plays an integral role in the agreement, and both have committed to expanding cooperation in cybersecurity and Internet regulation, especially when it comes to establishing mandates for international tech companies operating in their Internet spaces.  

Russia has been on the forefront of solidifying its ties with United States’ enemies and has engaged in similar agreements with China and North Korea, and now with Iran.  What’s more, China has independently engaged in its own strategic agreements with Iran and North Korea.  And while many of these relationships are aimed at bolstering political, economic, and military ties, cyber is featured prominently in them as well, largely because technology is driving or tied closely with the aforementioned aspects of international agreements.  Furthermore, cyber encompasses a vast array of subcategories where there is substantive competition for states to gain advantage over their adversaries.  Whether it be cybersecurity, emerging technologies, cyber law and regulation, cybercrime, or building a state’s own offensive cyber capabilities, there is a need for like-minded governments to come together, especially if they do not want to be left behind the curve.

While at any time adversarial governments come together in very public reaffirmations of their joint interests is a concern, there is always speculation about if such spectacle is more bluster than pop.  While on the surface, China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia all view the West and the United States as their adversaries, actually working together on a nuanced issue such as cyberspace can be a more difficult challenge, as this would require them to work as a cohesive bloc.  Yes, they all pose a threat to the United States, but often in different areas and on different issues.  However, there are signs that this may have started to change, especially with North Korean troops joining Russia’s war on Ukraine, Iran supplying Russia with weapons, and China supporting Russia with material and financial resources.  True partnering on cyber issues would be a natural evolution of these already public overtures of cooperation, and an area that if successful, would be a disconcerting development for U.S. interests.

Although all are considered authoritarian governments, they are relatively unique in how they rule and therefore operate.  Per one think tank paper on the subject, China is a single party government, Russia a dictatorship driven by the personality of its leader, Iran is a theocracy, and North Korea is a dynasty driven dictatorship.  However, despite their difference philosophies, their approaches to cyberspace and the Internet are more in line than they are different.  For example, these governments already actively restrict the Internet in their respective countries, and have expressed interest in being able to cut themselves off from the global digital ecosystem and rely solely on their own domestic Internet to provide a more secure alternative.  They generally share the same belief that cyberspace allows them to project power, whether it be through cyber espionage, cyber disruption, spreading influence, committing theft, or engaging in technological diplomacy.  And when it comes to cyber norms of behavior, the four have consistently supported states’ right for cyber sovereignty, which is gaining traction globally.  Some Europe countries have even espoused a European “digital sovereignty” – a term advocate the increasing of Europe’s technological capacity and its “ability to establish values and rules in a technology-centered world becoming dominated by other countries.”  Given the fact that approximately 100 countries have some form of data protection/digital sovereignty laws in place, there is a growing appetite to move away from multi-stakeholder collectives like Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and toward governments.

Established in 1955, the Warsaw Pact was a military and political alliance ideologically opposed to NATO and notably engaged in an arms race with its Western counterpart through much of the Cold War.  Though it finally dissolved in 1991 as political climates changed in member states, the Warsaw Pact put up a short-lived counterbalance to NATO interests.  Fast forward to today, and there’s an opportunity for the emergence of a “cyber” Warsaw Pact, though instead of Russian satellite countries bolstering the alliance, four of the more capable cyber countries and adversaries of the United States would lead this effort.  Now, alliances are difficult to maintain for a variety of reasons.  Lack of trust, competing interests, unbalanced power dynamics, and difficulties of managing so many different resources and who benefits from them, are just a few of the problems alliances face.  Even NATO’S longstanding alliance has unresolved issues with which it grapples.

But a cyber alliance of this magnitude might be easier to work, especially given that the big four antagonists have similar philosophies governing cyberspace, how it should operate, and how governments operate in it.  What’s more, given NATO’s acknowledgement that a cyber attack against a NATO nation could be grounds to trigger the alliance’s Article 5provision, and the growing trend of “active defense” operations being conducted by the United States, and some of its allies, the adversarial four may find a need to formally band together as more Western-led collaborative “hunt forward” operations go into effect.  No doubt, the big four have all been on the receiving end of Western cyber activities and espionage, and have collected data and conducted analysis of them, though only China has really started to disclose its findings of alleged U.S. incidents against it with the global community.  Still, this type of information could be distributed among the big four to bolster their own detection capabilities, share best defense practices, and set up their own joint efforts to monitor and surveil this activity.  There’s no doubt that this would be a heavy lift but is certainly less cumbersome than supplying or supporting a controversial war.

The biggest obstacle would be managing egos and image.  No doubt Russia has been long considered a cyber power, whose forays into the digital domain go back at least as far as 1998’s cyber espionage campaign dubbed Moonlight Maze.  While still being a formidable presence, China has quickly assumed a more prominent position on the mantel, steadily developing its technological base and cyber capabilities steadily over the past two decades.  Despite Iran’s, North Korea’s, and Russia’s demonstrated prowess in cyberspace, China is undoubtedly a more complete leader in this arena and unmatched by the other three, given its advancements in the tech field with networking, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and pushing global cyber sovereignty.  The question is, does it want the job?

That may very well depend on the amount of pressure exerted against China under a Trump Administration.  With ramped up calls to confront China’s cyber activities from Congress and other senior government officials, the Trump Administration has not yet unrolled a plan to directly address the Chinese cyber threat.  This uncertainty, and the fear that drives it, has only been exacerbated with the Administration’s disbanding of the Cyber Safety Review Board, a move that has elicited hyperbolic criticism essentially comparing the decision to surrendering to China’s cyber operations.  This is erroneous as it portends that you should address a state as complex as China one issue at a time at the expense of other geopolitical considerations and expect to achieve favorable results.

Given the strategic context of the Chinese threat, Trump will no doubt seek to leverage the full extent of statecraft using a combination of political, economic, and cyber resources when he is ready to confront Xi in the hopes of making a suitable arrangement for both parties.  If successful, not only would he have made progress in an area where few have had before (i.e., cyber espionage), he could also make gains in other areas like artificial intelligence or quantum computing that protects U.S. interests.  Finding that balance would be key to keeping China separate from the others with the added benefit of further discouraging it from building a cyber alliance.