In 1979, an expansionist Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the beginning of a bloody 10-year war with enormous casualties. In November 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided to withdraw all Soviet combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 1988, publicly stating that Afghanistan had become “a bleeding wound.” And by February 1989, all Soviet troops had been withdrawn from Afghanistan, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. What followed was a failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, with Ukraine and Belarus declaring their independence and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland seeking international recognition as sovereign states. On Dec. 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, with Boris Yeltsin taking over as president of a Russian state that was no longer a communist monolith. That was the end of the Cold War. In 1999, Yeltsin resigned and passed the torch to Mr. Putin, who told the nation in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan was welcomed by many in China who remembered the summer of 1969 when the Soviet Union had 42 divisions - over 1 million troops ? on the border with China, threatening a nuclear strike against Chinese nuclear sites. Indeed, that March, Chinese and Soviet forces clashed on Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri River, with both sides taking casualties. The conflict ended in two weeks, averting an escalation of hostilities with the potential use of nuclear weapons.

Liberal democracies usually don’t make war on each other, but there will always be people who want what other people have. Such people will embrace the dictators, rogues and terrorists who will take power and go to war to conquer others. There will always be ideologies and religions that believe their destinies are to dominate the world. Humanity’s natural state is not some idealized version of Western democracy; it is conflict and war. The fall of the Soviet Union brought about the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mao Zedong’s death did not bring about a Chinese version of Western liberal democracy. China remains a totalitarian state, as does North Korea. The 1979 Iranian revolution brought about one of the world’s most odious and dangerous regimes. History lumbers on, crushing idealism in its path. Mr. Putin’s Russia is, for now, the best example. Mr. Fukuyama wrote, “There has been a steady decline in the quantity and quality of liberal democracies around the world for the past 18 years. Among the backsliders, no case is more serious than that of the United States.” He wrote correctly that U.S. institutions have been decaying for some time and are now at a major crisis point. Mr. Fukuyama prescribes remedies, each one out of the progressive playbook and each utterly wrong. On his list are everything from the elimination of the Electoral College to greater limits on campaign financing. In short, he wants to enable the Democrats to limit Americans’ constitutional freedoms. Mr. Fukuyama has expressed so well the common view of European and American elites.

Even before the terrorists who slaughtered innocent concertgoers at Moscow’s Crocus City Mall had been apprehended, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the nation’s Security Council, was accusing the government of Ukraine of being responsible. Days later, Mr. Putin finally admitted that “radical Islamists” were behind the attack, but he and his Federal Security Service director continued to accuse the U.S., Britain and Ukraine of playing a role in the terrorist attack, without providing any evidence. In today’s Russia, there is no independent and impartial judiciary, no non-state media, and no real parliamentary oversight. There is only the Kremlin and what Mr. Putin refers to as the “vertical of power,” which makes him alone responsible for the country’s successes and failures. That is what makes autocracies inherently brittle. This last incident was another of Mr. Putin’s intelligence failures. The FSB failed to detect and preempt the threat. Once the attack took place, authorities failed to secure the perimeter as the attackers fled. The stakes could not be higher for Mr. Putin, who has built his reputation on stability and bringing order to Russia after the chaotic 1990s under Boris Yeltsin. There is no indication this terrorist attack will threaten Mr. Putin’s hold on the Kremlin in the near term. But ISIS-K has shattered whatever was left of Mr. Putin’s Potemkin village illusion of security in Moscow. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky wrote: “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to the point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

Consider Russia’s SolarWinds attack on Orion software and the 2021 DarkSide attack against Colonial Pipeline. China has targeted Microsoft, and North Korea launched a damaging cyberattack on Sony. CIA Director William Burns has repeatedly sounded the alarm about Iran’s cyber targeting of U.S. critical infrastructure. The intelligence community and the U.S. Cyber Command are exceptionally effective at detecting and preempting cyberattacks. But private businesses must still be prepared for when a cyber hacker successfully evades our full-court press. When I served at the CIA, we used to say there were two kinds of governments: the ones that had been infiltrated by spies and the ones who did not know it yet. Similarly, companies should assume they have already been hacked. That’s why installing the most sophisticated incident response platform is critical to detecting cyber intrusions and reducing response time to seconds. None of the axis of tyranny dictatorships distinguishes between lawful military targets and civilians. Having formed a “without limits” strategic partnership, Russia and China enjoy a robust exchange of intelligence on U.S. cyber vulnerabilities. Dependent on North Korea and Iran for the artillery and drones for its Ukraine war, the Kremlin would not hesitate to share cyber hacks with Kim Jong Un and the Iranian mullahs. The axis of tyranny, bound together by a fear of democracy, is constantly trying to vacuum up our personal information and steal our intellectual property, which they lack the know-how to produce themselves. The U.S. public and private sectors can reduce their targets of attack by hardening defenses with technology and an effective insider threat program.

One of the more ominous consequences of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the most destructive land war in Europe since World War II, has been the tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape it has caused. Increasingly dependent economically and militarily on Iran, North Korea and China, the Kremlin has become the centerpiece of this century’s new axis of tyranny. Recent Intelligence threat briefing on Capitol Hill, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines emphasized that, because of its needs in the war, Russia has been “forced … to grant long-term concessions to China, North Korea and Iran, with the potential to undermine, among other things, long-held nonproliferation norms.” Ms. Haines added that the four dictatorships’ “growing cooperation and willingness to exchange aid in military, economic, political, and intelligence matters enhances their individual capabilities.” The emerging axis of tyranny only complicates the already complex threats to U.S. security, including China’s militarization of the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear saber rattling, Hamas’ attack on our ally Israel, and Iran’s growing nuclear capability, ballistic missile programs and support of proxy terror groups. But the threats are even more multifarious, especially in the unregulated fifth domain of cyberspace, which operates as a force multiplier for freedom of expression and commerce. The U.S. private sector is squarely in the crosshairs of not only cyber criminals but also cyber spies recruited by the North Korean, Chinese, Russian and Iranian regimes.

The most brazen example of this can be seen in Kazakhstan, with a landmass the size of Western Europe and the 12th-largest oil supply, which refused to recognize Russia’s annexations of Ukraine’s territory and offered to send more oil to the European Union. Russia temporarily severed Kazakhstan’s energy links with the outside world. Yet Russia would have to confront the neighborhood’s heavyweight. China, the Belt and Road godfather, is interested in the project. Despite the February 2022 “friendship without limits” and a subsequent meeting between “close friends” Xi Jinping and Mr. Putin this past March, China has been reluctant to help Russia directly. China is warming up to the Middle Corridor for three reasons. First, it wants to increase its influence in Central Asia at Mr. Putin’s expense. Second, it wants more trade with Europe that is not dependent on Russian goodwill or liable to Western secondary sanctions. Third, it hopes to increase European dependency on China and splinter the Western alliance. The Middle Corridor should effectively prevent conceding strategic economic engagement in Eurasia to Russia and China alone. The U.S. companies need to be more involved in Central Asia, Caucasus, and specifically the Middle Corridor. For that, broad U.S. and EU strategic support is necessary. The Middle Corridor will isolate Russia, help Ukraine, spur economic development in a part of the world dominated by Russia and China, and supply the EU and the world with the necessary raw materials, including hydrocarbon energy, uranium, rare earths, wheat and fertilizer. But most of all, it may drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.

One wouldn’t know this profound geoeconomic transformation was unfolding just by looking at the Moscow parade. Central Asian leaders begrudgingly sharing the stage with Mr. Putin are simultaneously working with Beijing and Brussels on isolating Moscow by building the Middle Corridor. Regrettably, Western investment and international support for economically bypassing Russia did not materialize. During Russia’s shaky experiment with democracy in the 1990s, or even before Mr. Putin’s 2008 aggression against Georgia, this was an understandable choice. The Middle Corridor requires political will, local support and significant multilateral investment to upgrade and expand infrastructure and build connections across the Caspian Sea and new port facilities. The World Bank, International Financial Corp., Development Finance Corp., European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and others need to get fully engaged. After 2008, and especially after 2022, the political calculus changed. Ignoring the Middle Corridor is a failure we should mitigate. We know what happens when Russia can exercise economic leverage over its neighbors and why the Middle Corridor is so important. Even before the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, Ukraine too was a victim of Russia’s energy dominance from 2007 through 2014. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Uzbekistan and most post-Soviet states have been directly coerced by Russia. Romania, Balkan and Baltic states also suffered from gas supply disruptions. Russia’s transit dominance is used to choke neighbors’ economies. Lacking Western support, neighbors then fold or appease the Kremlin.

Amid the pomp and pageantry of Moscow’s May 9 Victory Day parade commemorating the Soviets’ triumph in World War Ⅱ, the attendance of some post-Soviet Central Asian Republics presidents was not only about the past joint sacrifices. Nor was it about Vladimir Putin’s desperate need to break out of the unprecedented isolation into which he plunged Russia. It was also about geoeconomics. In the year after Russia’s 2022 reinvasion of Ukraine, freight volume more than doubled on the Middle Corridor, a transportation network connecting Asia with Europe via rail, boat and highway. In March, U.S. unveiled a new approach to Central Asia that stressed the facilitation of the Middle Corridor, which bypasses Russia. This route removes Russia’s ability to extort its neighbors by leveraging its transit infrastructure while expanding an independent economic artery to the states of Central Asia and further to China. In April, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, the two indispensable state actors for the Middle Corridor, proposed the expansion of the strategic route. An expansive overland trade network linking Central and East Asia and Europe has haunted the imaginations of merchants and rulers since the Mongol Empire fully realized its potential in the 13th century. Today, however, the 2013 China’s Belt and Road initiative, which connects East and West, is jeopardized by the Russian aggression in Ukraine. The strategic rationale of the Middle Corridor is that Russia ends up a net loser. The multimodal route would link West to East via Turkey (or Black Sea route), Georgia ports, Azerbaijan, and across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia and beyond.

No doubt Mr. Putin was pleased to see the progressively tense relationship between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, the South China Sea, trade wars, semiconductors, intellectual property theft, fentanyl, Ukraine and other issues. If Mr. Putin had aimed to put a wedge between the U.S. and China, he might have concluded that he had succeeded. Recent developments, however, should give pause to Mr. Putin’s optimism. At the United Nations, China abstained when Russia vetoed the Security Council resolution to extend the Panel of Experts monitoring North Korea’s compliance with sanctions; Mr. Xi recently declared publicly that “China opposes any threat or use of nuclear weapons” when Putin was threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. More importantly, Mr. Xi, confronted with significant economic challenges in China - foreign companies leaving China with less foreign direct investment coming into China, consumers spending less, challenging demographics, a real estate bubble, and sluggish economic growth - apparently realizes that it is not a given that China will be the predominant global power in 2049, the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Mr. Putin needs China and North Korea to support Mr. Putin’s efforts to recreate the Russian Empire. He wants China and North Korea to view the U.S. as the enemy. Hopefully, China will push back and not align itself with a revanchist Russian Federation. And North Korea will realize, assuming the U.S. and South Korea are more flexible and creative in their approach to Pyongyang, that it is in North Korea’s interest, for the security of the country and the well-being of its people, to have a normal relationship with the U.S. and South Korea.

This alliance of two authoritarian states permits Russia to frustrate U.S. and South Korean efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue with North Korea. Russia’s recent veto to extend the Panel of Experts to monitor North Korea’s compliance with U.N. Security Council sanctions is indicative of Mr. Putin’s intent to use North Korea as a strategic asset to frustrate U.S. efforts to contain a North Korea determined to build more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, to distances as far as the U.S. The recent visit of Kim Jong Un to Russia for meetings with Mr. Putin and the recent flurry of reciprocal visits of senior officials from Russia and North Korea have made it clear that absent any major initiative from the U.S. or South Korea, North Korea is now aligned with a revanchist Russian Federation. Compared with the 1980s, when the U.S. and China cooperated to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, Russia’s current relations with China are excellent. As President Xi Jinping said to Mr. Putin days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2022, there are “no limits” to their partnership. Russia and China have embarked on a journey of two authoritarian states determined to oppose U.S. influence in the world. They have expanded military relations with joint military drills and arms deals while expanding economic relations, with China importing oil and gas and providing Russia with greater quantities of manufactured goods. Diplomatically, they have expanded membership in the BRICS(Brazil, India, South Africa, Russia and China) and engaged more actively with Russia and Iran in the nine-member states affiliated with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.