Former US president George W Bush’s concept of an “axis of evil”, introduced in his 2002 State of the Union address, came to define the flawed foreign policy decisions of his years in power.
He used it to legitimise both the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing “war on terror”. Bush’s axis of evil included Iraq, Iran and North Korea. They were bound together as long-standing US adversaries, rendered as actively seeking weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and who, he argued, collectively posed a “grave and growing danger” as antagonist regimes capable of attacking the US and its allies.
Rolling into 2024, with a US presidential election on one side, and continuing geopolitical volatility from Ukraine to east Asia on the other, Republicans, in particular, have recently revived the term to explain concurrently the machinations of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
