In the international battle for power and influence, North Korea is moving ever closer to Russia and China — and abandoning what was once a desire for engagement with the United States. Pyongyang’s hardening position is one more sign of a global realignment taking place in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
As conflict rages in the heart of Europe, the world is dividing more sharply into East and West. The United States’ partnerships are stronger but so is the intensity of the adversarial camp. North Korea and Iran are supplying weapons to an embattled Russia, according to the White House. Swing states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey are trying to hedge their bets between the battling superpowers.
North Korea has been a rogue state since the 1950s, but its recent behavior has been extreme, even by Pyongyang’s standards. It fired volleys of rockets and artillery in October, sent scores of jets aloft to menace South Korea this month, and adopted a new law in September promising a nuclear strike “automatically and immediately” if its leadership is attacked.
Such truculent behavior illustrates one hidden cost of the Ukraine war. With near-daily Russian threats to use nuclear weapons against Kyiv, smaller nations fear they need nuclear weapons for their survival — and know that if they have them, they should never consider giving them up, as Ukraine agreed to in 1994.
“This war has unfortunately raised the perceived deterrent value of nuclear weapons”, wrote Mayumi Fukushima, a former senior Japanese diplomat and security expert, in an April article in War on the Rocks.
Since the Ukraine conflict began in February, North Korea has taken dramatic steps to toughen its nuclear doctrine, reject any denuclearization negotiations with the United States, and draw closer to the autocratic alliance between Russia and China. Kim Jong Un’s aspirations for a deal with Washington, evidenced by what President Donald Trump called “love letters” pursuing one, appear to have evaporated.
“All the signs suggest that there has been a fundamental shift in North Korea’s thinking”, argued Robert Carlin, who was for many years the CIA’s leading analyst of North Korea, in a note to me this week. He contends that after the breakdown of Kim’s talks with Trump in Hanoi in 2019, “normal relations with the U.S. no longer seemed attainable … [or] worth the candle. If China was on the rise and the U.S. in decline in the Asia-Pacific, it made no sense for the North to put any eggs in the U.S. basket”.
North Korea, for decades, wanted a U.S. counterweight to Russia and China, but apparently no more. Rachel Minyoung Lee, a Korea analyst with the Stimson Center, argued last week in 38 North that Pyongyang’s recent tilt “seems to spell the end of a strategic decision made 30 years ago by Kim Il Sung to normalize relations with Washington as a buffer against Beijing and Moscow”.
This strategic shift was partly a reaction to the “no limits” friendship pact signed in February by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Their proclamation of a “new global order”, followed shortly by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was an “inflection point” for Kim, argues Lee. She quotes Kim’s assessment in a September speech that “the change from a unipolar world advocated by the U.S. into a multipolar world is being accelerated significantly”.
Kim has been newly solicitous of Moscow and Beijing. He quickly endorsed independence for the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine. He backed China’s crackdown on Hong Kong and its menacing moves toward Taiwan. According to Carlin, North Korea’s defense ministry said in August that it would “closely wage strategic and tactical coordinated operations” with the Chinese military.
Kim has raced to bolster North Korea’s own nuclear deterrent. In April, he announced that he would augment his nuclear weapons capability “at the fastest possible speed”. In September came the law mandating a nuclear counterattack if he is ever threatened. Perhaps most important, Kim has rejected any possibility of giving up his nuclear weapons. “We have drawn the line of no retreat regarding our nuclear weapons so there will no longer be any bargaining over them”, he said in a September speech. “There will never be … denuclearization”.
The Biden administration has noted these worrying actions by Pyongyang. But a senior State Department official said on Tuesday that it is “too soon to tell if it’s a fundamental shift” in policy. The administration has signaled North Korea since President Biden took office that it is ready to talk anytime, anywhere, without preconditions. But North Korea hasn’t responded, other than with belligerent public rhetoric and launching more than 60 ballistic missiles this year.
Kim is indisputably right about one thing. Russia and China are seeking a new world system to replace the U.S.-led “rules-based order”, as Biden calls it. Ukraine is the main front where that battle is being waged, but it isn’t the only one.
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “The Paladin”.