Toothless US threats won’t scare North Korea away from Russia cooperation
Tom Rogan
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Reports suggest that Kim Jong Un will soon travel to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin. Putin’s meeting with North Korea’s leader is likely to take place in the Pacific coastal city of Vladivostok, close to the North Korean border.
The discussions will center on Russia’s acquisition of North Korean artillery rounds. Facing Ukraine’s counteroffensive, artillery munition shortages have become an increasing crisis for Russia — a problem that affects Russia’s battlefield potential and its troop morale. In turn, the United States is opposed to North Korea providing this support to Russia. Washington rightly wants Ukraine to retain the strategic initiative. Washington’s problem? The costs it can impose on North Korea for providing arms to Russia are far outweighed by the benefits Kim can secure by doing so.
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On Tuesday, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned that any arms provision to Russia was “not going to reflect well on North Korea and they will pay a price for this in the international community.”
This threat exists in rhetorical form only. It is not credible.
Kim cares very little, perhaps not at all, as to how his actions “reflect” on North Korea’s international standing. He knows that the international community isn’t going to impose significantly stronger sanctions on his regime. Yes, the U.S. and the European Union might sanction a few additional North Korean front companies and citizens. But the impact of these sanctions would be marginal. Beijing and Moscow would block any major new sanctions at the United Nations. Indeed, those nations that border North Korea already ignore existing U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang. Sino-Russian smuggling to and from North Korea is rife. Kim will recognize that the U.S. is highly unlikely to engage in a naval blockade or another form of escalation in order to prevent North Korea from supporting Putin. And Kim knows that both China and Russia see him as a tool with which to strain the U.S., rather than as a problematic nuclear-armed despot.
In contrast, Kim’s engagement with Putin offers tantalizing prospects. Just as China benefits greatly from increasing Russian submarine warfare instruction, for example, North Korea can learn a great deal from Russia in terms of missile and satellite technology, signals intelligence, and nuclear weapons and technology. Putin’s desperate need to maximize his armament supplies means that he might now be willing to provide this technical support where otherwise he would not.
That support offers Kim a chance to overcome complicated obstacles to his military development and thus pose a heightened threat to the U.S., South Korea, and Japan — a more significant threat, Kim will hope, that he can then leverage to extract economic concessions. Even if Putin limits his sharing of technical knowledge, Kim will surely receive energy supplies and foreign capital in return for his provisions to Russia. The decrepit state of the North Korean economy and its starving population make those supplies highly desirable.
Top line: Kim is as likely to be scared by Sullivan’s threats as he is interested in going on a diet.