Amid rapid developments in Moscow and Pyongyang’s strategic alignment, the world has seen them sign a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty. After Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held a summit in the Russian Far East in September last year, they again met in Pyongyang last month to create a formal alliance. It remains to be seen if their ambiguous mutual security commitments were made to ensure immediate military intervention in the event of a full war.
Mainstream Western observers are more concerned whether the pact would boost Russia’s military strength in Ukraine, and bolster North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and threaten regional security. There is also concern that the pact could embolden Pyongyang to make regional and global security more delicate and dangerous.
However, upon closer inspection, these concerns are off the mark.
To assist Russian logistics in the war in Ukraine, Pyongyang reportedly exported about 500 million shells and several dozen ballistic missiles. Certainly, the exports made it much easier for Moscow to take on the Ukrainian armed forces, which have been assisted logistically by the US-led West.
Yet, Russia produces 3 million shells annually, while the West as a whole manufactures only 1.2 million.
Despite mainstream Western war propaganda, Russian forces are already dominant in regional land warfare, and Pyongyang’s arms exports are hardly essential.
On the other hand, without Pyongyang’s supplies, the war of attrition would be more disadvantageous to the US-led West, not Russia, due to continuous and significant increases in energy and other commodity prices, cost-push inflation, mass impoverishment and political instability.
To be fair, North Korea has already obtained nuclear deterrents that would at least be effective in Northeast Asia, which would have little impact on global nuclear proliferation.
Putin is correct in saying that the pact is defensive in nature, as the US’ approach over the past two decades has been geared toward a regime change through economic sanctions, armed attack, mass starvation or breeding rebellion, with the eventual unification of the North into South Korea in mind.
Regardless of occasional skirmishes in border areas initiated by the North, this understanding is consistent with Pyongyang’s most recent defensive moves. It has been placing land mines on the 38 parallel, sending hundreds of balloons filled with filth and garbage to South Korea, and broadcasting propaganda through loudspeakers in border areas.
Under the circumstances, there is little instability on a conventional level as mutual nuclear deterrence is stable.
As shown in Russia’s war in Ukraine, the US is afraid of a conventional war escalating into a tactical nuclear war, and thus would not directly attack a small nuclear-armed power that is allied with Russia, a nuclear superpower.
This means that, with the Moscow-Pyongyang alliance, the US would not be able to overthrow North Korea by force. Obviously, there is now little prospect of a second Korean War that would involve direct combat between the US and Russia. The US could also not overthrow Kim with economic sanctions while Pyongyang enjoys Moscow’s economic aid, especially oil and food.
In addition, as shown by the discontinuance of the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea’s experts panel at the end of April, Moscow has used its veto power to rapidly weaken sanctions. Consequently, countries in the Global South are now able to ignore UN economic sanctions against North Korea and face few practical obstacles in trading goods and materials with the country.
Thus, there is little possibility of North Korea now facing an economic collapse, as the Global South controls an overwhelming portion of energy and other resources, and has substantial industrial manufacturing power.
In contrast, the US-led West chiefly retains US dollar-based financial hegemony ridden with high systemic risks of a gigantic asset bubble burst.
Under these unfavorable circumstances, there is wishful thinking of a discord between Moscow and Beijing. This is because Russia might become more dependent on China as an economic powerhouse. Also, Moscow faces great pressures due to China’s massive population compared with its sparsely populated Siberia and Russian Far East, and Beijing’s growing political economic influence in Central Asia.
Yet, the two countries’ strategic alignment is likely to remain stable for the foreseeable future, including their strategic diplomatic use of North Korea, due to their common front against the US-led West.
There seems to be a clear division of labor between Moscow and Beijing in which the former openly supports North Korea because it has already undergone full economic sanctions and is no longer worried about them, while the latter extends economic support to Moscow through trade.
Hence, the significance of the Moscow-Pyongyang alliance has to be understood in a global structural context, not from a regional security policy perspective. More concretely, North Korea is no longer a wild card under the US-led international system, with Russia and China as major obstructionist powers, but is now a useful pawn firmly placed in Russia’s orbit.
In this evolving structure, Japan and South Korea have to do more regarding their own self-defense, because the US can neither directly fight North Korea or Russia due to the risks of nuclear escalation.
Masahiro Matsumura is professor of international politics and national security at the faculty of law of St Andrew’s University in Osaka and a Taiwan Fellow at the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei.
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