Getting inside the mind of any dictator is a challenge — and Kim is among the most hermitic. So North Korea experts have been left to draw their own alarming conclusions from his recent behavior. Just last week, Kim told his own parliament North Korea was abandoning efforts to reunify with South Korea, a project his father championed. Then, to drive the point home, he literally demolished the monument to reunification that stood for decades in Pyongyang.
On top of that, Kim is regularly firing cruise missiles in the direction of his neighbors, deployed a military satellite successfully for the first time and, according to newly released satellite imagery, has started operations at a new nuclear reactor. Some prominent North Korea experts read those tea leaves and conclude Kim is getting ready for battle.
“We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” the respected North Korea scholars Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker wrote earlier this month.
Kim’s turn away from diplomacy with Washington and his abandonment of reunification with South Korea are signals that his fundamental worldview has changed, these experts argue. That seems right. But the two experts might be jumping to the conclusion that Kim is preparing his people and his military actually to fight.
More likely, Kim’s fiery rhetoric and increased threats are meant to distract both the West and his own people from his real priority: to advance his blossoming partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin. By raising tensions with Washington and Seoul, Kim can justify his use of North Korea’s money and industry for its weapons business rather than feeding its people, Stimson Center senior fellow Jenny Town told me.
“It creates a nationalist purpose for restarting their military industry and funneling resources back into their military manufacturing,” she said. “You don’t start a war when you are sending vast amounts of munitions and missiles to another country to help them fight a war.”
Ever since the war in Ukraine began, Moscow and Pyongyang have been growing closer. Last September, Kim and Putin met in Russia’s Far East to tour space launch facilities and eat crab dumplings. North Korea’s foreign minister was in Moscow last week. After the meeting, North Korea’s state media said Putin was invited to Pyongyang and called him “the Korean people’s closest friend,” a passive-aggressive dig at Beijing.
“We are no longer dealing with North Korea in isolation,” said Town. “We are now dealing with North Korea in partnership with the Russians.”
Both countries have denied that North Korea is transferring arms to Russia, but the evidence is piling up. In 2022, North Korea began sending more than a million pieces of ammunition to help Russia kill Ukrainians, according to U.S. officials. Lately, Kim has upped his transfers to include advanced weapons.
On Jan. 4, the Biden administration said North Korean ballistic missiles were fired by Russian forces on Ukrainian targets multiple times, calling it a “significant and concerning escalation in the DPRK’s support for Russia.” In a Jan. 10 U.N. Security Council meeting, the South Korean government said Pyongyang was using Ukraine as a “test site” for its illicit missile program.
In return, Russia has protected North Korea from any accountability and in fact seems to be now helping it advance its illicit weapons programs. Russian assistance might explain why North Korea is making so much progress lately on its military satellite and advanced missile systems. More broadly, the growing Russia-North Korea alliance is slowly but surely degrading any U.S. claim that either country is isolated by Western sanctions.
Even worse, every time a North Korean weapon kills a Ukrainian, that’s a sales pitch for Pyongyang’s weapons industry to any aggressor with cash on hand. Considering the long relationship between North Korea and Iran, it is no surprise North Korean weapons are reportedly also being used today by Hamas. With demand around the world skyrocketing, North Korea’s weapons manufacturing business could refill Kim’s coffers.
Amid all this, it’s unfortunate the U.S. government doesn’t seem to have any creative North Korea policy besides finger wagging. The Biden administration has bolstered ties with (and between) Japan and South Korea, but alliance management is hardly sufficient. At the very least, the State Department should appoint a North Korea special representative to replace Ambassador Sung Kim, who retired last month.
What’s clear is that Russia, North Korea, Iran and China are all working together to ramp up their capacity to fight in Ukraine and the Middle East for years to come. Leaders in Washington and Brussels can’t even promise support for Ukraine into next month. Until the West acknowledges how all these conflicts are connected, it will be impossible to craft a comprehensive response.
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