John Jefferson
On November 29, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, met the Russian defense minister and declared steadfast support for Russia’s ongoing operations in Ukraine. The two countries vowed to defend each other’s sovereign interests, boost their ongoing partnership and defend their territorial integrity from “the imperialists,” in the words of the North’s Korean Central News Agency.
Earlier in 2024, North Korea reportedly dispatched 10,000 troops to aid in Russia’s mission in Ukraine, earning the ire of not just the US but South Korea, who threatened unspecified countermeasures. The Democratic Party–aligned Center for a New American Security has termed this partnership, along with China and Iran, the “Axis of Upheaval.”
Such concerns may be overstated, but the North continues to breathe murderous threats against its neighbors and support irredentist claims of its great power partners, which could destabilize the crucial Indo-Pacific region. Until about a decade ago such a development looked fanciful – the North was largely isolated on the international stage and Vladimir Putin’s Russia looked like one of the least likely candidates to bring them out of seclusion.
Now, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, are conditions ripe for a deal to lower tensions? Readers are not advised to hold their breath.
First, some historical context. Since the late 19th century, “great” powers have surrounded the Korean Peninsula on all sides, with Japan to the east, China to the west, and Russia to the north. Its position as a potential land bridge onto the Asian, specifically Chinese, land has imbued it with a specific strategic importance that the peninsula’s wealth and military might not have suggested.
By the late 19th century, with the rise of Imperial Japan and decline of China’s Qing Dynasty the contest for influence accelerated. The Qing asserted their traditional status as the “big brother” of the region in the hierarchy of Confucian international relations, while Japan sought to grow their influence there so they could take advantage of trade and cast themselves in the elder sibling’s role in the region. This led to the first Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95, which ended in Japanese victory and sounded the Qing’s death knell, culminating in their 1912 overthrow.
Around this time Russia, itself a declining empire (though it may not have known it at the time), began to seek influence of its own, cozying up to the Korean monarchy—and in one notorious 1895–96 period, sheltering the king at its legation for a year after Japanese agents, enabled by Korean collaborators, murdered the Korean queen. Eventually its ambitions, and those of Tokyo, led to the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05, which settled not only the question of who would dominate the Korean Peninsula, but also Manchuria. In the decades that followed Japan annexed Korea in 1910, used it as an entry point for seizing Manchuria in 1931, and eventually went to war with the United States and its allies over who would dominate Asia and the Pacific. Russia, for its part, saw its empire collapse in 1917 with the turn to communism; the triumph of Joseph Stalin’s self-interested “socialism in one country” over Leon Trotsky’s more internationalist vision of “permanent revolution” followed.
But to be self-interested does not preclude interest in the outside world, especially when the outside world is interested in you. The Soviets’ lessons from the wartime period – lessons which Russia has adhered to even after communism’s fall—were that it was in Moscow’s to establish buffer zones, in the form of friendly countries on both sides of its territory. While Americans may know of the Iron Curtain that fell across Eastern Europe in the post–Second World War period, they may be less familiar with Russia’s late entry into the Pacific theater in 1945—it only declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945, two days after Hiroshima—at which point they finally took Manchuria from Japan and then began to move toward Korea. Rather than fight Moscow over the peninsula or surrender it entirely to communist influence, the U.S. proposed dividing it into administrative zones. When the Soviets agreed, the division of the Korean Peninsula began, with the U.S.-aligned South and USSR-backed North splitting into opposing camps—the longest ongoing national division in the world.
To foster friendly ties, the USSR sent the new Northern regime weapons, but also expertise in the form of advisors and a host of ethnically Korean but Soviet-born and -bred officials who staffed the regime in its early days. The Soviets could even, if they desired, take credit for the Kim dynasty itself, having installed Kim Il Sung—a veteran guerrilla leader who had fought alongside the Chinese Communist Party in Manchuria, but who had shown few political ambitions—as North Korea’s leader rather than a domestic leftist they saw less potential for control over.
And for many years it was assumed they succeeded in their efforts. Americans believed the Soviets had pushed the North to invade the South in 1950. Newspapers in both the US and South Korea labeled the North Koreans “puppets” of Moscow. It was assumed in the early 1990s that the collapse of the USSR and Eastern Bloc would eventually prompt the collapse of the Pyongyang regime—especially when Kim Il Sung, the only leader North Korea had known, died in 1994.
What would not be clear until much later, namely the opening of Soviet archives after the fall of communism, is how independent North Korea had been all along. Kim Il Sung, not the Soviets, had pushed for the 1950 invasion, eventually getting Stalin to sign off and Mao Zedong to serve as insurance, leading first to Chinese intervention after the tide turned against the North in late 1950 and then eventual stalemate. Kim in the postwar period moved to consolidate power by purging the Soviet Koreans from the upper levels of his government (along with pro-China Koreans and leftists active on the peninsula during Japanese colonization). Then, as Moscow and Beijing’s relations devolved into the Sino–Soviet split, North Korea proceeded to play the two against each other for its favor—at first siding with the more militant CCP against Khrushchev’s reforms but then, during the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, switching back to the Soviets.
Moscow has never written off the importance of the Korean Peninsula, however; nor has North Korea not seen Russia as at least a potential partner.
Except, possibly, for a brief period after the Iron Curtain’s collapse. By the time the Russian Federation government of Boris Yeltsin took office in 1991, the two Koreas’ contest for legitimacy appeared to have a clear winner. Following South Korea’s economic acceleration in the period spanning the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s they far outstripped the North in terms of gross domestic product and technological advancement. Impressed by Seoul’s hosting of the 1988 Olympics, the Eastern Bloc countries began normalizing ties with South Korea, and in 1990, amid a late and ultimately doomed effort to solve its economic disintegration, the Soviet Union established official relations with Seoul for an aid package, breaking military cooperation with the North. The Soviets nevertheless collapsed a year later, but Yeltsin tained this trend, working to consolidate ties with the South and largely ignoring the North.
Yet the North did not collapse. Whether due to nationalism, willingness to dispense with communist ideas when convenient, the regime’s successful isolation of its population from outside influence, or a combination of all three, Pyongyang defied the predictions of observers. Despite the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, and a catastrophic famine that began that year (worsened by the loss of Soviet aid), North Korea persisted, turning to a nuclear weapons program to ward off foreign interference and provide propaganda victories.
By the time Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin in 1999, the durability of Pyongyang’s regime was clear, and Russia stepped up its engagement with the North, judging Yeltsin’s clear favoritism of the South a mistake, as it meant neither Korea felt the need to compete for Moscow’s favor. Putin’s approach to the peninsula—characterized by stated opposition to North Korea’s nuclear program but a belief that the matter should be settled by dialogue, rather than sanctions—came to be known as “standing on two legs.”
And a holding pattern persisted on the peninsula for the decade and a half following Putin’s rise to power. Russia, along with China, sought to play mediator on the Korean Peninsula. It engaged both Korean capitals and discussed regional integration projects, though these were usually dismissed by the isolationist North. It usually—not always, but usually—exercised its veto power as a UN permanent member to prevent sanctions on the North over its nuclear and missile programs, especially if they and Beijing feared the penalties threatened to destabilize the region. The U.S. and its partners, who still engaged heavily with Moscow and Beijing, implored them to take a sterner line on the North to rein in the nuclear program they claimed to oppose, and were frustrated by the lack of response.
Nonetheless, they could console themselves in knowing that the forces of liberalism had won the Cold War, and the international institutions built up after the Second World War had prevailed—the Soviet Union had collapsed, unable to compete with it, while China had reformed its economy to better engage with the international community. Even South Korea, a military dictatorship in its economic reform period, had liberalized to accommodate the international expectations of democracy and laissez-faire economics, characterized by free trade.
It was only a matter of time until North Korea did the same.
Or so it seemed. In retrospect, 2014 had historic implications not appreciated at the time. Russia reacted to conflict in Ukraine between forces supportive of Moscow and those who desired to move closer to the European Union by invading and seizing the Crimean Peninsula. Though the EU and U.S. spoke harsh words and imposed sanctions, they ultimately acquiesced to the annexation in all but name.
North Korea, long treated as a nuisance with nukes, received a great deal more attention that year when a United Nations commission of inquiry released a detailed human rights report on the country condemning (among other things) a lack of domestic liberties, extreme punishments for border crossers into China (including forced abortions for women who come back pregnant), and criminal negligence during the famine of the 1990s. The UN took up the report’s findings, which included recommending referral of current leader Kim Jong Un—Kim Il Sung’s grandson—to the Hague for trial, but thanks to the veto power of Russia and China could impose no penalties. The matter fizzled for lack of attention; it certainly did not help that one of the commission’s star witnesses, defector Shin Dong-hyuk, eventually admitted to making up parts of his story.
That year’s events may have been the proof that globalization’s pressures could be resisted, that liberal democracy was not inevitable, and that history had not, in fact, ended. The ramifications of the year were not fully felt for some time, though, as North Korea, ironically enough, had not given up on the United States.
Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, a pair of North Korea experts who have for years argued for engagement with the regime, as well as carrying such engagement out themselves via track-2 dialogues, wrote in January 2024 that, despite outward appearances, North Korea had sought normalization with the U.S. between 1990 and 2019. This argument is not as implausible as it may seem, given that by the 1990s the North had begun negotiations with the first Bush administration, the Soviet Union was on its way out, and the PRC had embraced capitalism. The North did not stop embracing the nuclear weapons and long-range missiles the U.S. detested, but even this can be seen as the North seeking to engage the U.S. from a position of strength. Evidence for this can be found in the first administration of Donald Trump, as the North carried out its sixth (and at the time of writing, final) nuclear test, claiming to have acquired hydrogen-bomb technology, and tested a long-range missile capable of reaching any part of the continental U.S., all of which had happened by late 2017.
Scholars of recent American foreign policy will note that the North began to open itself up to dialogue with the U.S. early the next year. It was a historic event; Trump became the first sitting president to meet a North Korean leader, the two sides spoke of a wish for peace and denuclearization of the peninsula, and seemed to demonstrate a real personal affinity for one another.
It was not to be. Eyewitness accounts from their second summit in early 2019 suggest that Kim Jong Un arrived in Hanoi expecting a very favorable deal—one leaving most of his nuclear capability intact and resulting in considerable U.S. concessions on sanctions. Trump’s efforts at finding a middle ground left Kim unmoved, and therefore the U.S. side walked away. Disappointed at the results of the discussion, and with Trump departing from the White House in 2021 for a far less bold Biden administration, Kim seemingly sought an entirely different tack.
The Carlin and Hecker piece mentioned above did not get most of the attention it generated for its observation of the Kim regime’s change in views toward the United States. Rather, it was for its provocative title of “Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?” and its assertion, early in the piece, that the Korean Peninsula is at its most dangerous state since just before the Korean War outbreak in 1950. Carlin and Hecker answered the question of their headline “yes,” arguing that Kim has indeed “made a strategic decision to go to war.”
This looks like hyperbole, at least for now. Kim’s regime is certainly behaving differently than in the 2010s, declaring that South Korea’s corruption means peninsular reunification cannot be achieved, and seeking new arms for itself such as tactical nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, and train-mounted missile launchers that make invasion of the North an even less appetizing prospect than before. But it is not behaving like a regime that has its back against the wall, prepared to unleash a conflict that would devastate it and the rest of the region.
And Russia’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine appears to have opened opportunities for Pyongyang to capitalize on. North Korea was full-throated in its support for Putin’s invasion early on, including recognizing its annexation of territory. In late 2023 its cooperation with Moscow expanded; Pyongyang reportedly began supplying Russia with munitions in exchange for Russia’s advice on its space program, and early this year reports began circulating that it would begin sending troops.
This signifies two things. First, Russia appears to have resumed its traditional role as the North’s counterbalancing power against China. China has been, and will for the foreseeable future be, the primary source of North Korea’s trade, but it has not provided the North support for its space program, nor has it taken the step Moscow took in early 2024 of killing the UN panel of experts, whose reports are central to efforts to rein in the North’s efforts at earning currency to support its WMD programs. Since the U.S. has declined to be the North’s other partner, Russia has stepped in to fill the void.
Second, the so-called “liberal order” has lost whatever appeal it once had to nations like North Korea. Just as the North’s extreme nationalism may have insulated it from the factors that toppled its former communist partners, the 21st century has seen the resurgence of national interest over international “norms.” China and Russia have both been forthright in recent years about their view that nations under the broad umbrella of “Global South” will write the rules of the 21st century, with national sovereignty as a more important uniting principle than democracy or universal human rights. North Korea is not the only example of countries putting their weight behind this vision—Iran, under the recently deceased President Ebrahim Raisi, responded to the collapse of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action by aligning more closely with China and Russia. But it is North Korea’s recent changes where the difference between 2024 and 2016 can be seen most visibly.
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has resulted in optimism for proponents of North Korea engagement, and concern for those who see such engagement as ill-advised. The former believe Trump can use his rapport with the North to establish a breakthrough on the peninsula and lower the tension, if not resolve the conflict outright. The latter believe North Korea will use this decline in tensions as a brief reprieve to end the international pressures it faces, then resume attempting to bully South Korea and threaten Japan.
Both may be misreading the situation. Donald Trump tried a couple very different approaches to resolving the Korean Peninsular standoff: threats of decisive military action to warn the North away from nuclear proliferation and direct engagement. Trump, however, never appeased the North—even in his engagement he wanted the North to turn decisively away from nuclear stockpiling and building the capacity to threaten the U.S. When the North refused, talks broke down.
There is always a chance of such a development, but supporters of engagement are urged not to get their hopes up. Like any self-avowed dealmaker, Donald Trump will not seek a deal that that involves unilateral concessions—and with Russia currently enabling the North, Pyongyang may not see the need to concede anything itself. It is also a nonstarter to expect Trump to butt out of the Indo-Pacific region entirely and declare the Korean Peninsula, and region as a whole, are not America’s problem—too much trade travels through the continent and its surrounding waterways, and for the U.S. no longer to play a role in deterring regional conflict via its system of alliances would invite conflicts of the sort for which Trump roundly criticized the Biden administration.
Yet the lessons of history re applicable: Moscow and Pyongyang have seen tight ties before, only for the North to sour on them and switch to favoring China. If Trump continues to engage and signal to the North a willingness to make a deal—perhaps one that supports the North’s space exploration in return for a verifiable cap on its weapons development—it may yet meet the North’s price. The “liberal order” the U.S. once championed may be past its sell-by date, but there are still advantages to not being America’s enemy.
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