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Russia, under President Vladimir V. Putin, and China, under President Xi Jinping, have grown increasingly antagonistic toward the West over the past decade, but they have always been united with the United States on at least one geopolitical project: dismantling, or at least containing, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
That is, until the Ukrainian war broke out two years ago.
Putin’s visit to Pyongyang on Wednesday to announce the “mutual assistance in case of aggression” pact was one of the clearest throwbacks to the Cold War and underscored long-faltering efforts by the world’s three largest nuclear powers to prevent North Korea’s nuclear proliferation. Putin and North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, held a memorial service just after the incident.
Mr. Putin has not only abandoned any desire to ensure nuclear deterrence: He has promised unspecified technical assistance that would help North Korea design a warhead that could survive re-entry into the atmosphere and threaten a host of adversaries, including the United States, if it included some of the key technologies that Mr. Kim has been trying to perfect.
Nowhere in Wednesday’s statement was there any suggestion that North Korea should give up its estimated 50 to 60 nuclear weapons. Instead, Putin declared that “North Korea has the right to take appropriate measures to strengthen its defense capabilities, ensure national security and safeguard its sovereignty,” but he did not say whether those measures would include further development of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
The shift is obvious, but what it portends is startling: “This is definitely a return to Cold War-era security guarantees,” says Victor Cha, who worked on North Korea during the George W. Bush administration, which date back to a now-defunct 1961 mutual defense treaty between Pyongyang and Moscow.
But the deal is “based on mutual trade needs — artillery for Russia and cutting-edge military technology for North Korea,” said Cha, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The two countries are not bound together by ideology, as they were in the Cold War, but by their shared opposition to the U.S. and the Western liberal order,” he added.
Cha said the new agreement was almost certain to further formalize the security alliance between Japan, South Korea and the United States amid growing threats from North Korea.
The Russians predicted what was going to happen 18 months ago.
Needing more artillery to bolster the war effort in Ukraine, Putin asked Kim Jong Un for a small helping of ammunition in late 2022. That trickle has now reportedly turned into a flood: Western intelligence agencies estimate 5 million rounds of ammunition and a growing stockpile of North Korean-made munitions packed into 11,000 shipping containers the State Department said were full of weapons. Ballistic missiles followed.
This reflects the fact that, perhaps for the first time in history, North Korea has a valuable bargaining chip that one of its allies needs in a conflict with the West: North Korea is a prodigious weapons producer.
At first, Kim was happy to receive oil and food in return, but intelligence analyses circulating in Washington and Europe are raising concerns that the North Korean leader is now determined to overcome the last major technical hurdle to turning his country into a full-fledged nuclear power: the ability to reach any U.S. city with nuclear weapons, officials say.
Russia holds the keys, the question is whether Russia is willing to hand them over.
“Russia’s need for help in Ukraine has forced it to make long-sought concessions to China, North Korea and Iran,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told Congress in March. “Among other things, this could undermine long-held nuclear nonproliferation norms.”
In closed-door classified meetings, she was far more specific, briefing key members of Congress on a series of techniques that Kim has not yet shown he can master — mostly related to keeping nuclear warheads 6,000 miles above the ground and ensuring they survive re-entry into the atmosphere and can hit their targets with precision.
It’s a step that successive US presidents have said is unacceptable. Before the end of talks in Pyongyang this week, Cha wrote that the possibility of Russia supporting North Korea “poses the greatest threat to US national security since the Korean War.”
“This relationship is deeply historically rooted and has been reinvigorated by the war in Ukraine, but it undermines the security of Europe, Asia and the U.S. homeland. With top priorities like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the administration is putting this issue on the back burner at its own peril,” he argued.
Of course, Washington has been warned many times about the dangers of North Korea’s nuclear weapons since its first nuclear test 18 years ago, and they have become the background music to much geopolitical upheaval.
Kim has also signaled a willingness to attack the US with means other than nuclear weapons. North Korea hacked Sony Pictures a decade ago, taking away much of the studio’s computer power. The attack was triggered by Sony’s decision to release “The Interview,” a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco about two journalists sent to assassinate Kim.
In many ways, it set the stage for modern cyberwarfare, with North Korea funding its expanding nuclear program by hacking central banks and other vested Western targets.
A seemingly endless series of UN financial sanctions failed to halt either North Korea’s nuclear expansion or its closely linked missile program. US sabotage worked, but only for short periods.
That means the United States has no choice but to rely on the cold calculations of deterrence: long-range bomber exercises to remind North Korea that an attack on the United States or its allies would almost certainly result in its own destruction. But a credible security pact with Moscow would complicate that reasoning by suggesting that Russia could strike back on North Korea’s behalf. But the terms of Wednesday’s agreement were not clearly explained.
Putin’s announcement on Wednesday is also a reminder that North Korea’s continuing success in developing a nuclear weapon is one of Washington’s greatest bipartisan failures. It began with the Clinton administration, when in 1994, facing a new crisis with North Korea, the administration considered halting any new nuclear program before North Korea had built even one nuclear weapon.
President Bill Clinton backed off the talks, convinced diplomacy was the better way to go, and this marked the beginning of three decades of on-and-off negotiations, with China and Russia coming to the aid of North Korea as part of the “Six-Party Talks” aimed at buying out its nuclear program.
When that collapsed, sanctions were imposed and a UN monitor mission was set up that was supposed to publicly provide evidence of sanctions evasion. When the UN recently mooted the idea of reinstating the monitor mission, Russia successfully led the effort to remove it, at least for now.
Now the United States, Japan, South Korea and other allies have two immediate challenges: First, preventing the transfer of technology that Kim Jong Un has on his buying list, which Cha and other experts say includes the means to build silent nuclear submarines and techniques to evade missile defenses.
U.S. intelligence reports say Mr. Putin has provided North Korea with missile blueprints in the past, but there is little evidence of cooperation on actual nuclear weapons. North Korea now has influence. Keeping its artillery storehouses open for Mr. Putin may depend on Mr. Kim getting his way.
And no one is watching this situation more closely than Iran, which is also supplying drones to Russia. U.S. officials believe the two countries are discussing missiles. And last week, Iran stepped up pressure on Israel and the United States, saying it was installing advanced centrifuges that could quickly turn Iran’s fuel stockpiles into the materials needed to build three nuclear weapons, deep inside an underground facility that Israel may not be able to reach with its bunker-buster bombs.
If North Korea’s ploy is successful, Iran might also see an interest in drawing closer with Russia, and Putin might decide he has little to lose.
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