Kim and Putin recreate Cold War

 

The Cold War has returned to the Korean Peninsula after more than 30 years. And it is colder than ever.

The meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East marks a significant watershed.

The two reportedly negotiated arms deals, with North Korea supplying artillery shells and other conventional ammunition to support Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. In return, North Korea is expected to receive food and fuel aid from Russia as well as dual-use satellite technology that could benefit its long-range missile program.

Although the details of any technology transfer remain obscure, there has been persistent speculation that Russia is considering furnishing a variety of sophisticated weaponry to North Korea, including advanced fighter jets and even nuclear submarines.

After meeting Putin, Kim toured an aircraft plant that produces Su-35 and Su-37 combat fighters as well as a naval base to review a Russian frigate. He reportedly left Russia with a parting gift of drones, itself a sanctions violation.

Closer military cooperation between North Korea and Russia would have been unthinkable just a few years ago since Moscow supported U.N. sanctions that barred such arms transfers. But some experts, such as Theodore Postol from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have detected signs that Russia may already have violated this boundary by supplying an apparent turnkey Topol-M ICBM to North Korea, which has used them as the basis for its solid-fuel Hwasong-18 missile.

Putin is cagey about whether he is willing to violate U.N. sanctions by forging closer military cooperation with North Korea. “There are certain restrictions, and Russia complies with them. But there are things we can discuss and think about. There are prospects here, too,” he said after the summit with Kim. Other Russian officials say they see no contradiction in Russia adhering to U.N. sanctions while entering “a new phase” in relations with Pyongyang.

While the international media has focused on what impact the Kim-Putin summit will have on the war in Ukraine, the most important aspect of the meeting could be the topic of what happens in Northeast Asia as the ramifications of the Ukraine conflict continue to ripple across the world.

The summit signifies that Pyongyang has given up on normalizing relations with Washington, which exposes the bankruptcy of current U.S. policy that has relied more on coercion rather than diplomacy to end North Korea’s nuclear program.

An example of this was the recent trilateral Camp David agreement between the U.S., South Korea and Japan designed to shore up the hub-and-spoke American military alliance structure in East Asia. Meanwhile, Seoul is indirectly supplying artillery and munitions to Ukraine via Poland.

One of the cardinal principles of the “realist school” of international relations is the so-called “action-reaction” dynamic, where an action by one side leads to a push-back from the other side. The Camp David agreement could thus be seen as a driver for closer military cooperation between North Korea and Russia and possibly China.

Signs of this were already apparent in July when high-ranking delegations from Russia and China attended North Korean celebrations of the 1953 armistice that halted Korean War fighting.

The outcome of the Kim-Putin meeting will have several other important consequences. It will likely make Pyongyang more confident and more assertive in building up its military arsenal.

If Russia is willing to resume military deliveries to North Korea, it would confirm that the U.N. sanctions against North Korea are now a dead letter. Moscow and Beijing, both U.N. Security Council members, have already made clear that they will not support future U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang.

The recent events have turned the clock back to the early 1990s when the first moves were being made by the West to engage North Korea in an effort to break the Cold War stalemate on the Korean Peninsula.

Russia and China were willing to support these Western efforts by putting pressure on North Korea. For nearly three decades, that policy appeared to yield dividends as Moscow and Beijing engaged in multilateral negotiations, such as the six-party talks, and supported international sanctions at the U.N. as recently as several years ago.

But that era has now come to an end. North Korea is more well-armed than it has ever been and the opposing military alliances in the region are once again being strengthened.

John Merrill is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Korean Studies at George Washington University.