Opinion | Back to the future - assessing the significance of the DPRK-Russia treaty

By Tom Fowdy

Last week when Russian President Vladimir Putin visited North Korea, the world was watching. The Western media sought to portray the trip, his visit to the country in 24 years, as a desperate act by an isolated "pariah" seeking to shore up whatever support he could for his faltering war in Ukraine. Even though the two countries signed a "mutual defense agreement", in the eyes of the world, Pyongyang is hardly such a partner to be boasting of on paper, is it? While it is a nuclear weapons state, North Korea is for all intents and purposes one of the most isolated countries in the world with an impoverished economy, pushed under the weight of comprehensive UN and US sanctions.

Despite this, it would be naïve to say that this new partnership is not without any geopolitical or military significance. It very much is, even if for the wrong reasons. In fact, as someone who has analyzed Korean Peninsula issues for years, it is very much clear the new DPRK-Russia relationship formalizes in stone a change in paradigm which began with the Ukraine war itself, and the death kneel of the "unilateral isolation" in which Pyongyang experienced from the end of the Cold War (1991) to 2019, whereby Moscow and Beijing tentatively (if not superficially) coordinated with the US on putting pressure on North Korea to end its nuclear weapons programs. This door has been closed.

North Korea's foreign policy has always been premised on attaining maximum sovereignty in an environment of extreme insecurity, even at the expense of its own population, which is what developed its own unique brand of totalitarianism. Although created with the assistance of the Soviet Union, Kim Il-Sung sought to prevent the DPRK from becoming a client state of Moscow and Beijing, even as they supported him. To do this, he created the "Juche" ideology, which emphasized independence from the outside world, purged every single individual who was not loyal to him and built an all-embracing personality cult around himself, tying his identity to the state. In doing so, he adopted the strategy of effectively "playing" the two Communist powers against each other to attain maximum benefit for himself.

The fundamental lesson we take from this is that North Korea owes true loyalty to nobody, even to those it describes as allies. The collapse of the USSR and the dawn of American hegemony subsequently isolated North Korea and destroyed its economy in the process. While the 1990s beckoned total isolation, and thus famine, as Moscow and Beijing courted closer ties with the US, with Beijing eventually rekindling lukewarm ties with Pyongyang and offering a lifeline in the 2000s, coming to fear the impact of the collapse of the regime. The legacy of the Bush era would, however, turn the DPRK irreversibly toward the path of obtaining nuclear weapons.

Not only did North Korea fear US military intervention, but also as an impoverished state with no ability to protect power at all, it was the only rational incentive its leaders had to force themselves to be taken seriously. For the 2000s and 2010s, both China and Russia were in fact happy to cooperate with the United States in preventing the DPRK from serving as a threat to regional stability, even amidst the horrific "fire and fury" tensions with the US. But after Trump attempted to handle North Korea, he then decided to reset US policy towards geopolitical competition and attempt to contain China. By 2020, this broke any serious cooperation the US had with China. Then, as the final nail in the coffin, Russia's action toward Ukraine ultimately etched this new landscape in stone.

The consequences of this are that North Korea has gone from being a country of irrelevance to a country of value again. Our interpretation of North Korea's "isolation" is in fact relative to the US unipolar landscape of the 1990s. This is no longer relevant. Instead, Pyongyang now has formalized alliances with both Moscow and Beijing and is therefore able to play between their strategic anxieties accordingly and extract concessions. Kim Jong-un knows this, which is why he has now dismantled the whole peace process with South Korea, as on the other hand has Yoon Seok Yeol, and likewise, has no need to negotiate with the United States anymore. We should expect Kim Jong-un to have increased leverage to escalate tensions and will seek to pry Beijing and Seoul apart.

Once upon a time, it was forecasted by many analysts that in the aftermath of the Cold War, North Korea would cease to exist. In his 2011 book "The Impossible State", US NeoConservative figure Victor Cha likewise penned a chapter proclaiming "The End is Near" following the death of Kim Jong Il. Yet, we now face a Korean Peninsula once again returning to the same forces that divided in the first place, the only difference this time is that North Korea has a bigger than even before, South Korea is economically intertwined with China, and Putin is likely to enable Pyongyang's path to becoming a fully-fledged nuclear state. North Korea's people have nothing, but Kim now has all the cards.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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