There are lies, damn lies and rumors about North Korea. So treat recent reports that Pyongyang will send troops to aid Russia’s assault on Ukraine with more than a grain of salt.
Yet the summit that spurred those rumors, and the North Korea-Russia military alliance it produced, are part of something very real and very worrying — the tightening of ties between America’s adversaries.
Those relationships are racing ahead in ways virtually no one would have predicted a few years ago. The US needs to get ready for a world in which they keep advancing, in surprising and disturbing ways.
The rumors about a potential North Korean deployment to Ukraine were the echo of a remarkable meeting in Pyongyang. Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged to continue building a relationship that has given Russia shells, missiles and bullets for use in Ukraine, in exchange for Russian help with North Korea’s weapons programs and diplomatic support in its confrontation with the international community.
The two leaders also shocked most foreign-affairs analysts by signing a mutual defense treaty that pledges one country to aid the other if it is attacked.
“Relations between our countries have risen to a new high level of alliance,” Kim declared. “This is truly a breakthrough document,” Putin agreed, one that will raise relations “to a new qualitative level.”
The circumstances in which the mutual defense provisions might be invoked are hazy; the pact seems to have been written so that it does not obligate North Korean intervention in Ukraine.
But this new alliance is, nonetheless, a stark manifestation of today’s most important strategic phenomenon — the emergence of a new axis of revisionist powers — and a reminder of how astonishing its recent development has been.
Three years ago, who would have predicted that Russia and China would announce a strategic partnership with “no limits” and “no forbidden areas,” which Putin would then use as diplomatic cover for invading Ukraine? That Putin’s armies would then be sustained by vast quantities of artillery shells, drones and missiles from Iran and North Korea, and by copious economic and technological support from Beijing? Or that Putin would develop what US officials have called a “full-fledged defense partnership” with Iran and sign a formal defense pact with North Korea?
There is, if anything, more to these dealings than meets the eye. Russia and China are cooperating on shadowy defense-technological projects — involving development of helicopters, tactical missiles and missile-launch early warning systems, among other capabilities — that alarm US officials because they may hasten Beijing’s military development in destabilizing ways.
North Korea and Iran are presumably instructing Putin’s newly isolated government in the dark art of sanctions evasion, a discipline in which these rogue states truly are world leaders. North Korea could also dispatch some of its excess workers to man Russian military production lines. Meanwhile, Pyongyang and Tehran are learning valuable lessons from how Russia has used their drones and missiles in Ukraine.
Case in point: Iran’s attack on Israel in April looked suspiciously like Russia’s attacks against Ukraine, in which drones and slow-flying cruise missiles saturate a country’s air defenses, clearing a path for fast-flying ballistic missiles to pound the target. Iran’s attack failed, but only thanks to the extraordinary efforts of a rival alliance: The US and its partners shot down most of Tehran’s drones before they reached Israeli airspace.
It’s true, of course, that there is little trust within these autocratic relationships. But don’t underestimate the damage that even the most dysfunctional revisionist pacts can cause. Those who ridicule the idea that Iran, North Korea, China and Russia constitute a meaningful coalition might consider this: There is significantly more direct cooperation, in defense-technological and diplomatic terms, among this pack of revisionists than there was in the late 1930s among the countries that would eventually make up the World War II-era Axis.
Avril Haines, America’s top intelligence official, has warned that Russia could aid China in a war with the US in the Western Pacific — if not by intervening directly, then through cyberattacks that disrupt American mobilization or military operations, or simply by positioning Russian forces menacingly in Eastern Europe to thrust a two-front dilemma upon an overtaxed superpower.
Perhaps Iran will have greater Russian support in its next nuclear crisis with the West. Perhaps Russia will trade away more sophisticated defense technology in exchange for the autocratic aid it desperately needs in Ukraine. Or perhaps the next move will, once again, take many observers by surprise.
Nonetheless, Washington needs to get serious about the challenges autocratic alignment presents. Current Pentagon strategy documents stubbornly insist that the threats posed by US rivals are distinct, and that the US must maintain a single-minded focus on its chief competitor, China. But this simply means America hasn’t really priced in the problem of the instability convulsing all three key regions of Eurasia right now — much less that its enemies, far from scrupulously respecting regional boundaries, are finding ever-more creative ways of helping one another.
The US isn’t facing a random assortment of challenges, but a cohering league of foes. That’s the fundamental strategic reality whoever wins the presidency in November must confront.
Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
You can read the original article at Bloomberg Opinion. – By Hal Brands