No country makes hyperbolic statements quite like North Korea. So it is easy to dismiss the November 1 pledge by North Korea’s top diplomat Choe Son Hui while visiting Moscow that the country will “always stand firm by our Russian comrades until victory” as just the latest in a long line of exaggerated declarations.
This would be a mistake.
For over a year now Kim Jong Un has demonstrated with both substantive material assistance and the signing of a formal mutual defense pact that he is deeply invested in Vladimir Putin’s success. Now North Korean troops are primed to enter combat in support of the Russian military. The United States and its allies should recognize signs that deescalating North Korea’s involvement in the war is not going to succeed, and shift to a strategy of aggressively deterring Pyongyang from investing more troops in the war.
For weeks Western observers and officials have had to repeatedly revise cautious estimates of the size and purpose of North Korean troops deployed to Russia. Conservative assessments are perfectly reasonable, but there appears to be an irresponsible amount of wishful thinking driving analysis. The thousands of North Korean troops now in Russia have been variously assessed by Western analysts to be anything from technicians and operations support to internal security. None of these explanations satisfies any pressing needs for Russia’s war effort. Russia’s months of grinding offensives have, however, created an inexhaustible demand for replacement combat troops. As raw materials for the Russian military to expend to continue pressure on Ukrainian defenses, North Korean soldiers are an adequate substitute for Russians who would otherwise have to be drawn from a potentially destabilizing mobilization.
Under ordinary circumstances it would make little sense for Kim to casually throw away the lives of thousands of politically reliable troops in a war far from its borders that is already consuming over a thousand Russian soldiers per day. But there are rational forces propelling North Korea into the war as a combatant and putting it on track for significant escalation.
Both Putin and Kim have arrived at an opportunity to resolve existential threats to their regimes. Putin’s grip on power hinges on the perception of a Russian victory in the war in Ukraine. Kim has staked the future of his regime on a robust North Korean nuclear deterrent. The common thread uniting both parties is a perception that the threat to their survival in both instances originates from a fundamentally zero-sum competition with the West. Both stand to either gain or lose together, and therefore have good reason to make unprecedented commitments to one another during this war.
South Korean Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun has suggested that North Korea’s willingness to provide troops on top of millions of artillery shells and dozens of ballistic missiles will come in exchange for Russian technical assistance to upgrade its nuclear weapons forces. Kim Jong Un may believe his claim to this assistance will grow stronger with the number of troops he sacrifices and is willing to further sacrifice to help Russia win. In a sense the thousands of North Korean troops sent to Russia may be more valuable to the Kim regime dead on the battlefield in Ukraine, as a down payment for advanced strategic weapons systems, the ultimate security guarantee against the superior conventional militaries of the United States and South Korea.
Russia previously worked to contain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions as a matter of national interest, but hindsight suggests that Russia had long reconciled itself to accommodate a nuclear North Korea. This is a shift that has been accelerated with a wholesale reevaluation of Russia’s national interests leading up to the war. The new guiding principle for Russia appears to be revising the international order to give it enduring status as a great power, and not as a sphere of influence in a superpower competition between the United States and China.
Russia has repurposed this self-interested geopolitical strategy into a broader critique of the “rules-based” international order and a desire for a multipolar world. It’s a critique validated by stalwart support from another nuclear pariah state. It demonstrates that when pressed far enough, the rules-based international order shows itself to be an illusory form of social control used by the West to hold back legitimate the dissenting interests of a select few “worthy” great powers.
Alignment with another robust nuclear power unconstrained by international norms is also a hedging strategy for Russia that allows it to remain independent of overbearing influence by either the United States or China over the long term. This hedging strategy provides Putin with the incentive to strengthen his ties with North Korea and to strengthen Pyongyang’s capability to disrupt global politics with a more robust nuclear arsenal.
This interlocking of the fates of each autocratic regime over the last year has created a perverse incentive structure of ever deepening commitments and greater escalation to secure victory and avoid defeat. It is a dynamic that makes the continued Western strategy of escalation management a losing one. Instead, the United States and its allies should assume that North Korea’s presence in the war will grow unless deterred by overwhelming force.
Ideally, that means allowing Ukraine to interdict North Korean troops in their staging areas before they reach the battlefield. Failing that, U.S. leaders can at least provide Ukraine with a mass infusion of the hundreds of thousands of cluster munitions left in stock to blunt North Korean advances. Cluster munitions were initially designed to counter mass human wave attacks on the Eurasian steppe. The controversy surrounding their use and residual threat to civilians is overblown in this case, considering the frontlines of the war are already an uninhabitable moonscape pummeled by millions of explosives and seeded with more mines than anywhere else on earth. The United States should specifically supply its entire inventory of M26 cluster munition rockets, which is set to be destroyed anyway, a policy already advocated by an array of prominent military analysts.
Finally, Ukraine and NATO should work with South Korea to develop a potent information campaign against North Korea. The overwhelming transparency of the battlefield provided by commercial drones, smartphones, and satellite internet will provide unprecedented opportunities to capture and disseminate setbacks and humiliations faced by North Korean forces. Ukraine exploited similar disasters faced by Russian forces early in the war to rally international support and undermine the Kremlin’s effort to mobilize the population. North Korea’s famously closed society may be even more sensitive to the shock of scenes of gruesome casualties suffered in another country’s war. This sensitivity may be exploited to keep deployments and subsequent bad news resulting from them limited.