By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Strange Success of North Korea

In 2017, the highly militarized regime of Kim Jong Un of North Korea found itself confronting a rare coalition of China, Russia, and the United States. In response to North Korea’s successful test of its first intercontinental ballistic missile and thermonuclear device, the usually gridlocked UN Security Council had unanimously enacted a series of tough sanctions. Initiated by Washington and supported by both Beijing and Moscow, these punitive measures had the potential to devastate the North Korean economy. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, who had recently entered the White House, was openly discussing the possibility of a preemptive strike, promising to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea.

Today, things look considerably different. First, as the rivalry between the United States and China has intensified, Beijing cannot afford to pressure North Korea in ways that might create instability on China’s doorstep and has taken steps to buttress the Kim regime. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, North Korea’s large military complex has become indispensable to Moscow, with Pyongyang supplying vast quantities of ammunition, and now thousands of troops, to the Russian war machine. 

Finally, with Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election in November, Kim may have an opportunity to further cement his gains in the international arena. Despite the menacing rhetoric early in his first term, the president-elect seems, in contrast to his Democratic opponents, to harbor some positive feelings toward Kim, and he has said he hopes to reach some kind of deal with the North Korean leader. Not even the test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile—one that can hit any point in the continental United States— on the eve of the U.S. election, or Pyongyang’s embrace of a more hostile doctrine toward South Korea, has caused much difficulty for Kim: unlike in 2017, the UN Security Council has not responded to these challenges.

Although it is difficult to predict how future events will affect his rule, Kim has been a distinct beneficiary of the growing antagonism between the United States and both China and Russia. Perversely, even as North Korea becomes more threatening to its neighbor in the south and poses a greater military challenge to the West, it has gained more economic stability and become less vulnerable to outside pressure. This new situation suggests that during Trump’s second term, the Kim regime may become even more assertive, continuing to advance its nuclear and missile programs with even less concern about internal and external threats.

 

Beijing’s Bounty

At the heart of North Korea’s shifting fortunes is the dramatic improvement of its relations with China. For a long time, despite loudly proclaimed statements of mutual affinity—so-called friendship rhetoric—relations between Beijing and Pyongyang were far from idyllic. On the one hand, Chinese leaders valued North Korea as a buffer against the West and sometimes even maintained the fiction of close solidarity with what they called one of the few remaining fellow “socialist” countries. On the other hand, they were irked by the Kim regime’s refusal to emulate China’s market-oriented economic reforms and viewed North Korea’s nuclear ambitions as a threat to the nonproliferation regime that Beijing favored and supported. China also worried that Pyongyang’s provocative behavior gave the United States an additional pretext for its continued military presence in the region. Sometimes North Korean actions—including, above all, its nuclear tests—led to friction between Beijing and Pyongyang.

As China’s rivalry with the United States has grown, however, North Korea’s strategic value to Beijing has come to outweigh all other considerations in Chinese thinking. Heavily armed North Korea offers some depth for China’s defenses, while also creating a buffer between China and U.S. bases and listening stations in South Korea. On top of that, China cannot afford instability or chaos in a neighboring country with nuclear weapons. A West German‒style absorption of the impoverished North by the wealthy, pro-American South is now a nightmare scenario for Beijing—and the collapse of the Kim regime might lead to such an outcome, even if Seoul is no longer enthusiastic about the prospect of assuming responsibilities for the North.

The remains of a North Korean missile used in a Russian strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine, January 2024

Thus, around 2019, China began to increase its aid to Pyongyang significantly, embarking on a policy aimed at keeping the North Korean regime afloat. China is now shipping undisclosed but large amounts of free fuel, food, and fertilizer to North Korea and turning a blind eye to North Korean violations of the 2017-‒19 UN sanctions regime, as long as these violations remain relatively small-scale and deniable. This aid keeps North Korea from sliding into famine and instability, but, given the size of China’s economy, it does not cost China much. (North Korea’s population is less than 2 percent of China’s, and its GDP is a minuscule 0.2 percent of China’s.) Among other things, Chinese aid allowed North Korea to navigate the uneasy COVID-19 period, when its borders were virtually closed and its overseas trade came to a complete standstill.

Moreover, despite this influx of aid, China has not gained more control over North Korean actions. China may be able to extract some minor concessions: for example, it seems likely that Chinese pressure has prevented North Korea from conducting a nuclear test thus far. At the same time, China’s backing has limits: Beijing is not lavish in its support and is not committed to funding a broader economic transformation of its neighbor. Nevertheless, the aid has been enough to compensate for the chronic inefficiencies of North Korea’s economy and the impact of sanctions. And the Kim regime also knows that Beijing needs a stable and manageable North Korea and will not risk penalizing it for actions China is unhappy about. Therefore, China is highly unlikely to apply the kind of pressure that could produce a tangible change in its neighbor, and North Korea can expect to receive shipments of Chinese aid more or less unconditionally, probably for years to come.

 

Manning Up for Moscow

Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought its windfall to the North Korean elite. Initially, Moscow’s invasion of its Western neighbor seemed distant and irrelevant to Pyongyang, but as the conflict devolved into a prolonged war of attrition, with trench warfare reminiscent of World War I, artillery and manpower became crucial. Before long, the Kremlin discovered that North Korea was not only a major producer of the weapon Russian soldiers need most—heavy artillery shells—but also the only country willing to sell such ammunition to Russia in large quantities. Since early 2023, North Korea has shipped millions of shells, along with some other weapons and ammunition, to the Ukrainian front. The revenue from this deal in 2023 alone is conservatively estimated at $540 million—adding almost 25 percent to North Korea’s overall trade volume.

Then, in 2024, the Kremlin’s increasingly acute manpower shortages paved the way for even greater North Korean participation in the war, likely finalized during Putin’s meeting with Kim in North Korea in June: Pyongyang agreed to send troops—11,000 soldiers so far—to Russia in exchange for money, food, and likely, some advanced military technologies. In addition to filling Russia’s manpower gap, the deal allows Russia to sustain the war at a significantly lower cost: North Korean troops are far less expensive than Russian volunteers, who now receive up to $30,000 as a bonus when they enlist, plus a salary of at least $2,000 a month. The deal also reduces pressure on Putin to impose a second mobilization, whose implementation might trigger more public discontent in Russia. (For now, North Korean forces have been deployed in the Kursk region of Russia, where Ukrainian forces have taken a small patch of territory, rather than in Ukraine itself.)

For Pyongyang, the deal brings, along with substantial revenue, important strategic benefits. Among other things, it might give North Korea access to various advanced Russian military technologies—including for missile engines and reconnaissance satellites—that had been difficult or impossible to obtain. Moscow may also be more willing to engage in nonmilitary cooperation projects, potentially even subsidizing such joint ventures. Meanwhile, North Korean ground forces, which have not seen combat since 1953, are gaining valuable battlefield experience. And with new Russian diplomatic support, North Korea is less isolated internationally, with the UN Security Council unlikely to take further action against it.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un chairing a party meeting in Sinuiju, North Korea, July 2024

The arrangement is not without risks. If North Korean troops perform poorly on the battlefield, it will make Pyongyang look more vulnerable. During their deployment, North Korean soldiers are also likely to have some access to the Internet and tunable radios (both media are banned in North Korea), so they might be exposed to uncensored information about the world, especially from South Korea. However, these risks seem minor compared with the likely gains.

Significantly, the sudden influx of Russian money seems to have encouraged Kim to move further away from China. Relations between Pyongyang and Beijing have cooled noticeably since the deals with Russia were made. However, despite North Korea’s continued economic dependency on China, the Kim regime has little reason to be concerned by the mood in Beijing. Despite its current frustration with its neighbor, China has little choice but to continue backing Pyongyang, and North Korea knows that tighter relations can be restored almost instantly if needed. If, for example, the war winds down in Ukraine and Russia loses interest in dealing with North Korea—quite a likely outcome, despite talk of a new “dictators’ alliance”—Pyongyang will still have China to fall back on.

Domestically, the Kim government has reacted to its new relations with China and Russia in a predictable way. Following the 2017 sanctions, the government could not advance the market-oriented economic reforms, somewhat similar to those of the 1980s’ China, that Kim and his advisers had initiated and implemented, with noticeable success, between 2012 and 2018. Now, having secured Chinese and Russian money, the North Korean government has made a full U-turn, reviving the command economy model and further building its surveillance state. Although this neo-Stalinist approach is economically inefficient, it does allow the government to maintain total control of the population. Tighter surveillance is what Kim and the elite have always wanted, but it is the growing support from Moscow and Beijing that has made it possible to strengthen their control of the economy and society. (And the introduction of the super-tough sanctions regime in 2017‒2019 also made any export-oriented policy—a vital ingredient of the erstwhile reformist policy—untenable.)

 

Back to Hanoi?

A final, if less certain, dimension of North Korea’s resurgence is Donald Trump’s return to the White House. For the Kim regime, Trump’s first term was both a threat and an opportunity. For a brief period at the beginning of his administration in 2017, Trump seemed prepared to use force against the North, but despite his open threats, such plans, if they ever existed, were soon abandoned. Instead, the president suggested that he would be willing to discard the long-held, but increasingly unrealistic U.S. policy goal of “CVID”—complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea—and negotiate a deal based on accepting North Korea as a nuclear power, but with limitations.

The contours of such a deal emerged at the 2019 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi: if North Korea agreed to dismantle a significant portion of its nuclear facilities—ideally, all known facilities—the United States would lift several major sectoral sanctions targeting the country’s economy. Such a deal would have allowed North Korea—whether explicitly or implicitly— to retain the nuclear devices it had produced, along with their delivery systems. It is also likely that Pyongyang would manage to hide at least some nuclear R & D and manufacturing facilities and secretly keep them operational. Although the 2019 Hanoi negotiations broke down because of both sides’ inability to agree on certain technical issues, they provide a template for what Trump might attempt in his second term.

U.S. President Donald Trump with Kim at the North Korean border, June 2019

For the United States, the primary advantage of pursuing a Hanoi-style deal would be to slow down the rapid advancement of North Korea’s nuclear and missile technologies. Although Pyongyang might eventually break its promises and walk away, it would take significant time and resources to rebuild its nuclear facilities once they are dismantled. If instead the United States continues the Biden administration’s policy of essentially doing nothing while repeating the old mantra of total denuclearization, the only plausible outcome is North Korea’s deployment of ever more advanced nuclear weapons.

It has been suggested that, alternatively, the Trump administration might revive its “fire and fury” approach. That kind of maximum pressure, however, is unlikely to succeed in the world of 2025. With Russia and China behind it, North Korea is less likely to be intimidated, and the Trump administration is in any case likely to be distracted by a far larger number of challenges worldwide.

On the other hand, the renewed possibility of a U.S.-North Korean deal raises concerns in South Korea, since it could threaten South Korea’s own security. There are widespread fears in Seoul that the Trump administration might use a compromise with Pyongyang as a pretext to justify the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from the peninsula, leaving South Korea to face a nuclear-armed adversary on its own. Trump’s negative attitude to overseas commitments is widely known, and he has specifically criticized the U.S. military presence in South Korea a number of times.

For Kim, however, such a deal would offer many benefits. It would implicitly recognize North Korea as a de facto nuclear power and might even lead to some kind of normalization with Washington. With the partial lifting of UN sanctions, North Korea would become less dependent on China while retaining Beijing’s support should the need arise. Still, it would be a mistake to think that Kim and his advisers are desperate to negotiate with Trump. From 2017 to 2019, in the run-up to the Singapore and Hanoi summits, they felt cornered and had far more incentive to seek a compromise. Now they know that they can manage without it.

 

Kim’s New Kingdom

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Pyongyang is not a pariah state and has reliable foreign backers—great powers driven not by some nebulous ideology but by cold, pragmatic, long-term calculations. The Kim regime’s December 2023 decision to reclassify South Korea as a “different and hostile state,” thus breaking with a decades-old policy of regarding it as a partner in unification efforts, is another sign of growing assertiveness. 

In the past, North Korea saw the South as a source of aid, but now it has sufficient aid from other sources to sustain its economy. It is also ready to jettison the rusty unification rhetoric, which ceased to be realistic decades ago. As Pyongyang sees it, a more straightforward, confrontational approach has greater benefits, since it justifies keeping North Korea’s population isolated from the dangerously rich South and hostile toward potentially subversive South Korean cultural influences.

With China and, for the time being, Russia behind it, the Kim family has more confidence about its own future in power than at any other time in the past three decades. The domestic elite seems to be sharply under its thumb, too. The spread of dangerous knowledge about the outside world among North Korea’s youth remains an issue, but North Korea’s borders are more tightly controlled than ever.

Over the past two years, Kim’s daughter—her name, never mentioned in the official publications, is believed to be Kim Ju Ae, and she is now in her early teens—has frequently appeared at the North Korean leader’s side at official events. It seems possible she will eventually inherit his power, perhaps remaining at the helm for years to come. For the moment, at least, North Korea and the Kim dynasty may be among the clearest beneficiaries of an increasingly fractured world.

 

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