Yong Suk Lee

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Vladimir Putin’s state visit to North Korea last week, and the new mutual defense pact between Russia and the North, caps off Pyongyang’s rise and Moscow’s decline since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Suffering international sanctions, ridicule, and battlefield losses, the Kremlin is searching for friends in the most unlikely places. It has cobbled together a loose coalition of like-minded authoritarian countries, such as China and North Korea.

For Kim Jong Un, Russia’s invasion miscalculation and the suffering of the Ukrainian people offer a chance to elevate his global standing and receive cash for arms and defense assistance. In many ways, this is the first piece of geopolitical fortune for North Korea since the end of the Cold War. North Korea in two generations of Kim Family rulers went from a widely respected non-aligned power to an international oddity, known mostly for its young mercurial leader and state-sponsored larceny in cyberspace. With Putin at his side and a new mutual defense treaty to replace the old one that expired with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kim now has a powerful friend and a degree of legitimacy and respectability that he has desperately been seeking.

While Soviet client states rapidly collapsed, following the fall of the Berlin wall, North Korea managed to hold on and develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. The source of North Korea’s survival and international respectability in limited circles remains its niche martial prowess. Russia desperately needs munitions and North Korea is a steady and reliable source, even though there are doubts about the quality of North Korean arms. On the other side, North Korea needs Russia’s help to meet its next strategic goal of becoming a mature nuclear power with a nuclear triad of land, air, and sea-based means of delivery.

Pyongyang has been trying to develop a ballistic missile submarine since 2016. Kim told the world in 2023 that North Korea’s navy will become a component of the country’s deterrence strategy at a ceremony launching its first nuclear-capable submarine, and, in his first meeting with Putin in Vladivostok last year, Kim prioritized submarine development, publicly claiming that the North plans to ask Russia for assistance in building a nuclear-powered submarine. To paraphrase former US official Michael Vickers and a key lesson-learned from his book By All Available Means, when dictators say they will do something, believe them.

Arms experts say the first submarine the North claims is nuclear capable is a modified Romeo class submarine it received from China. North Korea test fired a medium range ballistic missile designed to be launched from underwater, called Pukguksong (Polaris), from an underwater barge, including a successful cold launch, in 2017, according to the South Korean military. The first generation Pukguksong were liquid fueled but analysts say the newer models are solid fueled based on North Korean TV footage of exhausts and nozzles. Solid-fueled missiles are safer to store aboard a ship underway, crews are able to launch solid fueled missiles quicker, and a sub-launched missile dramatically reduces warning time for the United States and its allies in case of a North Korean attack.

The first US ballistic missile submarine, USS George Washington, was launched in 1959 and went on its first deterrence patrol with 16 missiles in 1960, 15 years after the first US nuclear test in 1945. Eighteen years after North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, it has taken its first big step towards achieving a nuclear triad. Historians know from Russian and former Communist state archives that North Korea’s nuclear program started in 1959 with a Soviet pledge to help North Korea establish a nuclear research center with an experimental reactor. The one lesson North Koreans have taught the world in their pursuit of nuclear weapons is that it may take them a while but eventually they figure it out.

The international community can only hope that Putin is not so far removed from reality and so desperate for help in Ukraine that he now thinks it's a good idea to provide North Korea nuclear propulsion assistance. However, Putin has shown that sound judgment and advancing global peace are not his strengths or priorities.

China has historically been the natural balance against Russian influence in Asia. Indeed, the much publicized elevation of Kim Jong Un’s status as a world leader and Putin’s visit to Vietnam following his trip to Pyongyang undermines Chinese influence in the region. It is unclear if this was deliberate or if the Kremlin coordinated these visits with the Chinese ahead of time, but Beijing remains the best hope for the United States and its allies to check Moscow’s destabilizing influence in Pyongyang. Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine Beijing will do any favors for Washington at this moment, considering the level of distrust between the United States and China. The newfound ties between Putin and Kim, with implications for international security, should ring alarm bells everywhere. Potentially in the very near-future, it might provide at least one area of agreement for Washington and Beijing to work together.

 

Yong Suk Lee is a Visiting Scholar, Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. A career Central Intelligence Agency analyst, he served as the Deputy Assistant Director of CIA’s Korea Mission Center from 2017 to 2019. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force, the US Department of Defense, or the US government.