When the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 15 days ago, North Korea cast the only dissenting vote in the entire Indo-Pacific region. It is not surprising that Pyongyang wants to stay on the good side of a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, nor that Russia has now joined North Korea as one of the most sanctioned countries in the world. But Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression may also provide additional cover to Kim Jong-un’s regime as it appears to make a dangerous play for strategic dominance on the Korean peninsula.
Kim is preparing a special inauguration present for South Korean president-elect Yoon Suk-yeol: a new missile crisis. By May 10, when liberal President Moon Jae-in completes his five-year term and Yoon assumes office, North Korea is almost sure to have crept closer to resuming successful nuclear- and long-range-missile tests. A suspected ballistic-missile test earlier this week apparently failed, but Kim is sure to persevere.
The “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Committee” released this month assesses that North Korea has begun “laying the groundwork for an increase in tensions that could include ICBM or possibly a nuclear test this year.” Maintaining plutonium- and uranium-enrichment programs, as Kim has done, suggests more than a passing interest in mass-producing nuclear weapons.
Kim is wedded to strategic and “niche capabilities,” including submarine-launched ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and cyber weapons. According to the U.S. director of national intelligence, he seeks to establish “a range of options to deter outside intervention, offset enduring deficiencies in the country’s conventional forces, and coercive advance his political objectives.” In other words, the North Korean regime wants a strategic arsenal capable of prying America away from the peninsula, allowing it to retain absolute political power at home, and ensuring its strategic dominance over South Korea.
This is in some sense an old story. Three generations of Kims have used brute force and brutal internal oppression to ensure their survival in power. But it didn’t necessarily have to be this way; when Kim Jong-il died in December 2011, his third son, at 26 years old, was unknown and might have charted a different path from his father or grandfather. Instead, he chose not to. He undid an initial nuclear freeze in early 2012 by undertaking a space launch, and a decade later, he’s still conducting reconnaissance-satellite launches that boost North Korean ICBM development.
So the question remains: What can the United States, South Korea, Japan, and other democracies do to solve the pressing security dilemma Kim poses?
A “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions in 2017 led to a year of high-level diplomacy. But the animating spirit of summit meetings had all but vanished by the time President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un parted ways in Hanoi just over three years ago. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Kim started talking about ending his self-imposed ban on testing strategic weapons. Then, satellite imagery revealed new construction at North Korea’s leading nuclear-test site. Intelligence analysts concluded that two recent missile tests were meant to support the development of the Hwasong-17 — a monstrous, mobile, intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) first seen in a military parade in October 2020.
After several years of officials in Seoul trying to placate Kim, South Korea’s incoming administration is about to flip the script. President Moon has advocated an end-of-war peace accord and unilateral sanctions to lure Kim back to the bargaining table. But former prosecutor Yoon is promising to instead strengthen defenses, forge a closer strategic alliance with the United States, and insist on strict reciprocity when dealing with Pyongyang. Yoon also touts democratic values, cooperation with Japan and the ‘Quad’ countries (Australia, Japan, India, and the United States), and the need for South Korea to stand up to China’s bullying and malign behavior.
China is partly reaping what it sowed when it imposed costly economic penalties on South Korea for deploying an American THAAD missile-defense system in response to North Korea’s mounting military capabilities. The resulting shift in South Korean public opinion makes it easier for Yoon to turn Moon’s “three no’s” (no more THAAD system, no integration of South Korean missile defenses into America’s global missile-defense network, and no alliance with Japan) into “three yes’s” (more missile defenses, closer integration with the United States, and more active cooperation with Japan).
While Yoon’s tougher policies will find ready support in Washington, his emergence as a high-level policy-maker is set to come at a tricky time. Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine threatens to escalate. With Putin in trouble, China must choose how much, if any, aid it wishes to provide its junior strategic partner, whether that be help in evading sanctions, military hardware such as surface-to-air missiles, drones, armored vehicles, and logistics and intelligence equipment, or some combination of the two. Putin and Xi agreed in February, when Chinese intelligence undoubtedly knew what gathering Russian forces might do, that their bilateral relationship should have “no limits.” But thus far, China has maintained a certain strategic ambiguity in its public stances toward Putin’s invasion.
This week, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan spent seven hours huddled with Politburo member Yang Jiechi, one of Beijing’s top diplomats, in Rome. Since the Chinese Communist Party is never wrong, one can only imagine the painful circumlocutions Yang must have employed to distance China’s declared support for sovereign borders from its fence-sitting response to Russia’s deadly war in Ukraine. After the meeting, the Chinese emphasized that the discussions had focused on U.S.–China relations and Taiwan, no doubt because Russia’s aggression is still taboo in state-run Chinese media and because China might wish to use the threat of assisting Russia’s war effort as leverage to get the U.S. to scale back its support for Taiwan.
The United States is not about to abandon Taiwan, even as the convenient fiction of ambiguity provided by the so-called One China policy is becoming harder to sustain. But autocrats want what they want and brook no dissent. Russia wants to recreate an empire; China wants unification with Taiwan en route to regional and then global primacy; North Korea wants to be recognized as a permanent nuclear state in charge of the Korean peninsula.
As President-elect Yoon builds out an experienced team of national-security experts, he will face a baptism by fire from Day One. The already-horrific war in Ukraine could escalate, either diverting U.S. attention away from the Indo-Pacific region or creating a two-front theater of conflict. China is playing both sides, signaling a willingness to back Russia’s revisionism in one breath and insisting that it supports the maintenance of Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty in the next. China has helped North Korea flout international sanctions in the past, and doesn’t appear particularly interested in reining Kim in as he embarks on another round of weapons testing today. It could surely prop up its similarly isolated partner in Moscow if it perceived that to be in its strategic interests.
Not a fan of public goods, Kim is doing his utmost to help spur a long-feared second nuclear-arms race in Asia. As this unfolds, we can expect a handful of Kim’s apologists in the West to opine on how he was driven to such lengths by the hostile actions of the United States. And we can count on China to throw the weight of its fearsome propaganda apparatus behind the notion that the real danger lies with U.S. allies who dare to seek new defenses to uphold peace and order.
What ideological bedfellows and misguided doves fail to realize is that Kim is addicted to absolute power, both because it guarantees his survival and because his ultimate aim is to control the entire Korean peninsula. Just as Russia threatens to drive China into a great-power war in Europe, North Korea may attempt to do the same in Northeast Asia. Or, he could use the crisis to advance his interests in other ways, playing the U.S. and South Korea off one another while America’s attentions are consumed by the war in Ukraine.
The good news is that the arrival of the Yoon administration will make it much more difficult for Pyongyang to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington. Yoon has already signaled that he’ll discard Moon’s always-fanciful idea of front-loading diplomacy by offering an end-of-war declaration in favor of a far-more-realistic policy that includes the resumption of major allied military exercises in South Korea. Both the Trump and Biden administrations did their best to paper over differences with the Moon government, and President Moon also belatedly stood with the United States in the face of Chinese and Russian aggression. But Yoon’s fidelity to alliance solidarity and his hard-headed stance toward North Korea provide a chance to make the bilateral relationship much stronger — a chance that the U.S. cannot afford to squander.
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