Russia is likely to continue its strategic partnership with North Korea despite President Trump’s recent call to include Moscow in regional negotiations.
Recognizing the strong role that Beijing plays in assisting Pyongyang, Washington has repeatedly invited China to restrain its aggressive ally in hopes of halting the rapid progression of its nuclear weapons program.
While the relationship between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his Chinese counterpart remains vital to the regime’s stability, Pyongyang also relies on a steady wave of political support from its powerful northern neighbor.
“China has much more ties to North Korea than Russia does, but Russia doesn’t want to look like an irrelevant power on its border,” William Courtney, the adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, told the Washington Examiner.
A former ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, Courtney explained that Russia “has had an intention, for a long time of supporting, even at some financial cost, a bunch of countries that… keep the U.S. off balance or tied down.”
“Rather than having wealthy allies like the West, Russia tends to have poor and troubled dictatorial or unstable allies, and North Korea fits that [category],” he added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal of undermining U.S. interests in the region, however, has to be achieved through a carefully calculated policy that does not provoke Washington into a military confrontation with Pyongyang.
“Russia saw what happened with reunification in Germany,” Courtney explained, warning that Putin likely fears that a possible U.S. intervention will lead to “South Korea’s pro-US policy dominating the new reunified state.”
While the precarious nature of the North Korean predicament forces the Russian leader to publicly oppose provocative actions from both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, Moscow’s strategy of stabilizing the dictatorial regime only strengthens over time.
According to Russia’s official 2030 energy strategy, developing new energy markets within the Korean Peninsula will be at the forefront of Kremlin’s effort to diversify its oil and natural gas exports in East Asia.
“Stage-by-stage construction of the gas pipeline system in the Eastern Siberia and Far East for the purpose of gas supply to the countries of the Asia-Pacific region … will be performed in the context of implementing the program of the unified gas supply system formation in the Eastern Siberia and Far East,” the strategy states.
Moscow further plans to explore these new markets by constructing a natural gas pipeline that runs through North Korea — a move that will provide Pyongyang with a reliable source of energy that will slash its crippling dependency on China.
Russia’s strategic posture toward North Korea was also on display earlier this year, when Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping strongly opposed the U.S. move to deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system in South Korea.
For Russia, Washington’s move represented an identical expansion of missile defense systems in Eastern Europe and a direct threat to the hub of Russian strategic capabilities in the naval city of Vladivostok.
With equal resilience, Putin also dismissed Trump’s recent call to pressure North Korea with a new wave of severe economic sanctions.
“It’s absurd to put Russia on the same sanctions list as North Korea and then ask us to help impose sanctions against North Korea,” Putin declared in September. “The sanctions regime has hit a wall … No matter what we do to North Korea, North Korea’s actions will not change. But millions of people will suffer.”
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Russia substantially boosted its trade with the hermit kingdom by 73 percent to offset the effects of anti-North Korean sanctions in early 2017.
Despite Moscow’s geopolitical strategy, or perhaps because of it, the White House has visibly intensified its desire to cooperate with Russia in restraining North Korea. During his historic trip to Asia earlier in November, Trump took the opportunity to reiterate that having “a good relationship with Russia” will be a great benefit to U.S. efforts in the region.
“When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump tweeted. “There always playing politics – bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!”
Unfortunately for Trump, Putin’s long-term commitment to encourage stability in North Korea could also be driven by internal political pressures that even the Russian president does not want to ignore.
“Putin has not only his own predisposition to trouble US wherever he can, but he also ultranationalist, revanchist, chauvinist opposition,” Courtney told the Washington Examiner, noting that some opposition groups frequently criticize Putin for not being more geopolitically aggressive.
This internal political pressure, in conjunction with Putin’s vision of a weaker U.S. state, could explain why the Russian president knew about the North Korean nuclear program for the last two decades and chose to do nothing to oppose it.
“[I]n 2001 on my way to Japan, I was in North Korea and met with the father of the current leader,” Putin said in October. “Even back then he told me that they have an atomic bomb.”
“Today we are in 2017,” Putin continued, “the country is living in a permanent state of sanctions, instead of an atomic bomb they have a hydrogen bomb, instead of basic artillery systems they have mid-range missile capabilities… what changed?”
Nikita Vladimirov (@nikvofficial) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is also an investigative reporter for Campus Reform.
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