New Alliance Dynamics in and Around Korea
While most commentary on the Russo-North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) alliance emerging from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has concentrated on what each side offers the other and the activity of North Korean troops in Ukraine, it tends to ignore the dynamics of Russia-North Korea-China relations in error. These dynamics affect not only these countries but also South Korea (Republic of Korea or ROK), Japan and the US as well as the war in Ukraine, making their impact simultaneously regional and global.
Here we must remember that Putin has called China Russia’s ally and that Kim Jong Un has called Russia, based on the Russo-DPRK treaty, an ally. Russia calls its relations with China an alliance, while China studiously refrains from doing so, however, Chinese military behavior in tandem with Russia shows all the earmarks of an alliance, i.e., joint military action. As Stephen Walt wrote in 1987, an alliance is “a formal or informal agreement for security cooperation between two or more sovereign states.” In this context, Alexander Lanoszka commented in 2022 that “China and Russia arguably engage in more military cooperation now than some treaty allies have had historically.”[1] And the evidence now shows that he was right as this dimension of bilateral cooperation, particularly in military affairs, continues to grow.
For Pyongyang, having treaties with both Russia and China that include mutual defense clauses may represent a regeneration of the “Northern Alliance” or “Grand Strategic Triangle” of the 1950s with Moscow and Beijing. This process began around 2017, when Russia and China declared a joint approach to Korean security issues that has essentially endured into the present. But while Russia and China have long collaborated to undermine the UN sanctions regime on North Korea and are its primary partners, this shared approach is not exempt from the tensions that observers frequently find when analyzing alliances. The Russo-North Korea treaty has, for instance, revealed some of those fractures, as much of the commentary on China’s reaction to this treaty has emphasized Beijing’s discomfort with the arrangement for reducing its leverage over North Korea, playing the two big powers against each other.
As a result of the Russo-DPRK treaty both Russia and North Korea appear to have increased their spheres of discretion vis-à-vis China and thus caused some anxiety in Beijing about its ability to restrain its partners’ behavior. But apart from these alliance dynamics, the evolving relationship among these three states now raises the possibilities of Russia and/or North Korea taking more unilateral and thus potentially escalatory steps in either or both Ukraine and against South Korea. While this does not mean escalation is imminent or likely, it does enhance escalation risks in both theaters.
Deterrence Dynamics in Northeast Asia: China’s Diminished Leverage on North Korea and Russia
Although China tends to claim that it is a neutral observer of the war in Ukraine, it appears increasingly clear that without the economic support given by China to Russia in the form of buying Russian oil and gas and providing Russia with crucial dual use goods and components, Russia would be hard-pressed to continue the war in Ukraine. Furthermore, despite the many comments that this Russo-North Korean alliance has, to a greater or lesser degree, disturbed China, limiting its economic leverage over North Korea by increased Russian trade, aid and capital flows, China continues to support North Korea. For example, China’s $2.3 billion trade with North Korea accounted for nearly all the latter’s trade in 2023.
But beyond eroding China’s economic-political leverage over North Korea’s behavior and the credibility of Beijing’s “neutrality” in this war despite its abundant and visible economic support for Russia, the Russo-North Korean relationship also weakens China’s ability to employ its economic power to restrain North Korea’s military policies. That erosion of China’s control over North Korean escalation potential must generate anxiety among Chinese leaders.
The diminution of China’s leverage over North Korea’s inclinations for provocative behavior manifests itself in three ways. First, Russia’s increasing dependence on North Korea makes the question of North Korea’s quid pro quo more urgent. To date, according to South Korean officials, “North Korea has also provided Russia with 20,000 shipping containers’ worth of weapons, including millions of artillery shells, newly developed ballistic missiles, multiple-launch rocket systems and long-range howitzers…” Moreover, North Korea, according to ROK intelligence, will send still more troops to Russia. In return, the DPRK has already obtained up to $5.5 billion through arms deals with Russia. This report also estimated that North Korea could earn up to to $572 million annually through deploying troops if this type of arrangement is continued.
This money has gone, inter alia, to the DPRK’s defense sector leading Kim Jong Un to urge mass production of more attack drones and dual-capable KN-23 IRBMs. Apart from this defense construction North Korean forces are gaining valuable battlefield experience even if they suffer heavy casualties, as well as large amounts of oil and food from Russia. Beyond all this, North Korea has received air defenses from Russia that are vital to its defenses given its inferiority vis-à-vis US or ROK air and missile strikes. Receiving these defenses plus reputed help with satellites increases North Korea’s deterrence capabilities. This may encourage Pyongyang to take more provocative risks vis-à-vis Seoul that could escalate and force China into defending the North or abandoning an ally who might otherwise provoke nuclear escalation.
Second, Beijing knows full well that mass production of dual-capable North Korean missiles, acquisition of air defenses, and potential Russian transfers of missile and even nuclear technology to North Korea only incentivizes Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo to reciprocate by moving more US dual or nuclear-capable IRBMs to Japan and South Korea, a move that only heightens its own perception of threat from Washington and its allies. Moreover, if Washington were to approve of allied proliferation, it would be difficult to prevent Seoul and perhaps eventually Tokyo from going nuclear. That outcome would wreck one of the pillars of China’s strategy of no more nuclear states in Northeast Asia. One recent view may exaggerate the danger posed by North Korean nuclearization to China as a “strategic liability” but otherwise correctly highlights the threat that its proliferation represents to Northeast Asia.
For China, North Korea—and particularly its nuclear program—is a strategic liability. China prioritizes stability in its neighborhood, but North Korea purposefully pursues instability right next to China. This conflict of interests between the treaty allies exacerbates Chinese national security concerns, particularly regarding the United States and its hub-and-spoke system in the Indo-Pacific area. In response to North Korea’s rapid nuclear and missile developments, the United States has significantly ramped up its military presence on and around the Korean Peninsula, in consultation with its ally, South Korea. That includes the regular deployment of strategic (i.e., nuclear-capable) US assets to the region, something China is not comfortable with.
Likewise, Tong Zhao wrote that, “North Korea’s advancing nuclear and missile programs, for example, are major drivers of US development of homeland missile defenses and some US allies’ development of theater missile defenses. China believes both types of missile defense systems pose a threat to its nuclear deterrent.” Therefore the intensified US alliance network that will emerge from North Korea’s Russia-backed provocations will be both anti-Chinese and anti-Russian.
Russia has long and increasingly fulminated against US missile emplacements in Northeast Asia considering them a threat to which it will respond by placing more Russian missiles in Asia. While this supposed threat is one strong motive for the Russo-Chinese alliance; it also justifies Moscow’s alliance with Pyongyang and support for its proliferation. But Russian missile deployments in Asia, given its alliances, merely generate intensified South Korean and Japanese threat perceptions to which both those governments and the US must respond, further discomfiting China. So, here China’s “escalation control” over North Korea and Russia also diminishes leaving it trapped in an escalating arms race across Northeast Asia.
Finally, China now has two allies who regularly make cavalier nuclear threats to make everyone else take them seriously. The frequent, almost daily Russian nuclear threats through 2024 represent a conscious strategy to deter the West from helping Ukraine. But beyond that, it appears that there is a discernible domestic faction that sees nuclear weapons—or at least tactical nuclear weapons—as warfighting instruments that should actually be used. Until now China’s steadfast opposition to nuclear weapons use has helped stay their hand. However, a deeper look at alliance relations among these three states reveals potentially disturbing trends.
We have long known that for Russia, nuclear weapons are a talisman of its great global power status. This veritable obsession with status grips Russian political actors across the board. Moreover, as I’ve argued earlier, one reason for Russia’s many resorts to force, not only in Ukraine, is to prove to China and itself that it truly is a great power that is worthy of alliance with China (Bundnisfahig in German). Thus it has loosened the conditions of its deterrence and if facing a catastrophic defeat (which in Ukraine is any defeat), especially if supported by Western deliveries of conventional missiles capable of attacking Russia, will face severe internal pressures for nuclear use.
In addition, one key point of the Russo-North Korea treaty is that it allowed Russia to compensate for its rising dependence on China to prosecute the war in Ukraine. Observers report that one reason China is uneasy about this treaty is that it reduces its leverage on North Korea. But it also arguably reduces its leverage on Russia who now has a new ally or partner in Northeast Asia. This treaty offers Russia an opportunity to act independently of China in Asia thereby asserting itself as the great Asian power that it wishes to see in the mirror. Since it does the same thing for North Korea, for both powers it represents a way to enlarge their sphere of discretion vis-à-vis China more closely to them because of its anxiety about losing control or leverage over its partners if not allies at a time of growing American pressure on China. Thus, this treaty seemingly reduces Beijing’s “escalation control” over them, allowing them to act more provocatively and freely while China, who has found that it has no other reliable alternatives, must accept their behavior.
Conclusion
Therefore, if we examine these alliance and deterrence dynamics closely, we find some disturbing parallels to the Hohenzollern-Hapsburg double alliance of World War I where both powers trapped themselves and Europe in their obsession with showing everyone else that they were true great powers who would not be elbowed out of their place in the sun. China has thus found that it has no partners or allies other than these states. It now tries to exercise a measure of leverage to prevent them from behaving excessively provocatively or recklessly lest it and they all be driven into a cauldron of fire against their interests. Thus, as stated above, if we ignore these three states’ alliance and deterrence dynamics, we do so at our genuine peril.
- [1]
Alexander Lanoszka, “Military Alliance in the Twenty-First Century,” Polity, 1st edition (March 21, 2022).