With the dispatch of a North Korean contingent to take part in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the war is going global. The unprecedented rapprochement between North Korea and Russia is mutually beneficial, and all the signs are that it will grow stronger, despite the discontent of China, which prefers economic expansion to military action. Can we then expect a cooling of Russian-Chinese relations? No, say the authors, for there is a real convergence between Putin’s millenarian imperialism and the Chinese regime’s return to totalitarianism.
The decision taken by Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, to send a contingent (or, perhaps, a first contingent) of 12,000 soldiers to support Russian forces engaged in the war of aggression against Ukraine, has caused quite a stir in Europe. A few thousand soldiers from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), North Korea’s official name, are unlikely to make a strategic difference (the Russian forces engaged in the war against Ukraine number almost 400,000). But this decision confirms the de facto internationalization of the conflict that Western leaders thought they could avoid. For them, the war boils down to Russian aggression against Ukraine, even if some also point to the threat it poses to Europe, and indeed to the entire democratic world. Ukraine may enjoy political, diplomatic, and military support from the Western world but so far the West has done its utmost to avoid being accused of confrontation with Russia. The war was Russian-Ukrainian and no more. The dispatch of North Korean shells and short-range missiles last October relieved the Russians and made it easier for them to bridge the gap to the foreseeable period when, in a few months’ time, their arms industry will be operating at full capacity. No mean feat. But it did not take us out of the framework that the West feverishly (some would say cowardly, or at least fearfully) wanted to stick to.
With the dispatch of a North Korean contingent, we have undeniably stepped outside this framework. The war is no longer just Russian-Ukrainian. It is going international. No World War III yet, but it is beginning to look like one a jigsaw puzzle of a world war, if we include the other armed conflicts in which the West and Russia are facing each other (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Africa). The consequences of this enlargement decided by the Russians are serious: we would not otherwise understand the almost immediate decision by Joe Biden,then the UK, to authorize the use of their medium-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia — which they did on the night of October 18-19, 2024. And, as luck would have it, this first strike hit an ammunition depot housing, among other things, North Korean shells and military personnel.
How are we to understand the decision to reinforce the Russian army with North Korean soldiers? Was it motivated by ideological, strategic or financial reasons? Undoubtedly, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un share a detestation of Western democracies. But however brutal Putin’s repression of his active opponents may be, the North Korean and Russian systems are very different. The mafia aspect is undoubtedly present in both. Corruption is at work in Pyongyang as it is in Moscow; but there is no private or partially private economy in North Korea. There is no opportunity for people to remain cautiously on their toes as in Russia, but a constant solicitation of everyone to show their enthusiasm for the regime and its leader. It is hard to pinpoint the nature of the Putin regime, which is both nostalgic for the Stalinist period and capable of appearing to some Westerners as conservative nationalism. On the other hand, Kim Jong Un’s regime is a model of totalitarian control (with some traces of imperial rule, as illustrated by the transmission of power from father to son).
The relationship between the two has been prepared for a long time, and Kim Jong Un was undoubtedly more demanding than Putin at first. North Korea has proved a loyal ally, giving its unqualified approval to Putin’s initiatives over the past ten years. So when the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts declared themselves independent in 2014, North Korea immediately recognized them and even sent an ambassador there. The fact remains that this was above all a seduction operation or, better still, a skilful approach with a view to future commercial operations: sending arms, like sending soldiers, is first and foremost business, and the fruit of a twofold pragmatic decision. Putin needs troops. He can buy or rent them from Kim Jong Un because he knows North Korea’s financial needs to keep acquiring military equipment. How can the North Korean leadership launch ever more ballistic missiles, miniaturize nuclear bombs, and hermetically seal its borders? By turning to Russia, of course. China needs neither shells nor missiles. Russia needs them badly. Nor does China, the world’s largest army in terms of manpower, need soldiers. On the contrary, Russia badly needs them. North Korea can provide them. Proof of this was provided at the end of September by the Russian-North Korean strategic partnership agreement. Several million shells were sent to Russia, along with thousands of missiles and the first elements of the 12,000-strong North Korean military contingent. Russia can rest easy. The North Korean army has plenty of men (and women) motivated to fight. To confirm this, KCNA, the official North Korean news agency, reported in mid-October 2024 that around 1.4 million young people had volunteered to join the army, solely because of a border incident with the South.
This means that Russia can be supplied with equipment and manpower in return for a bill in the form of food and technology. We would also like to know how much North Korean soldiers are paid. Given the huge sums of money that Putin allocates to his own soldiers on the front line, the North Korean leadership, which usually takes 90% of the earnings earned by the workers it sends abroad, should be pleased. It is enough to feed the state coffers and further increase its military might.
While Putin gains from this agreement a significant reduction in his manpower requirements, Kim Jong Un increases his financial and technological capacities, and can thus envisage the further strengthening of his military power, notably ballistic and nuclear. He can even look forward to carrying out an economic development program which, until now, had never gone beyond the stage of mere announcement. And let us not forget another advantage, which he sees as not insignificant in a system that exalts the figure of the leader to the point of delirium: the agreement with Russia makes this small state marked by famine, dependent on its Chinese neighbor and exercising its power over only 25 million inhabitants, one of the central players in the world’s geopolitical future.
What a turnaround. In January 1951, the surge of hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers, launched onto the Korean front on Mao’s orders, had saved Kim Il Sung from defeat by the UN forces commanded by General MacArthur. Financial aid from China and the USSR — and from the communist world as a whole — subsequently enabled the country to recover from the ruin of the war. The North Korean regime was rather cautious about China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which brought too much instability and disrespect for the Party, but refrained from criticizing it. Nor did it publicly welcome Maoist criticism of Soviet “revisionism”, its gentrification and open criticism of Stalin. Always cautious, North Korea, which had not appreciated Soviet softness during the Vietnam War and leaned toward more direct intervention, even an increase in confrontations with American imperialism — wanting, like Che Guevara, to push for the creation of “two or three Vietnams” — had avoided criticizing and offending the Soviet Union. In other words, until now, North Korea has favored its independence by playing a game of seesaw between the two great communist powers, remaining cautiously neutral toward them.
Those days are over. North Korea is tightening its links with Russia. It is taking an active stance against the United States and its East Asian allies — South Korea and Japan — at the risk of upsetting China, which does not want to risk a new war on the Korean peninsula, where it enjoys fruitful relations with South Korea. And it is opting to develop its economic and commercial power for a while longer.
Faced with North Korea’s agility and aggressiveness, we can measure the disastrous blindness of the Western world, which took lightly the “hermit country”, perceived as an ubiquitous kingdom and satelliteized by China, and which the recurrence of famines made — it was believed — vulnerable to the denuclearization-for-food barter1.
Are Putin and his North Korean partner safe from Chinese retaliation? China initially claimed to be “unaware” of these military deployments, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman on November 1.
The Russian-North Korean initiatives run counter to China’s strategy of gradually asserting its commercial and financial power. This is how China intends to dominate the entire world, with the blessing or at least the benevolence of the UN.On the contrary, Russia, with its “rental” of North Korean troops, is going more openly than ever against the Security Council’s ban on North Korea exporting arms and workers (Russia is a member of the Council). It is a point that has been under-reported in the media: the growing loss of legitimacy of the UN, which is less and less capable of fulfilling its role as the source of international law. If we add to this the fact that China seems to have been unaware of the Russian-North Korean bargaining, we can understand its discontent, which has been evident for some time. At the ceremonies organized by Pyongyang to commemorate China’s entry into the war in 1951, China sent no high-ranking representative. They did the same for the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries — as reported by Sébastien Falletti, LeFigaro‘s excellent correspondent . This tension has become perceptible in other sectors, notably with the banning of a number of Chinese films in North Korea. China remains silent. Is it acting in the shadows? Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian war machine was the first piece of bad news for China: it suggested that Taiwan would be harder than expected to invade. The second piece of bad news for China was the emancipation of its small but turbulent ally North Korea. Can we expect the third piece of bad news to be the end of the privileged Sino-Russian cooperative relationship and the “unlimited friendship” between Putin and Xi Jinping that was loudly affirmed on February 4, 2022, a few weeks before the Russian army invaded Ukraine? It is highly doubtful, as the countries of the anti-Western axis (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea) are linked by a common interest: the destruction of the international order founded on the UN Charter, in favor of a “multipolar” world, i.e. one left to the appetites for conquest and the revisionist ambitions of the most powerful countries. China’s economic power and interest in world stability, a necessary condition for its commercial expansion, made it seem different from the other, more bellicose countries on the Axis. What has been said over the past three years about China’s so-called moderating role in relation to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, and its attachment to respecting internationally recognized borders (which is the basis of its claim to Taiwan)? In reality, the boundless friendship has grown stronger since 2022, despite differences (competition for influence in Africa, Chinese pressure to monopolize Siberian mineral resources, rivalry in Iran, etc.). There is certainly a fundamental tension, at first sight, between China’s strategy of slowly strengthening its hegemony and Putin’s choice of war, a tension that cuts across the gap between the world’s second-largest economy and a dilapidated, declining country. But perhaps this tension is not so great given the convergence between Putin’s millenarian imperialism and the Chinese regime’s return to totalitarianism. This would not be a fragile, unstable alliance, but a convergence in a typically totalitarian headlong rush. With his promise of a “de-Westernization of the world” in the near future, Putin has, so to speak, launched a multi-pronged war against freedom and peace between nations.
Born in Paris in 1944, professor of philosophy, director of the Institute of Social History, an anti-totalitarian think tank founded by Boris Souvarine, Pierre Rigoulot has published in particular: Des Français au goulag, (Fayard 1984), Les Aquariums de Pyongyang (Laffont 2000). He has just published with Florence Grandsenne Quand Poutine se prend pour Staline (Buchet-Chastel 2023). Pierre Rigoulot holds a doctorate in political science.
Lecturer at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas. Teaches philosophy and political science.
