A totalitarian party-state with an arsenal of nuclear missiles—whose number and range are growing—North Korea is likened by the U.S. military to a “dagger pointed at Asia.” Moreover, this ally of Russia-Eurasia and communist China is a strong link in the CRANK chain1 (China/Russia/Iran/North Korea), an openly anti-Western front against which the United States, Europe, and their Asia-Pacific allies are struggling to organize a response.
Let us summarize the doxa that, for a long time, dominated what contemporary parlance calls the Western “narrative.” North Korea is portrayed as a regime on the wrong side of history, and therefore doomed in the short term. Furthermore, a combination of cooperative diplomacy and strategic patience should thwart its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons—an ambition interpreted not as an assertion of power but as a sign of desperation. These efforts would be all the more futile given that its major neighbors and allies—Eurasian Russia and communist China—would never allow it to become a nuclear power. Never, ever. Finally, the communist dynasty founded by Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) would be on its last legs; North Korean oligarchs would soon be negotiating for their survival.
A nuclear-armed party-state, allied with Russia
In the end, more than three decades after Kim Il-sung’s death, his grandson rules unchallenged, and the totalitarian party-state has yielded nothing. While North Korean technology was portrayed as a fiction intended to impress the gullible, North Korea’s first nuclear test took place in 2006, during the reign of Kim Il-jung (1942–2011). Four more tests were conducted under Kim Jong-un (born in 1984), who is preparing his daughter to succeed him. At the same time, North Korea is pursuing a program of ballistic and cruise missiles with increasing range—Europe and the United States could soon be within striking distance—and is building nuclear submarines that reportedly benefit from Russian technology transfers. North Korea’s space program is also reportedly supported by Russia.
In fact, North Korea is not a “pariah state.” It is true that, for a time, Russia and communist China agreed to the adoption of international sanctions against it, in an effort to persuade it to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing”: those sanctions were, and are, undermined by the covert actions of these two countries, which no longer hide this fact.
Moreover, North Korea has long been part of a network of proliferating powers and criminal players who have learned over the decades to circumvent the Western counterproliferation framework. One need only look at Pyongyang’s ties to Pakistan’s “deep state,” the “Khan network,” Islamic Iran, and its allies.
When Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” encountered unexpected resistance from the Ukrainians and it became necessary to buy the time needed to establish a war economy, Russia turned to North Korea. North Korea first supplied it with shells and missiles and then, after signing a defense pact reviving the old alliance between Stalin and Kim Il-sung, sent soldiers to fight in the Donbas, at the other end of the Eurasian landmass. Of an expeditionary force of 11,000 men, deployed 6,000 kilometers away, 1,500 soldiers are reported to have been killed and another 4,000 wounded. Joining the troops are North Korean workers—modern-day slaves—intended to fill the “gaps” in the Russian workforce.
In return, the Russian government pays the North Korean regime $200 million a year and delivers 700,000 metric tons of rice, to prevent the country from experiencing another severe famine (as was the case in the 1990s). This aid helps cushion the cost of international sanctions, counterbalance dependence on communist China, and ignore Donald Trump’s pathetic messages, as he seeks to repeat the disastrous diplomatic maneuver of 2018–2019. Drawing on his negotiating skills and art of persuasion, the U.S. president had met several times with “Kim Boom-Boom” (the nickname given to Kim Jong-un), without any preconditions or subsequent success: North Korea’s nuclear program continued unabated, and there is no question today of slowing it down. Quite the contrary (see above).
Western diplomats and experts were counting, at the very least, on Communist China to slow North Korea’s long march toward nuclear weapons. A clumsy practitioner of an illusory “Nixon in reverse”—which would involve turning Moscow against Beijing—Donald Trump himself was counting on Chinese support in this matter (the “at the same time” mentality is a disease of postmodernity). Following the Sino-American summit in mid-May, he wanted to believe that Xi Jinping was on board with this objective. Building on what U.S. diplomacy presented as a given, some believed that Washington and Beijing were also aligned on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. More broadly, it seemed possible to drive a wedge between the Chinese and the Russians, who were portrayed as rivals in North Korea. Not so.
Communist China Backing North Korea’s Nuclear Program
During his recent diplomatic visit on June 8 and 9, Xi Jinping spoke of a “historic new beginning” between Communist China and North Korea, three-quarters of a century after the Korean War (1950–1953), during which Mao Zedong sent three million “volunteers.” The supposedly “shared” goal, according to U.S. diplomats, of “denuclearization” of the peninsula was not mentioned, with China’s silence being taken as approval. From Beijing’s perspective, the North Korean regime serves as a battering ram against the U.S. military presence in South Korea (28,500 troops) and is a key player in East Asia, at a time when Japan is strengthening its military and tightening its ties with Taiwan.
In short, the regional stakes in the “Asian Mediterranean” and those of the global rivalry with the United States outweigh the friction with North Korea and the effects of competition with Russia in that country. In Northeast Asia, as in the Middle East and throughout the Eurasian region, geopolitical synergies and convergences outweigh the differences. Within the broader framework of the CRANKs, North Korea is much more than a “dagger pointed at Asia” (to use the U.S. military’s expression). It is the forward bastion of a vast anti-Western front.
In this geopolitical “Very Great Game,” whose scope and stakes surpass Kipling’s “Great Game,” the West lays bare its divisions and fractures. As the hegemonic leader and strategic operator of this geohistorical landscape—a position it acquired in the aftermath of two European wars that became global conflicts—Trump’s America has lost its way in the cult of force and the idolatry of self. The Iran issue highlights the internal fault lines within the United States and the indecisiveness of its president—the nominal commander-in-chief who would like to win a war without seeing it through to the end.
As for Europe, mired in what resembles “secular stagnation,” it remains below the critical threshold of intensity that would allow it to transform itself into a unified power—that is, a fully-fledged global geostrategic actor. Some of its heads of state and government speculate about an illusory “coalition of middle powers,” supposedly opening up a “third way,” or they prophesy about Europe as the herald of a multilateral, UN-led “Brave New World” (history should eventually do it justice, they believe). In short, they are recycling the theory of soft power, a sublimation of European powerlessness. This can be seen as the inverse counterpart to Trumpism (the worship of hard power).
Yet the balance of power is shifting toward Asia. This historical process threatens to turn America into a distant geostrategic “great island,” with Europe returning to its pre-Columbian past, when it was comparable to a “small cape of Asia,” exposed to the effects of upheavals in its Eurasian hinterland (the nomad/sedentary dialectic on the great steppe). A Sino-Russian Greater Eurasia is taking shape (one that is, incidentally, more Chinese than Russian), capable of projecting power and influence across its southern corridor (the Greater Middle East) and of polarizing the global economy and world diplomacy (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS+, and the Global South). The CRANK axis makes up the offensive version of this non-Western world.
Faced with a geopolitical revolution of historic proportions—namely, the closing of the long historical cycle opened by the Age of Discovery and Iberian globalization—it is of the utmost importance that Westerners from the Old World and those from the New World rediscover what unites and brings them together. The Group of Seven summit (Evian, June 15–17), the European Council summit on the following two days, and finally the NATO summit (Ankara, July 7–8) are all decisive moments. Looking ahead: “burden-sharing” for defense in Europe, without pretense or bad faith; a convergence of positions on the Middle East; and a degree of unity regarding communist China. A decisive test: Ukraine, situated at the intersection of these strategic issues.
Associate professor of history and geography and researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics (University of Paris VIII). Author of several books, he works within the Thomas More Institute on geopolitical and defense issues in Europe. His research areas cover the Baltic-Black Sea region, post-Soviet Eurasia, and the Mediterranean.
Footnotes
- The common acronym is CRINK, but we now also see CRANK, used by Paul J. Saunders, president of the American think tank Center for the National Interest, to set the tone for the attitude of the countries in question toward the United States: in English, “crank” means both “grumpy, complainer” and “eccentric, oddball.” (Editor’s note)