North Korea comes in from the cold

Opinion

Earlier this month, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un flanked China’s President Xi Jinping on the red carpet at an epic military parade in Beijing. The supreme leader was feted as a guest of honour along with Vladimir Putin. Behind them in the pecking order were nearly two dozen heads of state — the leaders of regional powers Indonesia and Vietnam among them.

It was Kim’s first time at a major diplomatic event in his 14 years as leader. And it won’t be the last. Indeed, North Korea has asserted itself as a useful cog in the autocratic faction within the new multipolar global order.

Beijing for a long time was the sole ally propping up the Kim dynasty’s totalitarian dictatorship — if only because its collapse would burden China with millions of unwanted refugees. China thus provides its heavily sanctioned neighbour with vital energy and food supplies. Plus, China’s lone mutual defence treaty is with North Korea, signed in 1961.

The relationship has nonetheless been strained over the decades. Mainly, by Pyongyang’s habit of doling out rash threats of nuclear annihilation against the United States and its allies. This irritates Chinese leaders by bringing unwanted attention to what Beijing perceives as its geographic sphere of influence.

But North Korea has also deftly seized new opportunities that have arisen in recent years.

Kim Jong-Un has declared it his country’s “fraternal duty” to support Russia’s grinding invasion of Ukraine. Since late 2023, Pyongyang has sent some 10,000 of its soldiers and nearly six million artillery shells and other ammunition to Russian forces on the frontlines.

South Korean intelligence estimates that 2,000 North Korean soldiers have been killed fighting on Moscow’s behalf. And yet Pyongyang is reportedly poised to deploy 6,000 more personnel to Russia soon, prizing the ability for its soldiers to gain live battlefield experience.

Satellite imagery has shown that Russia in exchange supplied North Korea — which is barred from global energy markets — with nearly a million barrels of oil in 2024. Moscow also signed a mutual defence pact with Pyongyang last November. South Korea’s national security adviser has said this includes North Korea receiving numerous shipments of Russian anti-air missile batteries and air defence equipment.

Meanwhile, North Korea has intensified its outreach to Iran; the two nations being on-again-off-again friends since the 1970s. North Korean state media has amplified pro-Iranian propaganda in support of Tehran’s bloody standoff with Israel. North Korean weapons have been used by Hamas to fight Israeli troops in Gaza.

Closer engagement with Tehran could chiefly benefit Kim Jong Un’s regime in two ways, writes a Korean specialist for the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. First, “it could give North Korea another source of military technology beyond just Russia.” And second, “increasing trade and other forms of economic co-operation with Iran could also provide North Korea’s regime with much-needed foreign currency.”

Meanwhile, arguably the world’s most isolated nation has learned to leverage and cheat the globalized economy to its advantage. North Korean hackers have stolen an estimated US$6 billion over the years by infiltrating cryptocurrency exchanges. They have launched relentless ransomware attacks as well.

The advent of open-source AI tools has also enabled thousands of North Korean operatives — using deepfakes to falsely pose as IT workers, some managing multiple fake identities at once — to get hired at American companies. Once inside, they have pilfered trade secrets and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in wages annually for themselves, with Kim’s regime taking a cut.

“They’re everywhere, all over the Fortune 500,” a cybersecurity expert told CNN.

The illicit proceeds from this cybercrime are mostly funnelled toward ramping up Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. North Korea is estimated to possess around 50 nuclear warheads and has focused in recent years on developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland.

It’s anticipated that such efforts will now get a boost from Russia. The commander of America’s nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in May that Russian knowledge and co-operation will vastly accelerate Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program over the next three to five years.

But the direction of North Korea’s nascent rebirth on the world stage comes with many questions. Perhaps most of all, whether so-called “geopolitical swing states”— Brazil, India, Gulf nations, Turkey, South Africa and others — embrace it soon out of calculated pragmatism.

In other words, if the global balance of power keeps drifting further away from the orbit of liberal democracies, expect the Hermit Kingdom to start making a lot of new friends.

Kyle Hiebert is a Montreal-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.