‘There’s a price for being Russia’s enemy’: Putin, Kim aim to intimidate U.S.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin needs North Korea — not just for its weapons, but also to help deliver a warning to the U.S. and its allies: There will be a significant price to pay for any nation that gets on the Kremlin’s bad side.

That was one of the key points made by former CIA Moscow station chief Daniel N. Hoffman, who said during an online forum Tuesday that Mr. Putin’s recent meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was an acknowledgment by Moscow that it has become increasingly reliant on pariah states such as North Korea amid diplomatic isolation and heavy economic sanctions from the West.

But Mr. Putin had another motivation, one that seems to have driven the decision to publicly play up the mutual defense pact that the two often wary neighbors signed during their historic summit last month.

“I think that Vladimir Putin’s visit to Pyongyang — it’s definitely part of his cold calculus. It’s also a bit of an act of desperation. He needs North Korea, and he also needs the relationship to be very much public,” Mr. Hoffman told the Washington Brief, a monthly forum hosted by the Washington Times Foundation.

The mutual defense agreement, which on its surface seems to indicate Russia and North Korea will come to the other’s aid if attacked, may have also given Mr. Putin a powerful messaging tool against those who seek to isolate the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine.

“Putin was deliberately very public about that,” Mr. Hoffman said. “To demonstrate to the United States and South Korea, and other allies, particularly Japan and the Philippines, Australia, that there’s a price for being Russia’s enemy. If South Korea provides arms to Ukraine, then there will be costs in the Korean Peninsula to South Korea. Vladimir Putin wants to demonstrate that Russia can really be a thorn in our side.”

Former CIA official Joseph DeTrani, who moderated Tuesday’s event, also stressed that the burgeoning Russia-North Korea alliance — part of what analysts have dubbed an “axis of authoritarians,” including China and Iran — is born out of the Kremlin’s desire to undermine Washington and the liberal international order.

“Vladimir Putin’s focus is on the United States,” Mr. DeTrani said. “And this alliance with … North Korea, a lot of it is directed at the United States.”

Mr. Putin made no secret of his intentions with the summit. Ahead of his meeting with Mr. Kim, Mr. Putin wrote in a North Korean state-controlled newspaper that the two countries have a common interest in “resolutely oppos[ing]” Western ambitions to “hinder the establishment of a multipolar world order based on mutual respect for justice.”

But the mutual defense treaty could go beyond increased military cooperation between Russia and North Korea, or their shared desire to push back on an American-led global order. Other speakers at Tuesday’s event noted that, technically speaking, a formal security pact between Moscow and Pyongyang could accelerate a World War III-type scenario.

“Now that Russia [and] North Korea are military allies bound by a mutual security pledge, just like the North Koreans and Chinese are military allies bound by a mutual defense pledge, that brings Russia into the Taiwanese situation,” Alexandre Mansourov, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, said at Tuesday’s event.

It’s unclear whether Russia, regardless of its supposed treaty obligations, would offer tangible military support during a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan. China so far has been careful to avoid the appearance of direct military support for Russia’s own war in Ukraine, though U.S. officials and national security analysts say that Beijing is playing an increasingly crucial role in helping to prop up Russia’s beleaguered defense industrial base.

North Korea, on the other hand, has offered concrete military support. U.S. intelligence agencies have said that they have firm evidence of North Korean ballistic missiles being used by Russian troops in Ukraine, among other instances of Pyongyang’s help.

The fallout of the Putin-Kim meeting could have an impact on decision-making in Seoul, potentially complicating the already dangerous geopolitical dynamics at play in the region and around the world. After Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim signed their mutual defense treaty, South Korean media outlets reported that policymakers in Seoul were reconsidering the country’s policy of limiting support to Ukraine to nonlethal supplies.

A change in that policy would mark a major shift by South Korea and, by extension, would almost surely draw the ire of Mr. Putin.

Add to all of that the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and broader instability across the Middle East, and Mr. Hoffman argued that the threats facing the U.S. and its allies today are perhaps without equal.

“All of that makes today arguably more dangerous, more risky for U.S. national security than ever before,” he said, “not just in the Korean Peninsula but throughout the world. I think we face more wickedly complex threats to our national security right now, today, than ever before.”