It’s easy to imagine a different world, a world in which we could be living right now, if anyone in government had the foresight (for example) of Alon Preiss. 

I’m not a North Korea sympathizer, particularly, and I wouldn’t want to live there (I don’t think I would like to have a citywide alarm clock, for one thing, and I’d miss watching the various Breaking Bad spinoffs that pop up with regularity), but there is some beauty to the Juche philosophy, North Korean society is not purely dreadful as portrayed in western media, and it should be clear by now that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Un, is a canny survivor and protector of what his dynasty has built, and he is not someone with whom to trifle. 

But whether North Korea is good, bad or terrible, putting up a big wall and trying to starve the nation into submission would never get the West what it seeks, which is the end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. 

As I wrote in Audere Magazine, back in early 2022, North Korea is never going to give up its nuclear weapons and go the way of Libya (and Ukraine). So given a choice between nukes and legitimate world markets, Pyongyang would choose nukes and give up legitimate markets. And if the world denies a country legitimate markets, that country will seek illegitimate markets, which for North Korea means the weapons trade, both conventional and nuclear. “[I]f faced with a choice between dealing with terrorists or watching his citizens starve,” I wrote then, “Kim will deal.”

As I noted in this magazine a year later, in 2023, John Delury, associate professor at the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, South Korea, reached the same conclusion in 2016. “ ‘Comprehensive’ sanctions send North Korea deeper into isolation,” he wrote, “and increase the risks of a war that no one wants, a war that could be truly catastrophic.”

Today, that war arrived. 

A couple of weeks ago, Reddit posts began to announce the imminent appearance of North Korean soldiers in Ukraine, and earlier this morning The New York Times reported that they had landed in Russia and were headed to the battlefront. 

Don’t pretend that this was inevitable, that Kim Jong-Un has any especial sympathy for an imperial war against a sovereign nation. North Korea was born in a battle against imperialism, its entire governing philosophy emphasizes self-sufficiency, and its bear-hug with Russia after the Ukraine invasion began was entirely transactional. Russia needed bullets, North Korea needed capital and an ally. 

So too North Korea’s logistical support for Hamas, without which the October 7 massacre could not have happened. The atheist Kim dynasty is not a natural ally of a religious fundamental terrorist organization. 

Indeed, Kim Jong-Un’s embrace of Russia and Hamas aligns with the regime’s history of forming pragmatic alliances to secure money, resources and geopolitical leverage. 

In 1974, Richard Nixon went to China, and he thus disrupted the Soviet bloc for the next thirty years, leading to the collapse of the USSR. He did not demand that China give up its nukes. In 2018, Trump tried a similar gambit with North Korea, which embraced the overture with enthusiasm. But, unlike Nixon, Trump (or more likely the “adults in the room”) refused détente absent denuclearization. The US turned its back and forced Kim into Putin’s arms. 

Sometimes, we all need an imperfect but useful friend. Had we welcomed North Korea’s friendship during the Trump administration, or early in Biden’s term, there would have been no October 7. Russia would not have had a supplier of arms early in the Ukraine war, which might be over now. 

France has said that it will send its own troops if conditions in Ukraine worsen for our ally – which has just happened with the North Korean escalation. If France joins the fight, suddenly we’re in a world war. 

So to the various terribles that a sensible North Korean outreach would have prevented, we can add World War 3. 

All North Korea wanted was to sell Germany its ceramics and a few chain restaurants with terrible karaoke, to animate a few cut-rate European kids’s shows, and to be otherwise left alone. 

^^^

This article is by Alon Preiss. Image by Peteranta.