Can Donald Trump Disrupt the Russia-North Korea Military Partnership?

Despite all of the obstacles, Trump needs to try reviving the embryonic détente with North Korea.

An especially bad aspect of Joe Biden’s foreign policy was how it drove disparate countries in the international system together to oppose the United States. In short, Washington’s arrogant bullying intensified disruptive behavior on the part of longtime adversaries and created new enemies in the ranks of previously neutral powers. The administration’s insistent efforts to get reluctant countries to support the U.S.-NATO crusade against Russia have produced particularly unfortunate consequences for American interests.

The emergence of a new administration, however, creates fresh opportunities for beneficial policy changes. President-elect Donald Trump needs to give the highest priority to disrupting the emerging military partnership between Russia and North Korea. Achieving such a goal, though, requires dramatic changes in Washington’s policies toward both countries. 

Moscow’s courtship of Pyongyang threatens to produce an extremely painful lesson in geopolitics for the United States. For decades, Washington has been unduly fond of waging proxy wars against other countries. It was the hallmark of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and it appeared to be a great success, driving Soviet forces out of that country at little risk or cost to America. Later efforts in places such as Syria were decidedly less successful, but the proxy war approach never lost its appeal to many U.S. officials. That point became indisputable when Washington and its key NATO allies embraced the strategy of using Ukraine as a military proxy against Russia.

However, Vladimir Putin’s government has now demonstrated that it is able and willing to use North Korea as a military proxy of its own. Not only did the Kremlin obtain a new, plentiful source of conventional armaments, but North Korean units are reportedly battling Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine. That development constitutes a dangerous escalation in an already perilous conflict.

Once Trump takes office, the new administration must be ready to immediately alter the incentive structure for both Moscow and Pyongyang. It required extraordinary policy ineptitude on Washington’s part for Russia to conclude that it needed to create a new alliance with North Korea. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s new, noncommunist government signed on to most aspects of the West’s policy toward Pyongyang, including a long list of economic sanctions. Getting the Kremlin to return to a more neutral stance should not be all that difficult. However, ending Washington’s use of Ukraine as an anti-Russian geostrategic proxy—especially abandoning the provocative pipe dream of getting Russia to tolerate Kyiv’s membership in NATO—will be required. U.S. leaders should never have ventured down that path in the first place.

Getting Kim Jong-un’s regime to conclude that using North Korean troops as cannon fodder in a war on the other side of the world is not a good idea should not be all that difficult either. However, Washington cannot simply continue the hoary, unproductive status quo of trying to isolate North Korea and compelling Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear weapons. During his first term, Trump briefly seemed to be coming to that realization and had opened a productive dialogue with Kim. But intense bipartisan opposition from myopic hawks in Congress (and from some of the president’s own advisers) derailed those initially promising signs of change.

Despite all of the obstacles, Trump needs to try reviving that embryonic détente. A good first step would be to propose establishing formal diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. It is both foolish and dangerous for the United States not to have official ties to a country that now has a nuclear arsenal and a growing ballistic missile system. We don’t have to be friends with a regime like North Korea’s, but we always must try to keep the lines of communication open.

President Trump will need to summon every ounce of courage to ease Washington’s dangerously confrontational relationships with Moscow and Pyongyang. His political and ideological opponents are almost certain to revive the sleazy smears so prevalent during his first term that he was too “cozy” with Kim and an outright puppet of Vladimir Putin. If he allows such smears to intimidate him, though, Trump risks having the United States drift into wars against two nuclear-armed powers. 

Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, and a contributing editor at the National Interest. He also served in several senior positions during a thirty-seven-year career at the Cato Institute. Dr. Carpenter is the author of thirteen books and more than 1,300 articles on topics such as foreign policy, national security, and civil liberties. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

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