Troy Stangarone

In recent weeks, there has been significant discussion of whether North Korea has made the fundamental decision to go to war with South Korea. But focusing exclusively on whether Pyongyang has made a strategic decision to go to war in the absence of evidence of an imminent attack takes the focus off other important developments, especially North Korea’s economy and its growing ties to Russia.

After the failure of the Hanoi Summit, North Korea began to move away from engagement with South Korea and the United States. Kim Jong-un likely realized that there was no path to the normalization of relations with the United States that did not entail the significant dismantling of the regime’s nuclear weapons program. If Donald Trump would not give him the deal he wanted, it would be unlikely that any future U.S. president would.

Instead, the pandemic, U.S. tensions with China, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine altered the geopolitical dynamics around the Korean Peninsula. Kim seized the opportunity presented by these shifts to redirect his strategy towards self-reliance, strengthening the regime’s control domestically, and developing closer relations with Russia and China.

While these shifts provide Pyongyang with room to maneuver internationally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is........

© The Korea Times