As Vladimir Putin prepares to land in Pyongyang for his first visit to North Korea in 24 years, this second meeting of the two dictators in under a year – Kim Jong Un visited Russia in September 2023 – should not be ignored as mere showmanship. Even if the summit simply brings more bright lights and wet-ink signatures, the message from the two leaders will be clear, namely that an anti-Western coalition is not merely a fiction, but a worrying reality.

Back in 2000, North Korea was six years away from conducting its first – albeit far from successful – nuclear test and struggling to recover from a devastating self-induced famine. Pyongyang was also feeling betrayed following the end of the Cold War in 1991. Only a year earlier, much to North Korea’s ire, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with South Korea, what the North has long-called a ‘puppet state’ of the United States. The North’s trade with its Cold War patron would no longer take place at friendship prices. In another blow to Pyongyang in 1996, Russia pulled out from a 1961 treaty between the Soviet Union and North Korea, the Treaty on Mutual Friendship, Cooperation, and Assistance, which pledged mutual assistance in the event of any military attack on either party.

The two are sending a clear message to the West: any efforts to isolate Russia or North Korea will fail

Putin’s ascendancy to power in March 2000, however, would please........

© The Spectator