Russia and North Korea are Now Allied, Militarily and Economically
Putin has changed things in the Far East and made us all a lot safer. But try downloading a map of the Russia to North Korea border. Google seems to think it’s still 1953.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin has furthered the credibility of Russia in the Far East and strengthened the cause of world peace by calculated and trustworthy diplomacy. Thus he has done what US President Donald Trump tried to do for America but, sabotaged by war mongers and backstabbers in his own administration, Trump failed to do it.
To say that this is part of a world historical turning point is not an overstatement. It sounds the death knell for the centuries-old neo-colonialist aspirations of the West in Eurasia. And for the peace of this planet, that’s a very good thing.
President Putin has visited North Korea and he and Kim Jong Un have agreed to a military alliance between Russia and North Korea. Larry Johnson [Dialogue Works: Nima Alkorshid with Larry Johnson June 23/24] points out that diplomacy between Pyongyang and Moscow has been preparing this carefully for months, so it’s no fluke. This is a serious attempt to make Washington stop and think. It offers a counter threat to a deranged Washington’s use of Ukraine to “weaken” and even ”regime change” Russia and it offers a counter to Washington’s hostile moves in the Far East. But it is defensive in nature. It is meant to make war less likely, not more likely.
This is a formal, military alliance. Both Russian President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have emphasized that fact. Russia’s friendship with China is mutual and very close but it is not a formal military alliance. But Russia shares a border with North Korea and Russia has always had a close and supportive association with North Korea going back even before the Korean War. Now Russia has made it legal, and is demonstrative about it. Plans are announced to replace the old Russia-to-North Korea Friendship Bridge. A new bridge will be built to unite both countries more efficiently. North Korea has contributed artillery shells to Russia’s Ukraine war effort and promises to ramp up production. The economy of North Korea will be getting a much-needed boost.
US retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson has often said many sensible things in critique of America’s support of Ukraine and the insanity of Washington’s drift into war with Russia. However, on this issue of the Russian-North Korean alliance I think Larry is flying off the handle. He says he believes a commentator from Pyongyang who avers that Kim Jong Un is (1) determined to ignore Washington from now on, and (2) determined to unite North and South Korea by force using a blitzkrieg attack. This would kill millions and trigger a nuclear war.
I prefer the opinion of retired US Colonel Douglas McGregor. He points out that North Korea is in wretched shape economically. The average height of a North Korean is shorter than that of a South Korean after decades of poverty and periodic famine – and being besieged by US and ROC forces ever since 1953 is a factor in that which we of the "Free World" are not taught to consider. The population of North Korea is half that of the South. Kim’s acquisition of nukes and the missiles to deliver them can be thought of not as a scheme to start a war that Kim has to know would be suicidal, but rather a desperate way to fend off the rightly perceived threat coming from the USA. Kim’s alliance with Russia should be considered in the same light.
Has Putin rashly allied with a crazy man who wants to start a war? That’s the image that Col Wilkerson seems to have adopted. That’s not the image of Putin that his actions have exemplified. Putin is cautious and calculating. He thinks many moves ahead, always. He is not doing what he’s doing in order to have more war, neither is Kim Jong Un.
Let us not forget that Trump attempted to make peace with North Korea and was working towards an agreement which would have stopped the acquisition of nukes by North Korea. The North Koreans responded to Trump's overture by scaling back their missile and nuclear program. Trump visited Pyongyang and warmly praised Kim in 2019 then he went to Vietnam and tried to make peace. Mike Pompeo immediately contradicted Trump with hostile and insulting remarks which must have helped convince Kim that he could never trust the word of an American president.
Pompeo’s undermining of his president was part of a pattern. President Donald Trump was undermined and sabotaged by his own administration, with the result that the credibility of any future US president was damaged beyond repair. It wasn’t Trump’s doing.
President Trump was personally in face-to-face trade negotiations with Xi Jinping when the news broke that Meng Wanzou, daughter of the founder of China’s premier computer tech company Huawei and its chief executive, had been arrested by Canadian authorities in Vancouver. Xi Jinping was furious and accused Trump of treachery. John Bolton, then Trump’s National Security Advisor, held a press conference in Washington even before Trump returned from the devastated negotiations. Bolton said that he had known ahead of time that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would have Meng Wanzhou arrested and charged with violating a unilateral American sanction against Iran. Bolton then said that he “wasn’t sure” that President Trump had known about it.
Take note! The National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, head of the National Security Council, said before the whole world, that he, John Bolton, was in charge of US foreign policy, not the President. He, John Bolton, was announcing his power to give orders to the Prime Minister of Canada which would make his President look like a fool or a liar or both in front of the leader of China and the entire world. Bolton had also prepared an air attack on Iran and put it before Trump as a virtual ultimatum that Trump had mere minutes to authorize or cancel this attack because everything was ready for “Go”. Trump cancelled this attack and thus prevented the USA from being plunged into war with Iran. A short time later Trump fired Bolton. But he never fired Mike Pompeo.
US President Obama was unable or unwilling to keep control of his State Secretary Hillary Clinton. She illegally misused US classified documents – suffering not even a rebuke – and started a war to destroy Libya by facilitating the murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens on September 11, 2015. President Trump was even less respected and even less in control of his own administration. Now Joe Biden has made the US Presidency even more of a joke. The disarray of the Trump administration has been replicated by the Biden administration. Since September 11, 2001, every succeeding US President has been more and more openly relegated to figurehead status in Washington. And yet there has been no constitutional reform to establish who really is running Washington and the immense and world-destroying US nuclear arsenal. The world hears about something called the “Deep State” but Washington’s official establishment, the Three Branches, has heard of no such entity. So who’s really running things? A senile window dummy like Joe Biden who can’t even find his way to exit a stage and has to be led around by the hand like an idiot? The CIA, a collection of fascist cowboys who, as the whole world knows very well, blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline thereby dealing a mortal blow to Germany and the EU?
The Congress, Presidency and the Judicial Branch of what was once the government of the United States have been reduced to a nasty clown show. The election of the next POTUS is mere months away and the contest is between senile Biden at barely 40% approval rating, or Donald Trump who has been convicted of a crime which isn’t even a misdemeanour, or Bobby Kennedy Jr who is being handled by a CIA agent (his daughter in law Amaryllis Fox) and has nary a hope of doing anything but spoiling Biden’s campaign, pathetic as it already is.
Washington is a dead man walking.
This is a lesson that Russia and China have taken to heart for many reasons. The majority of the world, especially the BRICS and the developing world, is coming to agree with this assessment and will comport themselves accordingly. They will support Washington out of caution or fear but never out of love or trust. This has been the lesson of last century and most emphatically it has been driven home in this century. Washington is not unified, and not a single promise coming from the White House can be trusted.
Diplomacy is dead in Washington. The US doesn’t have ambassadors worth shaking hands with, it has generals. Negotiating with the US is a waste of time. Even Putin, cautious and measured to a fault, has openly said it and meant it. Whenever in history nations have broken diplomatic contact this is always a prelude to war. This world is in FAR more danger of World War Three than it ever was during the Cold War.
But Putin repeating Trump's 2019 junkets to North Korea and to Vietnam, but this time with far more success, is a hopeful sign. The next stop on Putin’s very extraordinary junket was Vietnam; the Soviet Union gave Vietnam the MiG-21 jets and the SAM missile batteries that helped Ho Chi Minh defeat the USA, so the friendship between Russia and Vietnam is also warm. China and Vietnam have not been such warm friends, despite the illusions of Washington in that regard. Being sucked into a war on China's borders has never been a popular idea in Beijing.
Putin is there to tie North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and China together economically for the mutual benefit of them all. China is developing high speed rail links with Myanmar; Vietnam might well benefit by getting closer to China as well. Before the Vietnam War Chinese economic ties were ancient and beneficial in Indochina. I think it’s coming back and I think the whole world ought to be glad of it.
Great power diplomacy is dead in Washington. But Russia is now the world leader. That’s a good thing.
China has not been very warm towards North Korea (and the poverty of North Korea is evidence of that). China felt that the Soviet Union had dragged China into the Korean War, in which China spent all the blood, and that North Korea, perpetually needy and perpetually a hazard, was a gift that kept on costing. The Vietnam War was a similar situation.
In the 1960s China was perceived by Washington’s hawks – and the CIA cowboys they loved – as running the whole show in Vietnam. To my way of thinking, the Vietnam War could be seen as Washington’s Cold War Asia Hands’ attempt to prevent China from establishing a commercial empire in the Far East. This was actually articulated at the time as “Containing China” and when finally it was desired by the anti-war faction to end this crazy Vietnam War disaster Richard Nixon went to China to make peace. Mao died in 1976 and Deng Xiouping turned China around and initiated its modernization. China has built 30,000 miles of high speed rail in the last 15 years.
The Washington establishment of the 1960s was delusional. It was the USSR that was the real backbone of North Vietnam as it had been of North Korea. Or maybe you could say that the Washington think-tankers of the 1960s were too far sighted to see what was in front of them. The Chinese commercial empire in the Far East that they feared has come to pass in our time.