North Korean Troops in Russia Bring a "World-Island" Conflict a Step Closer
Nicholas Eberstadt is the Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
SEOUL — With the dispatch of thousands of North Korean special forces toward the front lines in Russia’s war against Ukraine — a development first reported by South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence sources, now confirmed by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — the emerging contours of global struggle in the post-Cold War era are coming into sharper focus.
As North Korean soldiers head into possible combat in Europe — the degree of their ultimate military involvement might turn out to be much greater than generally appreciated — a “World-Island”-style contest seems to be falling into place. Four ambitious, revisionist states at the heart of Eurasia — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — are coordinating ever more closely to challenge, if not shatter, the prevailing international security order known as Pax Americana.
“World-Island” was geo-strategist Halford Mackinder’s memorable description of Eurasia plus Africa in his 1919 book “Democratic Ideals and Reality,” which expanded on his seminal 1904 essay “The Geographical Pivot of History.” Mackinder prophesied, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland: Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island: Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
Ukraine, fatefully, is roughly ground zero in Mackinder’s depiction of that “Heartland” upon which world politics would “pivot” — and is now ground zero of the latest military contest for primacy on that landmass.
Yet the Kremlin’s quest to re-subjugate Ukraine by force has not gone according to plan. The invasion was not supposed to turn into the current, inconclusive land war now grinding toward its fourth year, costing Russia hundreds of thousands of casualties and the loss of much of it military’s effective fighting power (in the estimate of both U.S. and British militaries).
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s war effort appears to be short on both materiel and manpower. And this is where the Russia-North Korea “strategic partnership,” ratified last week by Russian lawmakers, fits in.
Unshakably committed to its own never-ending struggle for mastery over the Korean Peninsula, the super-militarized but acutely-impoverished regime of Kim Jong Un will have no shortage of “asks” in exchange for helping Putin: military technology to modernize conventional weapons programs; scientific-technical expertise for nuclear weapons and missiles; resources and know-how to rejuvenate and improve North Korea’s sprawling, inefficient defense economy.
Over that past two decades, Putin had consigned Pyongyang to something like “smile diplomacy”: offering occasional soothing words of encouragement, while keeping the belligerent state at arm’s length.
Then, when the war against Ukraine became a slog, the Kremlin’s posture toward North Korea completely shifted. The strategic partnership quickly tumbled into place in June when Putin visited Pyongyang.
Kim’s mercenary military aid for Moscow builds on his past diplomatic support. Almost immediately with the Russian invasion in February 2022, North Korea expressed its enthusiastic approval. A month later, North Korea joined a handful of countries in voting against a U.N. resolution demanding that Russia “unconditionally withdraw” from Ukrainian territory. In 2023, at an official dinner when Kim and Putin met in Russia, the North Korean leader raised a toast, wishing Putin a “great victory” in Ukraine.
But, of course, North Korea’s main services for Moscow have been military. Months into the invasion, it now appears, North Korea began to resupply Russia’s own dwindling stocks of munitions — in particular, the artillery shells and Katyusha-style rockets that have been mainstay ammunition for the Russian offensive.
Over the past two years, little North Korea has somehow managed to provide an amazing amount of armaments for the Russian war effort. North Korea’s estimated population of 26 million isn’t as large as Texas’s, and its $23 billion gross domestic product in 2023, according to South Korean estimates, doesn’t even beat tiny Vermont’s. Yet Western military intelligence suggest that Pyongyang has thus far nonetheless managed to ship up to 20,000 rail containers of missiles and ammunition for the Russian war effort.
At its current production levels, the Russian defense sector might thus have gained the equivalent of several years’ worth of armaments from Pyongyang. According to some Western assessments, up to half the ammunition Russian forces expended in Ukraine this year and last year was of North Korean make — and not obviously inferior to Russia’s own artillery and rockets, at least in the judgment of some experts.
In effect, North Korea has already thrown the Russian war effort a lifeline. Given the burn rate of ammo and Russia’s own limited capacities to turn it out, North Korea’s contribution to the invasion might well have made the difference between the current stalemate and steady Russian setbacks in the field this year and last.
Now come Kim’s special-forces troops.
A brigade, about 3,000 soldiers, “had been given uniforms, weapons and IDs to disguise themselves as Buryats and Yakuts, ethnic minorities from Siberia with similar physical features to Koreans,” the The Post recently reported, citing South Korean intelligence. North Korean troops have reportedly been spotted at the Ukraine border; the supposition is that they will be under Russian military command, but are apparently operating as distinct and independent units. Another three brigades, up to an additional 9,000 soldiers, will reportedly head to the front this year as well.
In Seoul, Washington and other Western capitals, observers suppose that these North Korean troops might provide technical and other support functions from the rear areas for the Russian war effort. Or that they might be observers learning about the warfare against a modern Western enemy. Or that they might be deployed for combat on Russian soil, in Kursk province, against the Ukrainian sortie that Moscow has not yet been able to beat back. Or maybe, just maybe, they might be sent into Ukraine to fight against its defenders.
Such assessments sound plausible enough — to us. In the sense that those are the sorts of options that Western militaries might consider if they were in charge of that campaign.
But what if we are just “mirror imaging”: misreading the Russian and North Korean dictators, whose intentions and objectives are obviously so different from our own?
Consider for a moment: Could it really make sense to Putin to ask for Kim’s troops simply to help Russia bleed out more slowly? Or for Kim to commit his best forces to a campaign aiming to achieve at best modest gains, when that immensely risky decision to cross the Eurasian Rubicon necessarily entails prospects of indeterminate losses among his elite units and incalculable consequences if unhappy rumors from the front spread back home?
Perhaps so. But one of America’s leading authorities on the North Korean military, professor Bruce Bechtol of Angelo State University in Texas, sees another possibility.
Could these initial North Korean brigades, he muses, be an advance party for a much larger deployment? Say, 50,000 special forces out of Pyongyang’s million-plus army, confidently detailed by Kim to Ukraine since he has no real concern about an attack from South Korea?
A surge like that, Bechtol argues, really could turn the tide in this war: smashing back the Ukrainian military; allowing Russia to conquer significantly more Ukrainian territory, and then positioning Putin to propose a Ukraine settlement of his own liking, on his own terms. In other words: a victory for Russia, with North Korean forces as the game changer.
Bechtol’s worst-case “nightmare” hypothesis is a scenario that might never come to pass — but it is precisely the sort of strategic surprise from the new Russia-North Korean partnership that Western governments should be preparing for. And, so far, they don’t appear to be doing so.
However the Ukraine war unfolds, the deployment of North Korean forces to support an attack on a Western democracy many thousands of miles from the Pyongyang should awaken Americans to the new power politics of the post-Cold War era.
The four aggressive Eurasian dictatorships — Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — are cooperating strategically, and their cooperation is deepening, with an increasing coherence. Three are nuclear-armed and the fourth, Iran, is working to join the club. The day is long past when these regimes posed isolated, discrete threats to Western interests.
True, these state differ in their specific objectives and priorities — and as historian Hal Brands has underscored, they do not form a tightly coordinated alliance like NATO. But they are already more deeply integrated, both economically and militarily, than were the Axis powers of World War II.
China and Russia subsidize North Korea. Russia relies on China for markets, Iran for drones and North Korea for materiel and soldiers. Iran gets military technology from North Korea and economic cooperation with Russia and China. And they serve as defense attorneys for one another in international and diplomatic forums.
There is now a coordinated challenge to the existing U.S.-led security order that stretches from the Middle East through Eurasia, all the way to the Far East.
We must look at the threats we face on World-Island today from the Heartland dictators with new, more strategically sophisticated lenses. We must come to understand that, for all intents and purpose, the war in Gaza and Lebanon against Israel by Iranian proxies is the war by Russia against Ukraine, as would be the war in Taiwan that China may unleash, at a time of Beijing’s own choosing. All one.
The time for posturing about unreservedly defending one Western target of the Heartland dictators’ aggression (Israel) at the expense of another Western target of their aggression (Ukraine) should be over. Setbacks in one theater will only sow more setbacks in other theaters.
Meeting the threats from this confederation of Heartland dictators will be difficult enough, even if we recognize the challenge they pose. If we do not recognize the logic and intentions behind their actions, and respond accordingly, the years ahead — already foreboding — will be even less pleasant.