Russia, playing its own geopolitical game, has opened, as it seems, a third front to the US in South Korea and Japan, aiming at the dispersion of US forces, while Moscow is also targeting the Balkans.
The Korean Central News Agency quoted a statement from the country's foreign ministry as saying that North Korea "warmly welcomes President Putin visiting Pyongyang, and is ready to receive the closest friend of the Korean people with the utmost sincerity."
Kim Jong-un, an astute geopolitician, seeks to create synergy through a merger strategy that actually dates back to the time of Joseph Stalin, who deliberately sought to lure the United States into a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula and prevent the outbreak of World War III.
"Stalin's calculation was that the United States, exhausted by Chinese intervention in the Korean War, would be unable to fight a third world war in the near future.
On 27 August 1950, Stalin wrote a highly confidential letter to the then President of Czechoslovakia to explain his decision, which in 2005 was obtained from former Soviet archives and published in the historical journal New and Contemporary History.
Apparently, Stalin supported Kim Il Sung's plan during the North Korean leader's secret trip to Moscow in April 1950, not because he miscalculated that the United States would not get involved in the war (as Western historians have assumed), but precisely because he wanted to plan for a limited U.S. conflict in Asia.
Stalin reassured his entourage about the international situation and Moscow's decision to withdraw from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in January 1950, as well as the rationale for the Soviet Union's absence from the UNSC in July of that year when it discussed the Korean issue, and that the Soviet Union abstained and did not veto the US resolution to station UN forces in Korea.
Stalin wrote that "it is obvious that the United States of America is at this moment detached from Europe in the Far East. Does this not give us an advantage in the world balance of power? This is certainly true," the Russian expert says M K Bhadrakumar.
In other words, Europe was the top priority of the Soviet Union's international strategy and the Korean War was seen as an opportunity to strengthen socialism in Europe, diverting American interests and resources from that continent.
How this movement translates today in 2024
What distinguishes great powers like Russia is the sheer depth of their historical consciousness, which allows them to relate the past to the present time and to understand that the relevant seeds of the future time can be found largely in the past.
After all, time cannot be considered in the abstract, but as the vital basis of human reality.
This must be one of the reasons why there is such tempting speculation in the US today about the recent rise in relations between Russia and North Korea.
White House senior director for arms control Pranay Vaddi recently said that "the nature of the security threat posed by North Korea could change radically over the next decade as a result of its cooperation with Russia."
"What we are seeing between Russia and North Korea is an unprecedented level of military cooperation," Vaddi told the Washington think tank, which is a Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to him, "it is necessary to pay close attention not only to the assistance of North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, to Russia's military operations in Ukraine, mainly in the form of missile systems, but also to "what may be happening in the other direction".
How might this improve North Korea's capabilities?
What does this mean for our own extended deterrence policy in the region with Korea and Japan?
What does the Russian-North Korean policy of friendship and defense cooperation mean
Without a doubt, Russia has decided to expand its alliance with North Korea. And Kim has publicly expressed his interest in deepening ties with Moscow with a personal visit to Russia in September.
The timing of Putin's trip to North Korea was truly lightning in a bottle, given recent U.S. moves with South Korea and Japan to intensify trilateral efforts to contain North Korea.
A de facto trilateral "bloc" with Russia and China, opposing the trilateral alliance of the United States, South Korea and Japan, is in its infancy.
Pyongyang's support for Russia in Ukraine serves China's interests because it will check US power, while North Korea inevitably gains strategic depth from the support of two UN Security Council members with veto rights.
Essentially, a new geopolitical actor is emerging in the Far East, which, unlike Ukraine or the Gaza Strip, is a nuclear hot spot.
Geopolitics is finally moving in the direction of North Korea, a country that seven years ago was already harbouring dreams of sinking a US nuclear aircraft carrier 'in one fell swoop'.
The point is that this fantasy remains untested. Putin's trip to Pyongyang will be closely monitored by the Biden administration.
Russia's challenge will be to build a network of relations with friendly states that may eventually include some Westerners.
The US strategy is to destroy violent points of strategic autonomy, which Washington managed to do in Western Europe in the first phase of the Ukrainian crisis, but this step was one of the last successes in this respect.
In any case, in the confrontation between the US and Russia an eastern front is opening up to complement the western and southern fronts in Eurasia and West Asia respectively, Russian experts emphasize.
