As Russias war effort has struggled they’ve turned to unlikely partners, most notably North Korea, to sustain their effort. Much in the same way Ukraine has tapped into Europe, Russia has tapped into Asia.
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And so when people litigate Biden’s escalation fears, I think about this a lot. Even in the 80s, Russia refused to give the DPRK nuclear tech. Now they’re helping them build SSNs, in exchange for T-62s, and shells, and a few thousand troops.
Escalation isn’t just nukes landing on Paris. In the same way that Finland’s ascension to NATO was a massive blow to Russia, the revitalization of the DPRK is a major blow to the US, and it came because of Russias battlefield failures.
This is not an argument to trade Kyiv for Seoul, that the US can’t do anything good ever and so shouldn’t try. Nor is it to say that the last admin were blameless lambs. That they mismanaged this conflict is painfully obvious in retrospect.
But it is to say that the West and the US was vulnerable in many of the same ways as Russia, and ironically in the exact way Russia is itself rebelling against. We live in a globalized world in which events in Donetsk has tremendous consequences along the Han.
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The DPRK will be a big winner from Ukraine because they understand this. And that means that wrt Taiwan, ROK and the US find themselves even worse off