Russia, playing its own geopolitical plan, opened, as everything shows, a Third Front in the USA in South Korea and Japan, with the aim of dispersing the American forces, while the Balkans (Southern Europe) are also in Moscow’s sights.
The Korean Central News Agency quoted a statement from the country’s foreign ministry as saying that North Korea “warmly welcomes President Putin to visit Pyongyang, and is ready to welcome the closest friend of the Korean people with the utmost sincerity.”
Kim Jong Un, a shrewd geopolitician, seeks to create synergy through a merger strategy that actually dates back to the days of Joseph Stalin, who deliberately sought to draw the United States into a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula and prevent the outbreak of Third World War.
The historical past
Stalin’s calculation was that the US, exhausted by Chinese intervention in the Korean War, would be unable to fight a third world war in the near future.
On August 27, 1950, Stalin wrote a highly confidential letter to the then President of Czechoslovakia to explain his decision, which was unearthed in 2005 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 assumed); but precisely because he wanted to draw the US into a limited conflict in Asia.
Stalin reassured those around him of 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 the same year , when he discussed the Korean question, 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 currently being detached from Europe to the Far East. Doesn’t that give us an advantage in the global balance of power? This is certainly true.
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 by diverting American interests and resources from that continent.
How is this geopolitical movement translated today in the year 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 understand that the relevant seeds of the future time can be found largely in the past.
After all, time cannot be considered abstractly, but as a vital basis of human reality. This must be one of the reasons why there is such tantalizing speculation in the US today about the recent rise in relations between Russia and North Korea.
Senior White House arms control director 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’re seeing between Russia and North Korea is an unprecedented level of military cooperation,” Wadi said.
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 other direction”.
Questions to be answered from the USA:
- How might this improve North Korea’s capabilities?
- What does this mean for America’s extended deterrence policy in the region with Korea and Japan?
- What does the policy of friendship and defense cooperation between Russia and North Korea 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-fast, given recent moves by the US with South Korea and Japan to step up trilateral efforts to contain North Korea.
A de facto tripartite “bloc” with Russia and China, opposed to the tripartite alliance of the United States, South Korea and Japan, is in its infancy.
Pyongyang’s support of 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 veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council.
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 already harbored dreams of sinking an American nuclear aircraft carrier “with one hit”.
The thing is, this fantasy remains untested. Putin’s trip to Pyongyang will be closely watched by the Biden administration.
Russia’s challenge will be to create a network of relations with friendly states that may eventually include some Westerners.
The US strategy is to forcibly destroy 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 regard.
In any case, in the confrontation between the US and Russia, an eastern front is opening that complements the western and southern fronts in Eurasia and Western Asia respectively, Russian experts emphasize.
