North Korea has joined Putin’s war effort. A timid West must respond

In the past 24 hours, the US administration has verified that North Korea is deploying troops to Russia, with the possibility of them fighting in their war against Ukraine. Ukrainian and South Korean government sources have previously reported that at least 1500 North Korean troops, and possibly up to 10,000, are part of this initial deployment.

The mission of the North Koreans remains a mystery. They could be used in occupation duties behind the front lines in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Alternatively, the North Koreans could be used as front-line troops in the eastern offensive by Russian ground forces, or part of Russia’s campaign to push Ukrainian troops out of Kursk. Given the recently signed Russia-North Korea defence pact, Kursk seems like a logical destination for the North Koreans.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un raises a toast with Russian President Vladimir Putin.Credit: North Korean government/AP

They are likely to be a logistical burden for the Russians and there will be cultural, doctrinal and tactical challenges with the integration of the North Koreans into Russian ground formations. Given the size of the North Korean contingent, they are unlikely to have a decisive impact on the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. Russia is currently suffering around 1200 casualties a day in Ukraine. The North Koreans represent about a week’s human expenditure by Russia.

North Korea, which already supplies rockets and artillery munitions to the Russian war effort, has much to gain from becoming a co-belligerent in the war against Ukraine. Politically, it ensures it has a grateful “fellow traveller” in Russia. Additionally, Russia may provide an array of financial incentives for North Korea’s troop deployment. It is likely to share with North Korea many of the new tactics and technologies developed for the war, as well as intelligence on captured Western equipment. Less likely, but still possible, the Russians could share technology to enhance the capacity of North Korea’s nuclear weapon delivery systems.

Regardless, this deployment will help North Korea undergo a rapid transformation and modernisation of its military forces. This will be a destabilising influence for the Korean peninsula and the Pacific region.

There is also a significant geostrategic impact from the North Korean deployment. The authoritarian quad of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea has been waging an information, influence and economic war on Western nations, and the post-World War II international system, for some time. The speeches of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are replete with references to their war against NATO and the West. But this North Korean deployment to Ukraine is an escalation in the confrontation between the forces of authoritarianism and the democracies of Europe, Asia and North America.

NATO, and the US administration, have sought to shy away from that confrontation for the past decade. While some of the rhetoric around competing with China has evolved, the unwillingness of the US and other nations to call out Putin’s bluffs on escalation in Ukraine (and in Europe, too, with his ongoing sabotage campaign) means that authoritarian leaders now believe they can undertake a broader range of military aggression with impunity.

When this authoritarian coercive behaviour has been called out by Western political leaders, there is an immediate response from the massive propaganda agencies of Russia and China denouncing “Western aggression”. One of the favourite rejoinders from China, in particular, is that the West is engaging in Cold War thinking.

Chinese dictator Xi has used this term frequently, and for good reason. He understands, better than most Western leaders, that their return to the kind of successful thinking and strategy that won them the Cold War would be bad for China. Cold War thinking saw Russia contained, and the international flows of technology and finance were steered away from it (and China) by a large coalition of like-minded nations over several decades. The Chinese leader knows that if the West were to return to Cold War thinking, his nation’s ascent would be stymied and potentially reversed.

This is the geopolitical context of the North Korean deployment. It is as much about stepping up the confrontation with Western nations as it is about North Korea gaining intelligence and foreign currency from Russia, and the modernisation of its military.

What might be the response of the US administration and NATO? So far, there has been the equivalent of a strategic shoulder shrug from the American and NATO leadership. The US administration, never a rapid or decisive actor during this war in Ukraine, has essentially issued a “wait and see” holding statement. NATO, reliant on consensus decision-making, appears to lack the will or capability to respond to the North Korean provocation.

With this kind of slow, risk-averse political leadership, it is little wonder that authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Xi and Kim believe the “East is rising and the West is declining” and have decided to act to hasten that process. By adopting an “avoid World War III” strategy, the Biden administration has appeased rather than resisted authoritarian aggression – and may well have made it more likely.

Mick Ryan is a retired major general who served in the ADF for more than 35 years and is the Senior Fellow for Military Studies at the Lowy Institute. He is the author of the 2024 book, The War for Ukraine.