By Ramon Pacheco Pardo
4.2.2025
Introduction
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the “Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” between the Russian Federation and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on 18 June 2024. The two leaders signed the agreement amidst warming ties between North Korea and Russia, with Pyongyang decisively siding with Moscow in support of its invasion of Ukraine. Before the agreement was signed, North Korea had already provided millions of artillery shells and dozens of ballistic missiles to Russia, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and United States (US) sources as well as debris found throughout Ukraine. In the months after the agreement was signed, the Kim Jong-un regime also dispatched over 10,000 North Korean soldiers to fight along Russian forces. In return, Russia has reportedly provided North Korea with food, fuel and technology to continue to develop its weapons programmes – as well as diplomatic backing to block any new UN Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang. It is fair to say that the North Korea-Russia relationship is closer today than at any point since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With US President Donald Trump recently vowing to “reach out” to Kim, the North Korea-Russia partnership looms large over North Korea-US relations.
What are the short-term implications of the partnership for the Trump presidency?
It has been widely reported that the past Biden administration sought to reach out to Kim several times over the past four years to resume diplomacy. North Korea, however, was unwilling to reciprocate. Some of the reasons behind Pyongyang’s refusal to resume talks with the US included its self-imposed COVID-19 pandemic-related border closure and the aftermath of the 2019 Hanoi summit between Kim and Trump – widely considered a diplomatic failure for the North Korean leader. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and in particular over the past year, however, it has also become apparent that the Kim regime has decided to place all its foreign policy chips on the Russia table. Not only has North Korea refused to contemplate diplomacy with the US, but it has behaved in a similar way with South Korea – which Kim declared Pyongyang’s “number one enemy” in January 2024– and also refrained from resuming normal ties with China. In other words, Trump is facing an emboldened Kim who understands that his short-term economic needs will be satisfied as long as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues.
Furthermore, the first bout of diplomacy between Trump and Kim in 2018-2019 came in the context of three inter-Korean summits, four meetings between North Korea and China and a North Korea-Russia summit. In other words, Kim was seeking to reach out to multiple neighbours at the same time, probably in the belief that Trump may decide to lift sanctions on Pyongyang and North Korea could receive investment from its neighbours. However, Kim is widely considered to have been scarred by the failure of the Hanoi Summit and is now receiving the economic support that it needs to maintain his regime stable from Russia. Furthermore, South Korea’s political turmoil means that Kim will not know whether the next South Korean government will seek engagement for months. Plus, Chinese president Xi Jinping seems to be uncomfortable with the partnership between Kim and Putin. As a result, North Korea-China exchanges have slowed down in recent months. In other words, the North Korea-Russia partnership is crucial for Kim in the short term both for economic and political reasons – making it less likely that the North Korean leader will rush to meet with Trump.
Why would Kim Jong-un want to meet Donald Trump?
Notwithstanding the above, there are important reasons why Kim would probably eventually like to resume diplomacy with Trump. To begin with, the Kim family has long sought to avoid economic dependence on China or Russia – the country’s two long-term benefactors. Thus, Kim will eventually seek to diversify North Korea’s economic ties away from the recent uptick in relations with Russia. This will probably involve reaching out to China again, as well as potentially to South Korea depending on who is the next president. But it would probably also involve resuming ties with the US to see what economic and diplomatic benefits may Kim be able to extract from Trump. In a sense, North Korea may seek to resume its decades-old strategy of playing China against Russia by either adding the US to the mix or even replacing Xi with Trump to play him against Putin.
Equally relevant, in theory Kim still seeks to improve the economic situation of the North Korean population at large. This was an important reason driving him to meet with Trump in 2018-2019, for ultimately North Korea can only improve its economic situation in a sustainable way if sanctions on the country are removed and investment, trade and aid increase significantly. And Pyongyang understands that Washington is the key to the removal of sanctions. Without the US agreeing to such a move, it is a non-starter. In fact, the Hanoi Summit ultimately failed because Kim and Trump had different views of the sanction relief for denuclearisation steps quid-pro-quo that ultimately would be the basis of any agreement between North Korea and the US. Were Kim to seek to focus again on the long-term economic prospects of his country, he would need to sit down to negotiate with the US to get some sanctions lifted.
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The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) or the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).