The usual talking heads are upset that President Trump has ordered the U.S. military to scale back its participation in joint exercises with South Korea. Their alarm is predictable and misplaced. More than seven decades after Presidents Truman and Eisenhower chose stalemate over victory against North Korean aggression, the Korean War remains a frozen conflict. Neither Pyongyang nor Seoul has formally renounced the aspiration to reunify the peninsula under a single government. That formal claim persists even as the economic and military gap between the two states has radically widened.
Some observers now point to growing military and strategic cooperation among North Korea, China, and Russia—most visibly North Korea’s decision to send troops to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine—and detect the outlines of an emerging alliance. Yet neither Russia, China, nor North Korea maintains foreign allies in the sense of partners whose interests they rank above their own transient calculations. Russia does have clients in the “near abroad,” though recent events in the Caucasus have shown how little that status is worth when Moscow’s priorities shift. Russians do not regard North Korea as part of that near abroad. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that Russia is not a superpower in conventional, symmetric warfare. North Korea’s overriding objective remains regime survival; it secures that survival externally through calibrated blackmail. Its options have not materially expanded. What we are witnessing is China associating itself with lesser states for limited, temporary gains. It is not the formation of a durable anti-American bloc in Northeast Asia.
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