The Russia-China Axis. Douglas E. Schoen
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development, such as it is, is owing to Chinese support, including deals signed by Chinese mining firms eager to get in on North Korea’s largely untapped mineral wealth, which some recent reports estimate may be worth as much as $6 trillion. Other Chinese investments have included transportation, power generation, and infrastructure. Roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s joint ventures with foreign partners are Chinese.16
“North Korea’s lifeline to the outside world,” says the Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore, is the port city of Dandong, on the Chinese border.17 About 70 percent of the $6 billion in annual trade between the two countries flows through Dandong. The black-market economy, meanwhile, may be even larger than the official trade. Even after the 2013 sanctions, trade continued unimpeded in Dandong, despite China’s shuttering of the Kwangson Bank, which had channeled billions in foreign currency to Pyongyang.
Only the Chinese can enforce what the UN has put in place. But, as Moore writes, North Korea’s elites continue to get whatever they need in Dandong: “Their shopping list includes luxury food and fine wine, Apple iMacs for Kim Jong Un, 30, as well as Chinese-built missile launchers and components for their nuclear arsenal.”18 Trucks leave the city every day transporting grain, fertilizer, and consumer goods to North Korea.
The 2013 UN sanctions also stipulated weapons seizures. But as one Western diplomat put it, “that will remain a largely ineffective measure until the Chinese implement it.”19 Don’t bet on that happening. North Korea still makes money off its lone export—weapons. The regime sells Soviet-era technology on the black market, especially to some bankrupt African nations. Although this trade is often intercepted during inspections of North Korean ships, some of it gets through, and it almost certainly couldn’t do so without Chinese acquiescence.20
In September 2013, Beijing released a 236-page list of equipment and chemical substances banned for export to North Korea—“fearing,” as the New York Times noted, “that the North would use the items to speed development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb on top.”21 This seemed an encouraging sign of Beijing’s willingness to clamp down on Kim’s regime and his nuclear ambitions, especially as Western officials have long known that sanctions cannot work without Chinese enforcement. But the list also revealed just how extensive Beijing’s knowledge is of the North Korean nuclear program. And it’s one thing to make a list, another to enforce it. Finally, these embryonic gestures of cooperation, if cooperation it is, must be balanced against a much longer and ongoing track record of adversarial behavior. (Just two months later, the New York Times reported on a U.S. study detecting new construction at a North Korean missile-launch site—including satellite imagery suggesting that North Korea may have begun producing fuel rods for its recently restarted five-megawatt reactor.22)
“Washington is looking to China to rein in the North Koreans. Unfortunately, Beijing has been busy giving the Kim regime the means to rock the world,” China scholar and security expert Gordon Chang writes. Case in point: the KN-08, an intermediate-range ballistic missile.23 The KN-08 presents a special threat to the U.S. While it lacks the range of some other missiles in Pyongyang’s arsenal, it does not require the weeks of transport, assembly, and preparation of those longer-range missiles. Rather, it is mounted on mobile vehicles more difficult to destroy before they fire their missiles.
“And guess what?” Chang asks. “It is China that recently transferred to North Korea those mobile launchers, a clear violation of UN Security Council sanctions.”24 When Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced in March 2013 that the Obama administration would deploy 14 additional interceptor missiles in Alaska, he cited the KN-08. In effect, as Chang and others have pointed out, in selling this system, the Chinese have given the North Koreans the means to target American cities. China’s transfer of the KN-O8 to North Korea makes clear that Beijing really has no serious intentions of restraining Kim.25 Those who see the Chinese as a willing partner with the U.S. in the effort to rein in the outlaw Pyongyang regime must contend with this consistent pattern of behavior. The U.S. should not be surprised. Beijing did not move against Pyongyang in 2010, either, when the regime sunk a South Korean frigate, the Cheonan, killing 46, and when it shelled Yeonpyeong, a South Korean island. The Chinese response in both cases was to stand by North Korea, its longtime ally. And in February 2014, China blasted a UN report on North Korea’s systematic human-rights violations, indicating that it would use its Security Council veto to prevent any legal action against North Korea or its leaders.26
Clearly, China wants the North Korean regime to survive more or less intact. Why? China’s support for North Korea is purely strategic and self-interested. Keeping the Korean Peninsula divided, and remaining an ally of North Korea, helps China maintain its authority in the region. Keeping Pyongyang in business not only staves off the possibility of facing a democracy on the border (or worst of all, a unified, pro-Western Korea), it also avoids regime collapse, which would lead to a host of problems China wishes to avoid: a refugee crisis at its doorstep, for one; the possibility that nuclear material would fall into the hands of the black market or terrorists, for another.27
Would China prefer to deal with a more stable actor in Pyongyang? Certainly. But China benefits even from today’s unwieldy North Korean regime, which keeps its neighbors off balance while presenting a constant challenge to U.S. influence in Asia. From China’s perspective, these benefits offset a multitude of sins. China’s history makes clear that it does not share Western goals with regard to North Korea.
Unfortunately, policymakers in Washington still seem unable to recognize this. As U.S. State Department spokesman (now assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia) Victoria Nuland put it in 2012: “[Kim] Jong Un can plot a way forward that ends the isolation, that brings relief in a different way of life and progress to his people, or he can further isolate them. . . . He can spend his time and his money shooting off missiles, or he can feed his people, but he can’t have both.”28
But Nuland is precisely wrong: Chinese support makes it possible for Kim Jong Un to “have both”: to threaten the world while also getting what he needs to stay in power. Kim’s regime “is like a honeybee,” Michael Totten writes. “It can sting only once, then it dies. But it’s like a honeybee the size of a grizzly bear.”29 That it can do so owes entirely to Chinese facilitation, influence, and support—all of which continue, despite cosmetic gestures and words.
The other half of the Axis does its fair share to support North Korea as well. Russia is pursuing a wide-ranging plan to boost its economic presence in Asia, which includes a proposal to build a gas pipeline through North Korea, providing the isolated country with $500 million in transit fees each year. In September 2012, Russia agreed to write off nearly all of North Korea’s $11 billion in debt, accrued during Soviet times when the Kremlin worked overtime to bolster ties with its neighbor. Years in the making, the deal will forgive 90 percent of the debt and reinvest $1 billion as part of a debt-for-aid plan to develop energy, health care, and educational projects in North Korea. Free of debt, North Korea will also be able to engage in more commerce with Russia.
Russia’s status as the world’s other nuclear superpower, and North Korea’s unquenchable interest in nukes, makes Moscow’s relationship with Pyongyang a crucial issue to U.S. security. Some, like the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer and Michael O’Hanlon, see U.S. pursuit of nonproliferation agreements with Russia as essential to ensuring that these weapons don’t wind up in North Korean hands. “Pursuing one more U.S.-Russia bilateral treaty,” they write, “can further reduce long-range or strategic nuclear systems to perhaps 1,000 deployed warheads on each side.”30 Perhaps, but Russia has a poor record of compliance with such agreements. The U.S. must understand that Moscow is no more interested in reining in Pyongyang than China is.
IRAN
“I would rather have a nuclear Iran than a pro-American Iran,” scholar Georgy Mirsky once heard a Russian diplomat say.31 If there is a single phrase that sums up the Axis attitude toward Tehran—especially the Russian attitude—this is it.
Those words describe more eloquently than any diplomatic communiqué or policy brief how Russia sees