Despite being a vile dictator of one of the poorest nations in the world, he captures our attention because of his resemblance to the glitzy James Bond villain riding in an elegant equipped train to Moscow to join President Vladimir Putin.
That trip was a victory for Kim Jong Un, the president of North Korea. It was both an option and a shame for Putin. But it was only a spectacle in the movies for Asia and the rest of the world. There were much more significant events taking place somewhere.
Let’s provide President Kim a small victory. North Korea is constantly in need of funds, and in the past, it has used a variety of methods, including money forgeries, cybertheft, the export of slave labour, drug production, etc., to generate foreign exchange.
It invests a significant portion of its earnings in its programme for nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons. Kim will have therefore thought of a Russian neighbor who was eager to purchase North Korean weapons and also willing to offer some technical support in exchange as the ideal customer.
Despite the fact that additional supplies, particularly standard weapons, will be helpful, this won’t significantly affect Russia’s war in Ukraine. The amount of arms produced in North Korea is insufficient, and its technology is outdated, to be a game-changer. This meeting demonstrates how severely strained Russia’s possess weapons and supplies must be if Putin wants to compete with people like Kim Jong Un.
This can only be humiliating for a democratic leader whose every move in recent years has been intended to demonstrate that Russia is still an imperious power to be feared and admired. The Kim-Putin accept serves as a reminder that Russia does include options for obtaining military materials, albeit shoddy ones like North Korea and Iran.
The fact that neither China nor its leader Xi Jinping participated in this Kim-Putin-Bofeld meeting and that China continues to refrain from providing Russia with weapons or another military supplies is the most significant aspect of this relationship. Due to harsh American sanctions against Russia, Sino-Russian business has increased significantly since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February of last year, but there is no proof that it has included any military goods.
This matters a lot. Three weeks prior to Putin’s invasion in 2022, the leaders of China and Russia met in Beijing and signed a long” Joint Statement” stating that they shared their antagonism to the West and their resolve to end American dominance( as they saw it ) of the institutions and rules of global management.
Both China and Russia assert a right to engage in nations that they believe should relate to them for historical reasons, as evidenced by the fact that this Joint Statement, which opposed the use of power and noise in other states’ internal affairs, was soon followed by Russia’s aggressive intervention in Ukraine.
In that impression, Ukraine is a proxy war for China. However, China has so far refrained from direct role. Its relationship with Russia does, for the time being, had a cap: it doesn’t include items or military assistance.
It would have been reasonable to assume that North Korea served as China’s proxies in the 1950s or 1960s, which could have led to a reversal of Taiwanese military support for Putin.
However, as Chairman Mao put it, North Korea and China have not been” as near as lips and teeth” for many years. In truth, their relationship has deteriorated into one that is often hostile. In any case, British intelligence would have noticed North Korea by now if it were serving as a conduit for Chinese arms materials to Russia.
Instead, the more significant events were taking place in New Delhi, where President Joe Biden continued his journey from Delhi to join the second-largest communist-run nation in Asia, Vietnam, and India hosted the major annual” G20″ mountain that brings together the world’s largest nations, rich and poor.
China’s Xi Jinping decided not to attend the G20, possibly because he had recently been involved in other international summits that were more to his preference or because the Taiwanese economy is currently experiencing a crisis. According to reports that were leaked to Chinese investigators from high-level Chinese political debate, President Xi has just received notably direct and harsh criticism from party mothers regarding the state of the economy.
While China is struggling and Russia is in a desperate situation, its rival India has prospered at the G20 and American politics is making progress in China’s own garden. The trip by President Biden to Vietnam, with which the country fought until 1975, was one of many initiatives to forge alliances and partnerships to counter China’s control.
This was also a seller’s dream, but this time it applied to both Vietnam and the US because both parties struck lucrative deals. Simply put, Air Force One is more familiar to us than Kim’s equipped train.
This content was previously published in Italian in Le Stampa on Bill Emmott’s Global View Substack. Asia Times is republishing the content with their consent, nbsp.