It’s no secret that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has had plenty of meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Those meetings have long been on the U.S. radar and have the potential to complicate any peace deal that went against Beijing’s regional interests. Now, North Korea is looking beyond its neighbor and Kim’s next high-profile meeting is slated to be with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
For the United States, which has tried to court Kim with good-faith relationship-building efforts and two summits with President Trump, the meeting with Putin has all the markings of a setback for U.S. interests.
For Russia, a budding relationship with North Korea seems likely an easy way to pursue its favorite pastimes: sowing chaos and undermining U.S. objectives. With North Korea, that likely means preventing a deal on U.S. terms but could also include a more dangerous attempt to dissuade Kim from giving up his nuclear weapons. That would keep the U.S. under nuclear threat and prevent regional stability.
Unfortunately, there’s also plenty of reason to think the North Korea might be interested in whatever Putin has to offer. Not only did the last summit between Trump and Kim end abruptly without an agreement, but Kim has recently done little to demonstrate good faith efforts towards denuclearization and has instead demanded that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo be excluded from future talks.
Of course, those difficulties shouldn’t mean that the U.S. should give up on talking with North Korea — we absolutely should continue to do what we can to work towards a deal. It just means that we should be wary of Putin’s fingerprints on North Korean actions.
