North Korea’s broadening ties with Russia make a possible re-engagement with the U.S. less appealing for Pyongyang despite an apparent overture from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, analysts said.
A delegation from the Russian prosecutor’s office wrapped up a three-day visit to Pyongyang and headed home Wednesday, North Korea’s state-run KCNA said.
Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov, the head of the delegation, and Kim Chol Won, director of North Korea’s Central Public Prosecutors Office, signed an agreement on Monday to cooperate on law enforcement countering foreign influence.
Krasnov said the two countries are “actively developing their comprehensive partnership” in “openly and successfully fighting off attempts to impose alien development models and values on us,” according to the Russian news agency Tass.
Krasnov said Moscow and Pyongyang seek to consolidate their efforts in countering “crimes in the area of information and communications technologies,” among other areas.
The ties between the two have been expanding rapidly in multiple areas since Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang in June and signed a mutual defense treaty with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, promising closer military cooperation.
Russia-North Korea ties
“Kim Jong Un may see less need to engage with the U.S. than in 2018 because the regime is now getting economic and possibly military benefits from Russia,” said Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation.
North Korea said, “We do not care” that “any administration takes office in the U.S.” or that Trump has “lingering desire for the prospects of the DPRK-U.S. relations,” according to state-run KCNA on Tuesday.
The statement was released after Trump said last week in his presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Republic National Convention that he “got along very well with Kim” and thought Kim wanted him to win the presidential election in November.
During his term, Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim resulted in their first 2018 summit in Singapore, a failed 2019 summit in Hanoi, and a last meeting at the inter-Korean border in 2019.
But that engagement came before Kim had Putin by his side, according to Andrew Yeo, the SK-Korea Foundation chair in Korea studies at the Brookings Institution. “There’s less incentive for Kim to engage with the U.S.” now that Russia and China are backing him, Yeo said.
“That said, Kim is an opportunist, so I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Kim reaching out to Trump at some point if Trump is reelected,” Yeo added.
Little incentive for talks
In its KCNA statement, North Korea also said, “It is true that Trump, when he was president, tried to reflect the special personal relations between the heads of states in the relations between states, but he did not bring about any substantial positive change.”
Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center’s Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program, said the KCNA statement "reflected that Kim felt humiliated when Trump walked out of the Hanoi summit rather than continuing negotiations, and the strategic choices Kim has made since 2019 — that he has abandoned long-standing North Korean interest in normalizing relations with the U.S.
“If Trump wins, he may be tempted to try to revive nuclear talks with Kim, but Pyongyang has taken denuclearization off the table. The political space for a more limited, credible U.S.-North Korea deal has shrunk immensely.”
Trump walked out of the summit in Hanoi, rejecting Kim’s offer to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear facility in return for sanctions relief.
Nuclear talks between the U.S. and North Korea have remained stalled since 2019 despite the Biden administration's call for Pyongyang to return to dialogue.
In the same KCNA statement that rebuffed Trump’s outreach, North Korea expressed its dissatisfaction with the deployment of U.S. FA-18 Super Hornets to the Suwon Air Force Base for joint drills with South Korea that began Tuesday and will run through this summer.
Washington’s continued call for dialogue in this context is a “sinister attempt” and “an extension of confrontation,” North Korea said.
The Heritage Foundation's Klingner said North Korea's message "hinted that the price for it reengaging with Washington would be the cancellation of bilateral military exercises, rotational deployment of U.S. strategic assets and reduction of the U.S. extended deterrence guarantee.
“If Washington capitulated to those demands, Pyongyang could seek to further divide the U.S.-ROK alliance and degrade deterrence by proposing a peace declaration or treaty which could then lead to advocacy for a premature decrease of U.S. troops in South Korea.”
