There is nothing very reassuring about the signing of a mutual defense agreement between Russia and North Korea on Wednesday in Pyongyang. Described as a “truly revolutionary document” by Russian President Vladimir Putin on an official visit to his communist ally, this “treaty for a global partnership” aims to bring the two dictatorships into line in their fight against American “hegemony”.
But it also further cements the construction of a new international coalition of which Moscow has become the catalyst since the start of its war of invasion in Ukraine, a fragile but necessary axis for the strong man of the Kremlin who, by uniting Korea of the North, but also China and Iran, around a common anti-Western posture also risks becoming a source of global destabilization in the face of which the United States and its allies certainly cannot appear divided.
From the capital of the most closed country in the world, the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, welcomed the signing of this agreement which, according to him, will contribute “fully to the maintenance of peace and stability in the region “. A euphemism, no doubt, for this stone added to the construction of an “axis of upheaval”, as Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine recently defined it in the digital pages of Foreign Affairs, and which seeks to bring about convergence the interests and efforts of these four anti-Western states to “overthrow the principles, rules and institutions of the existing international system,” they write.
For Moscow, the tactical opportunism of the approach is obvious. After the failure of its blitzkrieg against the former Soviet republic, the Kremlin must now navigate between international sanctions and its rare allies to maintain its offensive and its pressure in what has now become a war of attrition.
In this new equation, China is a key element, its lifeline with the increase in its purchases of Russian oil and gas, which has allowed Russia and its economy not to sink in the face of unprecedented coordination Western sanctions that followed the outbreak of war.
Beijing has also increased its indirect presence on the battlefield, by sending to Russia technologies that its ally needs for the manufacture of explosives, for the construction of tanks or to propel its missiles. China also provides information from its satellite network to support Russian military operations in Ukraine.
Since the start of the war, Moscow has launched more than 3,700 Iranian Shaheed drones on Ukrainian territory, in addition to having benefited from a transfer of knowledge and technology from Tehran and which now allows it to produce more 300 per month in Russia. North Korea also supplied it with 2.5 million rounds of ammunition and ballistic missiles. The new agreement signed this week should give it “secure access to Soviet-style artillery shells that it needs in huge quantities today,” summarized Vladimir Tikhonov, professor of Korean studies at the University of Oslo. , cited by Agence France-Presse.
This emerging quadripartite axis between Russia, China, North Korea and Iran now has all the potential of a cluster bomb that risks transforming the war in Ukraine from a local conflict into a broader confrontation against the Western bloc, thus creating a vicious circle of escalation of tensions already underway in Asia and the Middle East and even threatening to create new ones elsewhere.
For months, Beijing has been the spokesperson for the accusations launched by the Kremlin against NATO, accused by Russia of being solely responsible for the war in Ukraine. Moscow is intensifying its pressure on this defense treaty between Western countries by seeking to divide it to weaken it, thus preparing the ground for a possible attack. Last January, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned that Putin could take action against NATO within five to eight years. His Danish counterpart, Troels Lund Poulsen, is more pessimistic, speaking rather of a window on the tragedy which could open within three to five years.
And this threat is accentuated by the disparity of this new anti-Western coalition nourished by Russia and which seems more guided by what it does not want – no universal definition of democracy, no expansion of American alliances… – , rather than what it actually seeks to offer and build.
“Unlike the Cold War, where the communist bloc was linked by an ideology against the West, what we see today looks more like a “marriage of convenience” between disparate nations,” summarized the Washington Post last April. What drives these deals is not just convenience, but also desperation. And desperation can lead to dangerous situations. »
Three of the four countries that make up the new anti-Western axis possess nuclear weapons. Iran is no longer very far from this type of arsenal. And these States are now moving closer together in a general climate of instability which, in the context of international relations, highlights a troubling point of theory: historically, the level of conflict is higher in the world during periods when blocs compete over the definition of world order.
And even more so when one of these blocs is now formed by an astonishing and worrying “global alignment of dictators, thugs and aggressors, from Tehran to Moscow, via Beijing and Palm Beach”, summarized last April onthe former speechwriter of George W. Bush, David Frum, a subtle reference to the residence of Donald Trump, whose persistence on the American political scene as well as the inclination of the Republican party towards this new axis with accents authoritarians, he detailed in The Atlantic, necessarily add to the ambient instability.