There are growing reports that North Korea is sending as many as 3,000 troops to assist Russia in its war on Ukraine. If true, it would not only be the latest example of Pyongyang helping Moscow, but also further proof of a growing closeness between those two capitals, Beijing, and Tehran. It’s been variously called the new “axis of evil,” or the “quartet of chaos,” but whatever the moniker, the four countries are stymieing a range of United States and Western interests around the world.
Of those four countries, China and Russia receive considerable attention and media coverage. On the latest episode of FP Live, I wanted to shine a spotlight on what North Korea and Iran were getting out of their part in this budding quad. I spoke with Barbara Slavin, an Iran expert and distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, and Chung Min Lee, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or listen to the free podcast. What follows here is a condensed and edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: So, Chung Min, Ukraine says North Korea is sending troops to assist Russia. If that’s true, boots on the ground is as direct an involvement as it gets. But what’s in it for Pyongyang?
Chung Min Lee: The Ukrainian authorities, as well as media reports, have said that up to 10,000 North Korean troops either have been deployed or are in the midst of being deployed to the Russian front. There’s no independent verification of that. But there have been several North Korean troops, inspectors, and officers, who are overseeing the millions and millions of ammunitions sent to the Russian forces, as well as short-range North Korean missiles. The problem is many of these rounds were made in the ’60s, and ’70s, and ’80s. So they are having an impact on the battlefield, but their overall efficacy is quite questionable.
In return, Kim Jong Un wants more advanced technology from the Russians, including for his satellites and replacement for fighters, all of which are Soviet-era fighters. And he wants food aid in return for sending arms, and possibly even soldiers, to Russia.
RA: Barbara, Iran has been sending Russia drones and other military equipment. Beyond money, which Tehran obviously needs as it has very few trading partners, what’s in it for them?
Barbara Slavin: The Iran-Russia military cooperation really dates to their joint effort to salvage the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad back in 2013 and 2014. So they’ve become increasingly close since then. But in terms of direct quid pro quos, I think the Iranians want advanced Russian fighter jets, more advanced missile defense systems, which they could certainly use these days as they’re awaiting an Israeli retaliation for the Iranian retaliation for the Israeli retaliation, etc.
And they have the opportunity to test out some of their drones and other weapons in the Ukraine theater and learn from that, as well, which I’m sure is useful for them in their activities in the Middle East.
RA: I want to say one thing: I have never liked the phrase “axis of evil” from the time it was deployed in the war on terror about 20 years ago. Axis, of course, has a completely different meaning if you go back to World War II, and good and evil are also just very black and white for me in geopolitics. But this is a term that has been deployed to describe these four countries and their allies. Personally, I prefer the Economist’s term: “quartet of chaos.”
But regardless of how we brand it, it’s clear that there’s some sort of partnership between China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Chung Min, how do you characterize this partnership? Is it a marriage of convenience? Is it something more akin to an alliance?
CML: No, I would say it’s more of the meeting of minds for intrinsically their own interests. In Eurasia, over the last four or five years—but especially since the outbreak of the Ukrainian war—you have Russia and then you have Iran, China, and North Korea. They’re united by their common hatred of America and the West.
They also have other interests. From Russia’s perspective, they want to make sure that China is on board, but Russia doesn’t want to always play second fiddle to China. Russia wants an outlet to tell the Chinese, “I know that you have a much larger economy than mine and a huge global presence, but I assure you that with my strategic weapons and close ties with Iran and North Korea, I can make life difficult for you on the edges.” And from China’s perspective, North Korea is their biggest, and only, I guess, patron in Northeast Asia. And the DPRK is so dependent on Chinese trade and military assistance, that, from Kim Jong Un’s perspective, he wants to lessen his dependence on China and run into Putin’s arms.
So you have these four very different countries: Russia, which is a post-Soviet autocracy; China, run by the CCP one-party dictatorship under Xi Jinping; North Korea, family mafia dynasty/communist mafia state; and Iran, basically a theocracy backed up by the Revolutionary Guards. So there is a common interest of hatred against the West and America, and some type of strategic alignment.
This is not an alliance. It is not long term. And the most important glue that should hold them together, which is absent, is trust. None of these four countries trusts each other. I think that is going to undo the so-called super-Eurasian alignment over the next 4 or 5 years.
RA: Barbara, I’m curious how you think about what Tehran wants from its foreign policy. If you take a step back, you could argue that Iran’s foreign policy has done nothing but hurt its economy, whether it’s the nuclear program or the proxies it funds to attack Israel. Eventually, all of this serves to increase Western sanctions on it. It hurts the Iranian economy and ultimately the Iranian people. Why do it? What’s the animating principle here?
BS: The Iranian regime wants one thing. The Iranian people want something else. And the system wants to survive, to perpetuate itself. And so it has decided that this alliance with Russia, with China, is more useful to it. There is a fundamental belief in Tehran that the United States, the West in general, wants regime change in Iran. And they may be willing to make certain tactical compromises here or there. But the deep state, the IRGC, the Quds Force, the supreme leader and his family believe that the West is irredeemably opposed to the Islamic Republic. And therefore, even if China and Russia often disappoint Iran, which they do, they are still a more reliable bet than placing hopes on the West for sanctions relief. If they can get some temporary relief of sanctions, obviously that helps them. But in terms of the long-term survival of the regime, they think the better bet is with countries like Russia and China.
RA: Barbara, Iran’s still nominally a democracy. It has elections. It cares to some degree about what the people think. How does that fit into Tehran’s conception of strategy if it’s hurting its people?
BS: Iran has underperformed spectacularly over the last 45 years as an economy. And that is because of the ideological choices that Iran has made. Of course, the elite of the country—the supreme leader and his family, the well-connected members of the IRGC—are doing just fine. There are plenty of Lamborghinis in north Tehran that will prove that to you. So it is a system that doesn’t really care, frankly. As long as the great masses have enough to get by on, they’re not going to really push for much more.
Every now and then, we do see some tacking here and there. The Iranians are trying to improve relationships with their neighborhood, with the GCC in particular, in hopes of perhaps getting some trade and investment. But U.S.-led economic sanctions are a huge disincentive for investment in Iran, and that includes for China. Most of China’s big multinational companies won’t touch Iran with a 10-foot pole. So it’s a difficult policy to maintain. But Iran is a big country. It’s very self-reliant. And it’s managed to survive, if not thrive, over the last 45 years.
RA: Chung Min, let’s contrast North Korea with Iran. It is not a big country. It’s not an electoral autocracy; it’s just an autocracy. How long can complete repression last? What is your sense of the viability of the current regime and of Kim Jong Un?
CML: I think many of your readers will know Iran technically has elections, but they’re neither free nor democratic. There is a semblance of civic society, which makes it hugely different from North Korea. As we have seen, from the demonstrations over the last three or four years in Tehran and elsewhere throughout Iran, that if given the opportunity, the Iranian people will want a lot more freedom. There’s no doubt in my mind.
If you look at North Korea today, it’s a 25-million strong state with an army of 1.2 million people. The state spends nearly 30 percent of its GDP on defense. And so from Kim Jong Un’s perspective, his biggest legacy is the fact that he now has over 50 nuclear warheads. He has a conventional force that is atrophied and outdated, but is still ready for war on day one if he gives the order. All he thinks about is preserving the dynasty that his grandfather built.
The problem is, even in a state like North Korea, you need some semblance of legitimacy. And that legitimacy comes from the fact that he is so-called from the Paektu line as a direct offspring of Kim Il Sung. But Kim Jong Il had several wives and mistresses. Kim Jong Un’s mother was one of his mistresses. She was actually born in Japan and later repatriated as a Korean Japanese. Within the North Korean social hierarchy, you have the core class. You have the wavering class and the hostiles. And even worse than hostiles are returnees from Japan. So here you have the national leader of North Korea espousing his own view of nationalism and yet his own mother is from a country that is looked down upon as a lowest-of-lowest castes within the North Korean system. That’s why you do not see a single word in the press about his mother, whereas Kim Jong Il’s mother and Kim Il Sung’s mother were all hailed as heroines of the DPRK.
So that type of myth is not going to persist for long, especially into the younger generation, when every single young North Korean has watched South Korean drama, heard BTS, and the list goes on.
The second thing is Kim Jong Un is in very bad health. Our own national intelligence service has said this publicly in hearings in the National Assembly. He is 40 or 41 years old. He’s about [350 lbs]. He suffers from heart disease. He is a chain-smoker, a heavy drinker. He goes to bed at 5 or 6 in the morning. And he’s under a tremendous amount of stress because he still wants to show the world and his people that he’s in charge. The next three or four years are going to be a critical litmus test on whether Kim Jong Un not only survives politically, but whether he’s able to survive physically or under the current mental and physical health that he is in.
Regardless of the total repression you see in North Korea today—high school kids are executed or sent to the gulags for watching South Korean TV, for example, or some sort of gulags—you cannot sustain this repression for [long]. And this is why I think there’s going to be a red light sooner than later. Not only because of his health, but the fact that the indoctrination that holds that whole gulag state together is becoming weaker as we speak.
RA: Is there any sense of who could take over?
CML: He has about three, or maybe even four, children. No one has heard about his eldest son, who is maybe in his early teens. His only daughter, who has been publicly seen by the world, is Ju-ae. She is probably about 13 or 14 years old. And, as you know, she’s been accompanying him to rocket launches and so forth. So you have 60, 70-year-old generals fawning over her on their knees when they’re giving her a briefing. Let’s say [in] the next 3 or 4 years, she becomes 17 or 18 years old. Will she be able to control the Korean People’s Army, the Ministry of State Security, the police agency, and all of the other hard-currency-earning outfits, as well as, for example, other security apparatuses? I think the answer is no. So there’s going to be an intense power struggle the moment Kim Jong Un passes. I have very high doubts whether he will be able to transfer power to a fourth Kim, including his daughter.
RA: Barbara, contrast that with Iran, where we have some sense that supreme leader Khamenei is not doing well physically. What do we know in terms of succession planning and what that might do for Iran’s future foreign and domestic policy?
BS: So, he’s 85. He has had cancer, but he actually looks pretty reasonable. He’s been appearing mostly at funerals for IRGC generals and others assassinated by Israel in recent months. He could go on for quite some time.
He had groomed one possible successor, Ebrahim Raisi, who was president of the country. But Raisi died in a helicopter crash in May. So there’s also talk of his second son, Mojtaba Khamenei, succeeding him. But that would really smack of a monarchy, which the Islamic Republic supposedly overthrew. There are other clerics. There’s a group called the Assembly of Experts, full of senior Shia Muslim clerics; one of them could be tapped. There are a couple that have risen through the ranks and who have not antagonized too many people.
I think the real question is whether the IRGC, which has very prominently been the power behind the supreme leadership under Khamenei, remains content to be the power behind or whether it seeks more overt power. There are some scholars who think we actually might get into a sort of Pakistan-like situation where the military takes over and maybe you have an elected president and parliament that has some but not much power. It will be interesting to see whether they are able to perpetuate this into a third supreme leader. Iran has had only two since the 1979 revolution, and there is a lot of discontent in the country.
Unlike North Korea, what Iran has is the bones of a democracy, which could be used to go in another direction. If you had actual elections with a real choice in them, people have the habit of voting and they could vote in someone pretty good. Even in this last election, they had a choice between Pezeshkian, a pragmatic cardiologist, and Jalili, an extreme hardliner. And enough people turned out to elect the relative moderate over the extreme hardliner. So it’s possible that you could do something with the system that Iran has. But you would have to make the supreme leader a purely ceremonial position like the king of England.
RA: Another thing that all of them seem to have in common is that they’re sanctioned to some degree by the United States and a network of Western countries. This brings me to a larger question: Have sanctions backfired? In some senses, if you think of the policy choices that have brought us to this point, how did we get here?
CML: Ever since the North Korean nuclear crisis broke in the 1990s, you have one pillar of toolkits called sanctions and another that’s basically dialog. Well, we’ve run out of sanctions.
North Korea is the most heavily sanctioned country on the planet and yet has survived. For two reasons: first, China, and second, China. As long as the PRC provides fuel, consumer goods, and food aid to the DPRK, it will survive regardless of these sanctions. And as long as Kim Jong Un is getting benefits from his new relationship with Putin, that also makes the North Koreans sustainable. The problem is, however, even this system has limitations. North Korean soldiers serve, on average, 10 years in the army. Most of those 10 years are not spent in the battlefield, in training. They’re basically siphoned off as farmers or as laborers in construction projects. And many of them are malnourished. And so, even the so-called super army is underfed and atrophied. At some point, the younger people will say there’s got to be something better than this. And so once that resentment begins to build up and bubbles up the system, Kim Jong Un has two choices. You go down the route of China and Vietnam by opening your country. Or you become even more isolated. And that’s where I think his health is going to really converge with a terrible black hole in North Korea.
RA: Barbara, let me get you on the strategy question, as well. Where did the world go wrong in allowing autocracies to form these networks? And have we run out of a toolkit with which to combat them?
BS: Well, we had an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program, which could have been the basis for discussions on other issues. But Donald Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which really left the Iranians no choice but to rely very heavily on China. China has disappointed Iran, though. It has had very paltry investment in the country. It buys some Iranian oil through a variety of cutouts, bypassing violating U.S. sanctions, but it’s not a huge amount. It’s 1.5 million barrels a day, when Iran used to export close to 3 million barrels a day. But it’s enough to keep the elite happy and keep them in Lamborghinis, even if the rest of the population is rarely having meat anymore. So China is pivotal to the survival of both these regimes.
Have we run out of options? I think we’ve run out of sanctions options. I never thought we had a military option with Iran that would work. If you bomb Iran, they’ve told us what they’ll do. They will get the bomb. They’ll quit the NPT like the North Koreans did, and they’ll build weapons, which they can do in short order. So that leaves only diplomacy. But diplomacy is tough because the United States pulled out of the last deal. There is very little trust on the Iranian side. And, of course, there’s very little trust on the U.S. side, as well. But I don’t think we have another alternative. If we can’t reach a grand bargain, we have to work for small understandings that de-escalate the tensions over the nuclear program and, even more important, over the regional crisis, which is getting worse and worse.
RA: So, looking ahead, if Trump—who has this fascination with autocrats—wins on Nov. 5, what will that mean for this so-called alliance?
CML: First of all, it will make Kim Jong Un ponder his possible moves because he had two summits with Trump and the second summit in Hanoi was a failure. I think Trump really wants to go back and revisit his so-called bromance with Kim Jong Un because he wants to show the world, “not only will I end the war in Ukraine on day one but on day two, I’m going to denuclearize North Korea.” That’s not going to happen but he will try. But at what cost?
If Trump becomes president, come Jan. 25, he will reach out to Kim Jong Un. He will have some type of a nuclear freeze accord and a nontesting so-called agreement. And in exchange, what will the Americans give up? Maybe even withdrawing 28,000 American forces from South Korea, making sure that there are no more “exercises” that are a threat to the DPRK, from Trump’s own words. And this will then convince the South Koreans, the Yoon government in particular, that if the U.S. president, our erstwhile ally, does this with our biggest enemy, we should also consider other options including, for example, pursuing nuclear weapons. And this really does open a new can of worms. It would be totally destabilizing and not serve the interests of the Japanese, Australians, Taiwanese, or other allies in the Western Pacific. If Trump wins, the host of issues—tariffs, North Korea, the U.S. forces in Korea, and the fact that Trump wants to really hike up the defense cost-sharing between the South Koreans and the United States will create the biggest challenge South Korea has faced since the outbreak of the Korean War.
RA: Barbara, let me ask you a version of that. I mean, in many senses, America’s election has already begun. The voting is underway in many states. What are the stakes here? Depending on who wins, how does that impact these increasingly cooperating countries? It seems like the more the West tries to sanction them, the more it brings them together.
BS: I’ve been trying to think what Trump would do on Iran. He’s threatened to bomb and destroy the entire country. And then he’s also talked about reaching a deal with the Iranians. I really don’t know what he will do. And that, quite frankly, terrifies me because the situation is so volatile. It could get exponentially worse under him. Will he support Israel to the hilt? What will that mean for Iran and its policies? I think Iran will probably be more predisposed to developing nuclear weapons because it has seen its so-called axis of resistance being decimated by the Israelis.
RA: This is the proxy network.
BS: Many Iranians are now already thinking that they’re going to need nuclear weapons. They may feel that they will need them as a way to sit with the United States, as North Korea now can do, with potent leverage. So this is a really important election for foreign policy.
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