has effectively watered down and otherwise dulled the impact of international sanctions on North Korean ‘stability.’”
—STEPHEN YATES2
“Moscow has formed partnerships with China, Iran, and Venezuela to prevent the U.S. from consolidating a regional order under its auspices. Like the USSR, its predecessor and inspiration, today’s Russia pursues key allies in the Middle East and Latin America, such as Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, with whom it can jointly frustrate American and Western efforts to consolidate a peaceful regional order.”
—ARIEL COHEN AND STEPHEN BLANK, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION3
“For more than a decade, Pyongyang and Tehran have run what is essentially a joint missile-development program.”
—GORDON G. CHANG4
The setting was elegant: the dining room of New Century, the richest equestrian club in Moscow. The fare was extravagant: smoked trout, duck liver, venison soup, rhubarb sorbet, veal cheeks, and pear soup with caramel. The audience was distinguished: a gathering of members of the Valdai Club, a group of international academics and journalists that had flown in for the annual dinner with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once and future president. It was December 2011, and Putin was poised to retake the reins of power, once the formalities of the March 2012 elections were completed.5
Putin conducted a wide-ranging discussion with his audience, covering everything from the Russian government’s loss of public trust to his own indispensable leadership. He lambasted the United States’ plan to build a missile-defense system that, in his view, posed a deliberate threat to Russia’s national security. “You ask me whether we are going to change,” he said, directly addressing the Americans at the event. “The ball is in your court. Will you change?” Then Putin said something that could not help but make headlines around the world.
The only reason the United States had any interest at all in relations with Moscow, he said, was that Russia was the only country that could “destroy America in half an hour or less.”6 It would be difficult to find a statement more revealing about Putin’s true position regarding the United States.
By this, we do not mean to suggest that Putin has any intention of launching a nuclear attack on America. We refer to his general disposition toward the United States: We are not only an adversary; we are an enemy. Moreover, as Putin well knows, one can pursue the destruction of one’s enemy without initiating an Armageddon. And perhaps the most effective means of doing so is to facilitate and support the tactics, policies, and general well-being of rogue nations hostile to the United States. As the record of the last few decades shows, Russia and its Axis partner China have become expert at doing just this.
For many years now, Russia and China have directly facilitated the interests of North Korea, Iran, and other rogue nations such as Syria and even, in America’s backyard, Venezuela. Notwithstanding moves like that of the Russians to write the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons or that of the Chinese to rein in North Korea on nuclear testing, both nations believe it is in their long-term good to undermine American interests and power.
They do this under the cover of a doctrine they call “non-interference”: States should be able to do what they wish, whenever they wish, inside their own boundaries. The two nations that benefit most from this seemingly high-minded doctrine are Iran and North Korea, both of which enjoy extensive economic, political, and military ties with the Axis nations—Russia in particular with Iran, and China in particular with North Korea. As this chapter will show, the Axis nations have played an ongoing role in strengthening and facilitating the interests of these regimes.
Making matters even worse, Russia and China, by supporting these rouge states, have also facilitated terrorism. It is beyond dispute that Hezbollah has gotten weapons from Iran—in many cases, almost certainly Russian-made weapons. North Korea almost certainly sent to Syria the technology that built the nuclear plant that Israel destroyed in 2007. The non-interference doctrine has made it much easier for traffic in arms and military technology to flourish between these regimes. As if Russian backing of Iran and Chinese support for North Korea weren’t bad enough, there is also compelling evidence that Iran and North Korea, in concert with their sponsors and independently, have begun working together on developing nuclear-weapons technology.
In short, whether around the world or closer to home, Russia and China have done the bidding of forces inimical to U.S. interests, democratic values, and international stability. This chapter will explore how each key rogue regime has thrived with Axis backing and will examine the motivations that drive Russian and Chinese support of them.
NORTH KOREA
China wanted a “new type of great power relationship” with the United States, said Chinese president Xi Jinping in June 2013, as he prepared to meet President Obama for the “shirtsleeves summit” in Los Angeles. Xi wanted to make clear, he said, that China, as the world’s rising power, could work constructively and profitably with the U.S., the world’s established power. In part, his message was cautionary: He wanted the Americans to take China seriously and to understand that the relationship between the two nations had to be forged on mutual respect—not the mutual fear that, he said, had often led to wars between established and rising states.
As a sign of his good faith, he pointed to the “big gift” he had recently given Washington: his public pressuring of the North Korean regime to enter nuclear talks, very much against Pyongyang’s wishes.7 Xi’s intervention with the North Koreans was indeed welcome, as far as it went. But even the wording Xi used—a “big gift”—gives away that from his perspective, reining in North Korea is an American interest, not a Chinese one. More crucially, Xi’s apparent change of heart about Pyongyang and his assurances to Washington are part of a long historical pattern in which both China and Russia say one thing to America’s face and then turn right around and resume their support of rogue regimes.
It is well known that only one country can exert any serious influence on the behavior of the North Korean regime: China. The alliance between the two nations dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when Mao famously described the relationship as being as “close as lips and teeth.”8 Since then, it’s gone through its share of bumpy patches, but China has never fully abandoned Pyongyang—and it has a decades-long track record of supplying the North Koreans with weaponry, economic aid, and diplomatic cover. If every rogue nation had that kind of support from its sponsor, the world would be more unstable than it is currently. At best, China acts as a braking influence on Pyongyang, and even then, only when the North Koreans’ behavior becomes so volatile that it threatens China’s broader interests. For the most part, this happens when the Kim regime acts recklessly on the nuclear issue, as it did repeatedly in 2013.
In February 2013, the Hermit Kingdom launched its third nuclear test, this time of a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear device with greater explosive force than previously.” In April, the regime ratcheted up its threats against the United States and its “puppet,” South Korea, with a series of moves. It warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea so they wouldn’t be caught in a “thermonuclear war.” The country’s KCNA news agency predicted that once war broke out, it would be “an all-out war, a merciless, sacred, retaliatory war to be waged by North Korea.”9 That warning followed on the heels of the North’s decision to suspend the activity of its 53,000 workers at the Kaesong industrial park that it runs with South Korea, the last vestige of cooperation between the two countries. Kim also threatened to scrap the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War and to abandon the joint declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Then in April and May, Kim’s regime launched a series of short-range missiles into the East Sea (just off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast) and at least
