The West underestimates North Korea at its peril

Kim Jong Un's intervention in the Ukraine war reflects a dangerous turn in Pyongyang's approach to the world.

- Gideon Rachman

"The first step to a world war". That was how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the anticipated arrival of North Korean troops on the front line of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Western security officials have warned for months of growing cooperation between an "axis of adversaries", made up of Russia, North Korea, Iran and China. North Korean support for Russia is the most dramatic evidence yet of that axis in action.

Of the four adversaries, North Korea has received the least attention in the West. The country slipped out of the headlines after the attempted rapprochement between then US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un failed in 2019.

However, specialists on North Korea have been sounding the alarm for months. In January, two leading North Korea watchers, Mr Robert Carlin and Dr Siegfried Hecker, warned: "Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war."

Mr Carlin ran the US State Department team working on North Korea for decades, and Dr Hecker is a former head of the Los Alamos laboratory. Both men have visited North Korea many times.

In their joint article, they warned that Mr Kim has abandoned his effort to improve relations with America, in favour of a policy of confrontation with South Korea and the US. They concluded bleakly: "North Korea has a large nuclear arsenal... of potentially 50 or 60 warheads... (Kim's) recent words and actions point towards the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal."