Why is Putin backing North Korea? To build up Russia as a great power.

[applegrove]

By Samuel Ramani at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/26/why-is-putin-backing-north-korea-to-build-up-russia-as-a-great-power/?utm_term=.a71e76511adf

"SNIP.............


On July 6, the Russian delegation to the United Nations released an official statement, criticizing Washington’s handling of the North Korean crisis. In their statement, Russian diplomats disputed U.S. allegations that North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile against Japan on July 4, saying rather, that Pyongyang had launched an intermediate-ranged rocket. Russia also opposed U.N. proposals for tighter economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

Numerous Western analysts, like Bloomberg View columnist Leonid Bershidsky and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Van Jackson, have attempted to explain Russia’s conduct by highlighting Moscow’s economic and geopolitical links to Pyongyang.

But there’s more. Moscow defends North Korea in a way that’s designed to get both the Russian public and the international community to see Russia as a great power.

[President Trump, keep in mind that Russia and the West think about negotiations very, very differently]

My doctoral research focuses on how, during international crises, Kremlin elites remind audiences that Russia is a great power. The goal is to rally public support for their policies and increase Moscow’s international position as a credible counterweight to U.S. hegemony.


..............SNIP"

[Igel]

1. Hard not to find a time when Russia was backing N. Korea.

The original Kim was the USSR's suggested leader.

The Korean War was begun with the advice and upon consultation with the USSR.

We always look to China, but Russia's had its fingers involved straight along. It's competing with China on this.

This overtures aren't new. There have been repeated laudatory good-will trips made to PRNK by high ranking Russians in the last 15 years. The idea that suddenly Russia's doing the "we're a great power" shtick is ludicrous; it's been doing it for quite a while, when there are international crises and when there aren't but Russia would like one. If there isn't one, it creates one.

Even when the Soviet Union wasn't really an international superpower, except for nuclear weapons, everybody liked to think it was. As it helped create crises in Mozambique and Angola and Nicaragua, in South Africa and the Middle East; when it backed Assad and Saddam Hussein.

The only likely good thing is that it'll lose in the end: Demographics count, and it's further down the tubes than they like to admit. The question is what'll happen as a result of all that sparsely-inhabited resource-rich territory so close to a resource-hungry China, so that might not be so good after all. Even with trying to make all the Yakuts and Nenets and Mari and Evenki "Russian" by decreeing that you're ethnically Russian if you're a bearer of Russian language and culture, then making Russian language and culture mandatory while forbidding anybody to require anybody to learn any non-Russian language or culture, they'll lose that battle. They already have a rather large illegal immigrant problem in some areas--Chinese, some Koreans. All that has to happen is for Xi to pull a Putin and say that he's the defender of all Chinese everywhere and will protect their rights to self-determination, and China would de facto claim the part of Russia that lets them travel along the Amur.