North Korea’s Kim Jong-un went home Sunday after a grand tour of Russia— a grand tour of Russia’s arms factories, its aircraft factories, its warships, its fighter jets, its nuclear arsenal. Kim covets the technology behind them all. His host, Vladimir Putin, even showed him around the newly built space facility, the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in Russia’s Far East. Kim has dreams of launching his own satellites into space but while he has tried twice so far, he has failed.
That’s what made this trip to Putin’s Russia so important for Kim. He learned more than he ever learned before. The two men, both outcasts in much of the world, dined together, they toured together, they talked about what Russia can do for North Korea and what North Korea can do for Russia. But dealing with the North Korean leader, who much of the world sees as a madman, had to be some sort of a comedown for President Putin. After all, there was a time when he didn’t have to break bread with pariahs. There was a time when Putin wasn’t a pariah himself.
There was a time when he was received with respect in world capitals like Paris….
…. and Tokyo.
In Washington he has broken bread with American presidents.
He even once shared a royal carriage with the late Queen Elizabeth.
But that was then, this is now. No longer welcome in those capitals, nor able to welcome their leaders in his, he has instead had to content himself with hosting a rogue’s list of pariahs. From Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, to Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, and now, Kim. Why? Because he needs them as much as they need him, and maybe more.
He needs Iran’s technology to build a reported 6,000 new drones, known as Shahed-136’s, capable of covering more than 1,000 miles— deep into Ukraine— before they detonate.
He needs North Korea’s rockets and artillery. It’s been assembling and stockpiling artillery shells ever since the end of the Korean War, and with Russia firing as many as 20,000 rounds a day in Ukraine, Putin needs all the munitions Kim will give him.
That’s why Kim’s visit ended with the declaration of “a fresh heyday of friendship and solidarity and cooperation.”
We always knew the Russian president wasn’t like us. He could have been. He is a native of the western-style city of St. Petersburg, then named Leningrad, the city founded by Tsar Peter the Great to serve as the European side of Russia. He is a survivor of the detente between the Soviets and the West. But European values didn’t rub off on Putin. As a product of the Soviet Union and a former agent of the KGB no less, he had no reverence for democracy— one of his chief allies in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, once told me in Moscow that democracy is just a system designed to undermine the nation’s leadership. Before Ukraine reinforced Putin’s impulse to crack down on dissidents, he allowed his citizens a slim dose of freedoms. But those grew slimmer as he succumbed to his autocratic ambitions and his ill-fated war.
So now, although still the leader of a nuclear superpower, he needs help from lesser powers and is reduced to laying out honor guards and red carpets for the likes of the totalitarian tyrant from North Korea.
Columnist Tom Friedman put Putin’s predicament in a nutshell: “It’s like the biggest bank in town having to ask the local pawnshop for a loan.”
To be sure, Putin also has kept his alliances with leaders from the so-called non-aligned world, like South Africa and India. The U.S. has been distressed by the neutrality that both have shown since the invasion of Ukraine. Neither has publicly condemned it. But when they don’t take sides, there is an explanation if not an excuse. Besides the geopolitical reality that emerging nations like these are safest if they have relationships with every superpower, both have fruitful histories with Russia, and the Soviet Union before that.
For South Africa, it goes back to the fight for black majority rule. Soviet Moscow actively aided the African National Congress, the party led by Nelson Mandela. The ANC, which still leads the nation, has never forgotten. As a prominent South African commentator put it, "You could say their alliance is a friendship that was built on blood... and bullets.” And although the U.S. and the E.U. are South Africa’s biggest trading partners, Russian oligarchs reportedly are the biggest investors in the nation’s rich mines, which are its biggest source of income.
For India, the world’s largest democracy, it’s about arms and oil. I once did a story from the Soviet Union about its trade with India, and generally it came down to this: India sent fruit and rice, wheat and sugarcane to the Soviets, while they sent arms to India. Most of India’s weapons today date back to that era, and it can’t afford to sever the link. Moscow to this day is India’s biggest supplier of arms, and since Western nations have slapped embargoes on Russian oil, it also is India’s biggest supplier of crude, which India buys at bargain basement prices.
It is an interdependent world. But having lost many partners he once had, Vladimir Putin is increasingly dependent on fellow pariahs. It somehow seems fitting that Russia’s parting gifts Sunday to Kim Jong-un weren’t the traditional flowery lacquer boxes or elaborate nesting dolls. Instead, in addition to an exchange of hand-crafted rifles and the presentation of a ceremonial sword, Kim was given some sort of special clothing that is, according to the news agency TASS, invisible to thermal imaging cameras, and a bulletproof vest “with protection zones for the chest, shoulders, throat and groin.”
For these guys, military hardware is a common bond. Each has to spend his life looking over both shoulders. They are pariahs. They deserve each other.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Great piece, Greg. The world is in an ugly place right now and America is no longer the shining city on a hill. Don’t know where we go from here but I fear it’s not a good place.—Alan Paul
Dance of the pariahs. Well put Greg. Thank you