Are US relations with North Korea entering a new era? Hardly. 

The release of U.S. Army Private Travis King by North Korea might have been perceived as the glimmering of a “thaw” in North Korean policy toward the United States. Momentarily, it seemed possible that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was sending a message to the Americans: We are willing to be merciful if you will be reasonable in response. 

For sure, as King was turned over to the U.S. ambassador to China in the city of Dandong, across the Yalu from North Korea, the 23-year-old escaped the suffering inflicted on half a dozen other American soldiers who had crossed the line years before from South to North Korea. Only one — Charles Jenkins, married to a Japanese woman who had been kidnapped from Japan, with whom he had two daughters in captivity — had been freed, after Japan’s prime minister interceded with Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, for release of Japanese kidnap victims. The other five GIs had died after being held in North Korea for decades. 

And that’s to say nothing of the tragic fate that awaited Otto Warmbier, the college student who was arrested in January 2016 for ripping a poster off the wall of his hotel at the end of his brief visit on a guided tour. Sentenced to a lengthy term, beaten, he was drugged and sent in June 2017 to his native Cincinnati, where he died in a coma several days later. 

Anyone deluded enough to think that Kim was awaiting a sign of Washington’s willingness to ease up on sanctions would be seriously disillusioned. It’s hard to read anything other than gloom and doom in Kim’s decision to strengthen the article in the North Korean constitution that already proclaimed the North as a “nuclear state” — a phrase never used in the constitutions of any of the other eight nuclear powers, including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. 

Whatever possessed Kim suddenly to come out with a major speech at this juncture?  

The answer has to be that he was so buoyed by his meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome spaceport, as well as his tours of an aircraft factory and ship-building facility, that he believed he could speak with total confidence in the understanding they had struck. Said Vice Foreign Minister Im Chon Il, the North’s relations with Russia “serve as a powerful fortress and strategic stronghold for preserving peace.”  

Russia would not only provide technology for putting satellites into orbit, which the North Koreans have failed to do in two attempts this year, it would also provide Sukhoi fighter planes and new ways of hiding the North’s newest submarine from enemy radar. In return, Kim has to provide the artillery shells the Russians desperately need for their war in Ukraine. Russian factories just can’t make them fast enough, and Kim is eager to export them at discount prices. 

Washington was so upset by the emerging deal, which Kim and Putin did not sanctify in writing, that the State Department fired off its own brand of rhetoric. “Any transfer of arms from North Korea to Russia would be in violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions,” said a State Department spokesman, promising to “impose new sanctions if appropriate.”  

In fact, there’s not much the Americans can do about the rapport that Kim struck with Putin during his six-day magical mystery tour by armored train around the Russian far east. Unquestionably his meeting with Putin, whom he had met briefly more than four years earlier, marked the opening of a new era in relations between Russia and North Korea. They had ceased to get along after the fall of communist rule in the old Soviet Union in 1991, when the Russians stopped accepting payment for their products, including food and oil, in near-worthless North Korean currency. Russia’s plunge into Ukraine gave Kim fresh bargaining power in the form of arms and ammunition. 

The language of Kim’s speech is unambiguous and alarming. As if the constitution was not already clear enough, Kim announced the decision to “deter war and protect regional and global peace by rapidly developing nuclear weapons to a higher level.” For this, he blamed the U.S. for “resuming the large-scale nuclear war joint drills with clear aggressive nature and putting the deployment of its strategic nuclear assets near the Korean peninsula on a permanent basis.”  

In particular, Kim singled out the “Nuclear Consultative Group” of U.S. and South Korean officials “aimed at using nuclear weapons” against North Korea. Then there was “the triangular military alliance” of the U.S., South Korea and Japan, as seen at the gathering at Camp David of President Biden, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, which Kim called “the worst actual threat.” 

Victor Cha and Ellen Kim, Korea experts at the Center for Strategic and International Security in Washington, forecast “a tightening of trilateral relations in response and even more vigorous implementation of the Camp David commitments,” including “multidomain trilateral exercises, enhanced information sharing, and improved cooperation on ballistic missile defense.” They also predict a potential “broader action-oriented consensus” in groupings such as the G7 of leading economic powers, as well as NATO. 

None of this had much to do with Private Travis King, who can only hope that the army will go easy on him for having jumped across the North-South line at the truce village of Panmunjom in July. He would surely have some tales to tell intelligence experts of where he’d been, what the North Koreans had been asking and maybe even whether he believed they were serious about wanting to go to war with the Americans and South Koreans. 

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.