A Nascent “Tri-Axis” Threat to the West
Since Moscow’s assault on Ukraine in 2022, a tightening bilateral strategic alignment between Moscow and Beijing has generated many a headline with their increased joint operational efforts in the High North Pacific. But a contemporaneous bilateral alignment between Moscow and Pyongyang has also arisen, suggesting the potential for the emergence of an increasingly coordinated, tightly integrated Moscow-Beijing-Pyongyang strategic triangle and emergent “Tri-Axis” threat to the West, one that could prove even more menacing than the team-up of the economic and technological powerhouse China and the nuclear megapower Russia.
- A Nascent “Tri-Axis” Threat to the West
- Limits of Trilateral Military Integration
- Strategic Asymmetry Between Emerging Blocs
- A Formidable Yet Constrained Tri-Axis
- Pyongyang’s Underestimated Role in the Arctic Theatre
- A Still Unproven Trilateral Axis
- Tri-Axis Growing Pains: From Unequal Treaties to Asymmetries of Power
- Explore Books Written by Our Contributors
- Moscow Courtship of Pyongyang: A Dangerous Partnership?
This ominous (and World War II-echoing) Tri-Axis presents a worrisome security challenge to the democratic world, and in particular the defensive Japan-South Korea-USA strategic triangle, that could undermine the security of not just East Asia, but also the adjacent Beringian and Arctic region, with many elements of a nascent bloc structure emerging pitting two rival, contiguous regional strategic triangles against each other, with the fate of Beringia and the Arctic hanging in the balance.
Limits of Trilateral Military Integration
But critics suggest the Tri-Axis is more bark than bite, and its two nascent bilateral military alignments forged under the pressure of a protracted and thus far seemingly unwinnable war in Ukraine do not combine into a true trilateral axis, and that the brittle thorny relations between North Korea and China inhibit a true trinity of military power from taking shape. (The same can be said for the dual bilateral defense pacts aligning the United States with Japan on the one hand, and South Korea on the other, with Japan’s and Korea’s relationship also both brittle and thorny.)
The recent tightening of alignment between Moscow and Pyongyang has been described as a “dangerous partnership” from the perspective of the West.
This absence of regional cohesion limits the formation of true dueling diplo-military blocs, constraining the unity of command necessary for effective bloc integration despite diplomatic efforts on both sides to turn parallel bilateral defense pacts with, respectively, Moscow and Washington, into regional military alliances of the sort achieved in the past by the Warsaw Treaty Organization on the one hand, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the other (back when NATO was more likeminded in its trans-Atlantic unity than it is nowadays).
Strategic Asymmetry Between Emerging Blocs
Regional tensions between allies are nothing new, nor need it prove fatal, but also what constrains a full inter-bloc collision is the fundamental strategic asymmetry of the two contending proto-blocs (for want of a better word to capture their evolving nature still short of full bloc integration).
Just as North Korea forms a land bridge that solidifies autocratic control over most of mainland Northeast Asia (with the exception of a beachhead of western power in South Korea, DPRK’s principal rival and an important trading partner to both China and Russia, undermining Pyongyang’s achievement of equal stature as an alliance partner to both), fostering the emergence of a defensible interior heartland.
China, North Korea and Russia share a common objective in opposing the US and the current US-led international order.
The defensive strategic triangle composed of allied Tokyo and Seoul, each bound to Washington via its own bilateral defense treaty, but with their own fractious history of colonization and wartime abuses, in turn solidifies a united maritime bulwark just offshore the mainland, composed of Japan’s vast archipelago and South Korea’s coastal beachhead, fostering the rise of an exterior rimland to contain the former.
It is to this increasingly bipolar tempest of dueling trilateral blocs – one rooted at heart in land power reminiscent of the Sparta of Thucydides’ era, and the other rooted at heart in sea power reminiscent of Athens that battled Sparta in the long Peloponnesian War (one that Sparta ultimately won) – to which the increasingly utilized and long-promising Northern Sea Route connecting European ports with Asian markets across the top of the world deposits rapidly expanding Arctic shipping from Europe and beyond, challenging the stability and risking the security of this much-storied maritime trade route that bypasses numerous traditional and long-worrisome chokepoints further south.
A Formidable Yet Constrained Tri-Axis
The triple whammy of an increasingly aggressive Russia, a nuclear-armed and assertive North Korea (with battle-tested and hardened land forces fresh from their allied defense of Russian sovereignty in Kursk), and the techno-militarily modernizing China with its massive standing army and increasingly global naval reach, does indeed present a formidable opponent.
But as the war in Ukraine has shown, it is a still somewhat slow-moving and awkward adversary that may be more weakened than strengthened by Moscow’s recent military adventurism – thus planting the seed for a Cold War-like stability with occasional brushfire conflicts that reinforce an inherent aversion to existential showdowns, with regime preservation potentially being more important to all three members of the autocratic Tri-Axis than territorial expansion. But given the persistence of friction in kinetic operations, outcomes of even small regional conflicts cannot be reliably predicted, and as a result, these rival strategic triangles cannot be wisely wished or rationalized away.
Japan is well aware of, and its intrepid Prime Minister is proactively addressing, the potential dangers that it now faces, as is South Korea (if not yet fully on the same page as Tokyo), and the United States, which sees much of the world through a lens that Thucydides himself would find familiar, and this only affirms the authenticity of the risks perceived to the Arctic as well (and the western world more broadly, whose security will in time be tied to the stability of the ever-warming and increasingly accessible Arctic) from the recent alignment of strategic interests and operational capabilities between Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang.
Pyongyang’s Underestimated Role in the Arctic Theatre
Much ink has been spilled in discussion of the budding bromance between the former two (Moscow and Beijing), with Putin and Xi signaling a “no-limits” partnership, but there has been much less attention on the role Pyongyang could play in this unfolding drama in the North Pacific, and beyond to Beringia and the Arctic. But that doesn’t mean it’s been entirely ignored, but rather more submerged by the preponderance of attention to Russia and China, particularly in the Arctic literature where China’s rise and Russia’s geographical breadth continue to predominate in the limited attention and imaginations of the national security community.
But just as Pyongyang played a decisive spoiler role in Ukraine’s bold but ultimately reversed incursion to western Russia’s Kursk region (shattering many preconceptions regarding Russia’s ability to deter such violations of its territorial integrity), its potential and future role in Beringia and the Arctic could prove comparable.
Not active enough to be, at least for now, a persistent peacetime actor in Arctic affairs, but strong and bold enough (and a loyal ally willing to shed blood for its alliance partners) to be a spoiler not only to disrupt Arctic shipping as it enters the tempest that awaits outside the eastern entrance of the NSR, but to sow chaos in foreign lands from Beringia in the North to the island of Hokkaido in Japan’s north, and to thereby increase the cost of not just utilizing this emergent, storied and until recently largely imagined sea lane, but holding territory positioned forward to its entry point.
With Russia in possession of former imperial Japanese territory for eight decades just north of Hokkaido, one can conceive of a North Korean role in a future conflict there that is similar to its role in the war in Ukraine, as discussed in my three-part December 2025 series on Japan in the Arctic in Politics and Rights Review.
A Still Unproven Trilateral Axis
But critics of the Tri-Axis threat rightly point out that it has far to go to present a truly formidable threat in the region. Indeed, as reported by Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) senior research scholar Elizabeth Wishnick, an expert on Sino-Russian relations, Chinese foreign policy and Arctic strategy,
“In June 2024, Russia and North Korea signed a strategic partnership agreement with a mutual defense clause. China’s 1961 treaty with North Korea (renewed most recently in 2021) also contains a mutual defense clause, raising questions about the existence of a trilateral axis. Claims about the existence of such an axis also point to the anti-Western positions these states share and their potential to undertake coordinated action directed against Western interests.”
But as Wishnick also notes, “Critics of this view argue that there is scant evidence for the existence of such an axis beyond the current (albeit very different) assistance by China and North Korea (plus Iran) for the Russian full-scale war in Ukraine,” and “that trilateralism will not endure beyond this war,” in part because “such an axis would not be in Chinese interests.”
Wishnick finds “lacking in this discussion is an understanding of the indicators of a China-Russia-North Korea axis,” and concludes that there is still a need to fully document “signs of greater institutionalization, policy coordination, and support by Russian and Chinese elites to determine whether a trilateral axis actually is in the making.”
Until such institutionalization, coordination and elite embrace take root, the Tri-Axis threat to Northeast Asia and beyond to the Arctic is at most a harbinger of darker days to eventually come, but not yet proof that those dark days are upon us. While the pieces may be in place for an eventual Tri-Axis showdown over the High North Pacific and Arctic, the very real dissonance in the long-term interests of the three members of the perceived Tri-Axis threat to the security of not just Northeast Asia, but also Beringia and the Arctic, could limit the potency of its threat.
But one area where a geographical convergence may be catalyzing a real strategic integration may be along the Tumen River that demarcates the tri-cornered frontier separating China’s, Russia’s and North Korea’s northeastern territories.
However, as Wishnick points out: “Several obstacles impede the achievement of what might appear to be a mutually beneficial goal of expanding China-Russia-North Korea trade and transportation links. The river is rather shallow, making it impassable for large ships, and the Russia–DPRK Friendship Bridge is just 9 meters (29.5 feet) high, also limiting the height of passing ships.
More importantly for China, the Chinese border is 15 km (9 miles) from the mouth of the Sea of Japan, preventing Northeast China’s access to the Indo-Pacific and the Arctic and restricting regional development. China lost access to the strategic outlet to the sea after the 1860 Treaty of Peking, one of the treaties with Russia that Chinese officials have termed ‘unequal.’”
Tri-Axis Growing Pains: From Unequal Treaties to Asymmetries of Power
The practical implications of Beijing’s perception of historical injustice in its 19th century “unequal treaties” with imperial Russia that codified today’s international borders in Northeast Asia are of potential consequence, and could cause an unraveling of the regional order should Beijing one day seek to redress the unjust legacy that hems it in and thus denies it direct coastal access to Beringia and the Arctic. Therefore, such concerns are more than academic even if not particularly imminent.
As the New York Times has reported, senior officials in Russia’s intelligence and security institutions harbor many of the same worries that Beijing may one day seek to revisit these borders and reclaim its “lost” territories, positioning Beijing as Russia’s principal future strategic threat (a perception that has lingered in some security circles in Russia since the time of Brezhnev’s rule, well before the end of the Cold War, when China’s rise began).
According to the New York Times, independently authenticated intelligence documents from Russia reveal deep concerns in its FSB counterintelligence community about Moscow’s alignment with Beijing. These documents describe Russia’s efforts to counter the many emergent long-term threats that China could pose against Russian interests, including future assertions by China of territorial claims intent on redressing unjust historical treaties that codified imperial Russia’s 19th century expansion onto Chinese-controlled territories:
“Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, are doggedly pursuing what they call a partnership with ‘no limits’. But the top-secret FSB memo shows there are, in fact, limits. … In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable – a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era. But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the FSB, a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as ‘the enemy’.”
As the New York Times further described: “China is searching for traces of ‘ancient Chinese peoples’ in the Russian Far East, possibly to influence local opinion that is favorable to Chinese claims…. In 2023, China published an official map that included historical Chinese names for cities and areas within Russia. … Russia has long feared encroachment by China along their shared 2,615-mile border. And Chinese nationalists for years have taken issue with 19th-century treaties in which Russia annexed large portions of land, including modern-day Vladivostok. That issue is now of key concern, with Russia weakened by the war and economic sanctions and less able than ever to push back against Beijing.”
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This could be why progress on China’s cross-border access to the Tumen River has been slow, as Wishnick observes: “Although the 2024 joint statement by Xi and Putin mentioned ongoing discussions with North Korea on China’s access to the mouth of the Tumen River, no progress has been announced to date … The lack of trilateral engagement to resolve navigation issues on the Tumen River illustrates some of the underlying obstacles to economic trilateralism among Russia, North Korea, and China, even when an economic rationale may exist.”
But the prospective role of North Korea serving as a geographic bridge connecting China with the Northern Sea Route via its convergent frontiers of China and Russia along the Tumen River, provides an illustrative hint of how North Korea may emerge as an Arctic stakeholder, providing an interesting perspective on Korea’s future role in the Arctic from a DPRK perspective, as discussed by Jake Rinaldi and Brandon Tran on the Modern War Institute Blog at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
But lingering concerns of Russia regarding China’s historic claims to the region and Beijing’s potential long-term threat to Russian sovereignty over formerly Chinese-held or tributary lands from before the “unequal treaties” shifted national borders in Russia’s favor, have constrained forward movement here, and given the overlapping and at times paradoxical alignment (and misalignment) of national interests among and between these Northeast Asian neighbors, the Tri-Axis threat to the West remains largely an imagined one for now.
Moscow Courtship of Pyongyang: A Dangerous Partnership?
The recent tightening of alignment between Moscow and Pyongyang has been described in 2024 by Korea Foundation Fellow at Chatham House and Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Oxford, Edward Howell, as a “dangerous partnership” from the perspective of the West, which argues the “rapid development of relations from a simple cash-for-weapons exchange into a formal treaty on comprehensive strategic cooperation should serve as a wake-up call for the US and its partners in Northeast Asia, who must now prepare for where this dangerous partnership between Kim and Putin might go next.” Looking ahead, Howell explained that the:
“future trajectory of North Korea–Russia relations will likely depend on two main factors. The first of these factors pertains to the Ukraine war, and whether Russia decides in the short to medium term to develop munitions domestically, instead of relying on imports from North Korea. The second – and potentially more significant – factor is the response from China. North Korea’s increasingly active involvement in the Ukraine war is likely to have caused some unease in China, both regarding the rapprochement between Kim Jong Un and Putin and the enhanced bilateral and trilateral cooperation between the US, Japan and South Korea in response to the former.
Yet at the same time, China, North Korea and Russia share a common objective in opposing the US and the current US-led international order. Even if current North Korea–Russia–China relations are more accurately seen as three sets of separate bilateral ties, the prospect of increasingly robust and entrenched coordination between these states cannot – and should not – be discounted.”
And since Moscow’s assault on Ukraine faltered in its early days, and a resilient Kyiv boldly invaded and occupied territory inside southwest Russia’s Kursk region, the seeds for such “increasingly robust and entrench coordination” have been planted. Indeed, Brian G. Carlson observed the next year in a U.S. Army War College publication how “Russia’s war in Ukraine has stimulated interactions among China, Russia, and North Korea,” and the “China-Russia-North Korea triangle has deservedly captured the attention of US strategists. Each of these countries threatens US interests individually. Cooperation among them complicates US strategy by strengthening their respective military capabilities and by constraining US foreign policy options for addressing each of them. Particular risks that this grouping poses to the United States include … opportunistic aggression conducted simultaneously in multiple theaters, or coordination in a crisis.”
