Kim Jong Un is selling his soldiers’ lives to Russia and calling it economic development. The capital is now stocked with Chinese electric vehicles, sushi restaurants perched in glass-floored rooms, and mobile delivery apps that serve the elite. Outside Pyongyang, nearly half the population is malnourished, and the countryside knows chronic hunger.
The United Nations tightened economic sanctions nearly a decade ago, intending to choke off all trade and financial transactions. Instead, the pipeline widened. Kim swapped Western commerce for a wartime supply chain running straight from Moscow and Beijing, and he is spending the proceeds on glass-floored dining rooms while his conscripts bleed in the mud. With Xi Jinping set to visit Pyongyang this week, the sanctions regime is a dead letter.
Andrew Bacevich documented how Washington’s post-9/11 “Washington Rules” made permanent war the default instrument of policy. Kim has simply plugged his regime into that socket. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address that a military‑industrial complex could warp national priorities, turning weapons production into an end in itself. Kim’s MIC doesn’t have Lockheeds. It has conscripts and artillery shells. Russia bought both, and the regime is reaping more than ten billion dollars in just two years.
Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, drew a line between soldiers fighting for their own country and those who fight as contract killers. The North Korean troops in Ukraine are the latter, paid in rubles and missile technology. More than 15,000 have been sent. A third are dead or wounded. The survivors will bring home drone warfare and air‑defense know‑how, making Kim’s regime more dangerous than before.
The cash bought loyalty. Kim consolidated his grip on the black‑market merchant classes that once operated outside his control, replacing smuggled Chinese goods with state‑run electronics and factory jobs in rural provinces. The money from the front lines trickled down just enough to keep the elite fed and the security apparatus satisfied. Sanctions do not stop tyrants; they just reroute their trade to the other authoritarians.
With Xi Jinping set to visit this week, the sanctions regime is a dead letter. Kim already endorsed China’s “multipolar world” as cover for his war economy. The United States is preparing for another round of fruitless talks while Kim has locked in his alliances and rendered American leverage entirely ceremonial. North Korea does not want a deal anymore. It wants to keep building, keep selling arms, and keep watching its capital transform into a monument to the futility of Western coercion.
The United States could stop feeding the logic. End arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the Yemen war. Withdraw from the forever wars. Shrink the Pentagon budget that Eisenhower warned would consume us. Kim’s soldiers are being sold. We don’t have to keep buying.