Last week, we talked about North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s trip to Russia and the toxic deal that he was working on with Vladimir Putin. While mutually beneficial for their two countries, the deal holds all manner of bad possibilities for the West. But during remarks given during ongoing NATO meetings in Norway, General Mark Milley seemed to downplay the deal between Kim and Putin. He described himself as “skeptical” that any arms shipments to Russia from North Korea would make a “huge difference” in the progress of the war in Ukraine. He also continued his talk of “optimism” about the progress being made by the Ukrainians and stressed the need to keep sending money and weapons there. Of course, Milley is retiring at the end of the month, so he probably figures he can say pretty much whatever he likes at this point. (Associated Press)

North Korea may be able to boost Russia’s supply of artillery munitions for the war in Ukraine, but that is not likely to make a big difference, the top American military officer said as he arrived in Norway for NATO meetings that began Saturday and will focus in part on the conflict.

U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the recent meeting in Russia between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably lead North Korea to provide Soviet-era 152 mm artillery rounds to Moscow. But he said it was not yet clear how many or how soon.

“Would it have a huge difference? I’m skeptical of that,” Milley told reporters traveling with him.

Milley has been doing this for a long time, so if he doesn’t see Kim’s shipments of 152 mm artillery shells to Russia as being a game changer, I suppose I’ll take him at his word. But something tells me there will be some Ukrainian families who will view the matter differently if one of those shells comes through their roof. Russia has managed to keep its artillery supply replenished well enough to meet its needs, but they’ve had to be creative about it and that strategy can’t last indefinitely. Most analysts agree that Russia really doesn’t have a “plan B” if it runs out of shells.

With that in mind, the deal with Kim may wind up being more important than Milley is making it out to be. It’s also part of Milley’s job to be a cheerleader and try to continue to prop up support for the war. But he’s being a bit shortsighted about this in terms of the bigger picture, just as the Biden administration has been since before the invasion began. This tightening of bonds and commitments between Russia and North Korea represents an additional shift in global events that threaten the United States and the West in the long run. This is solidifying the new Axis of Evil. As National Review points out, Biden has been completely negligent in managing these developments.

The Biden administration has, for the most part, been astonishingly negligent in the face of these unholy new alliances. While Inboden credited some around the president with having a sense of the dangers the renewed Sino–Russian relationship poses to global stability, he said the White House did not seem alarmed enough by the degree to which the anti-American coalition has strengthened.

“With this appeasement they’ve been doing with Iran — the $6 billion in hostage diplomacy, the desperation to get some sort of return to whatever the new phase of the JCPOA is — I think they’ve been completely disregarding both Iran’s ties to North Korea and Iran’s support for Russia,” Inboden said.”

China doesn’t want to lose out on the economic opportunities it has in the United States and they certainly don’t want to lose all of the money they’ve loaned to us. Joe Biden seems to be continuing to fall for the same fallacy that has sent U.S. policy toward China in the wrong direction for decades. It was believed that if we just immersed China in enough capitalism, they would become capitalists themselves and eventually embrace democracy.

That didn’t happen, of course, and the Chinese Communist Party just took our money and spent it on a pattern of growth that now seeks to destabilize us and replace us as a leading global power. They are working with other nations to try to replace the U.S. dollar as the go-to global currency, a move that would cripple us further. And this relationship with Russia, North Korea, and Iran is indeed a very real threat to American hegemony and the Western alliance. Joe Biden is ignoring this threat at all of our peril.