The Iran Korea Connection (Daniel 8:4)

The other player in the North Korea crisis: Iran

BY Bridget Johnson

Pay no attention to that mullah behind the curtain, the North Korean regime implicitly orders the world as they keep ramping up missile tests, increasing the volume of bellicose rhetoric and crafting their four-missile plan for attacking Guam.

Sure, Iran and North Korea — along with another of their toxic allies, Russia — were partners as targets of the nearly unanimous sanctions that recently sailed through Congress. But they’re partners in so many ways — other than both holding U.S. hostages — from the weapons trade to circumvention of sanctions that every action coming out of Pyongyang needs to be weighed in broader context of the Iran relationship, and even as a test run of Iran’s ultimate ambitions for its own weapons capability.Iran is almost living vicariously through North Korea’s horn-locking with the Trump administration, engaging in weapons-grade trolling with state media loving the story and underscoring that Pyongyang is simply moving to protect the DPRK from unbridled U.S. aggression — the same convenient argument that Tehran makes to justify its own provocative actions.And there are early indications that Iran plans to act like Kim Jong Un’s war room — in the campaign sense, at a minimum — during Pyongyang’s testing of UN and Washington fortitude. A day before Kim’s Guam threat, the semi-official Fars News Agency ran a retrospective on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which they defended most nuclear countries including North Korea: “So much is said every day about nuclear weapons and threats from nuclear-armed states, but that one historic fact remains among all the blather,” went the piece. “For all the talk, only America has dropped the bomb.” Iran is paying close attention to the untested dynamics of a new world order in which the Patton-admiring President of the United States vacillates in a love-disappointment relationship with China, has nary a bad word to say about the Kremlin, comes to loggerheads with NATO allies and may or may not call quits on the Iran nuclear deal.
While North Korea tests the system by wagging its rogue nuclear power, Iran wants to know how the globe reacts. And this observation isn’t happening in a vacuum, as Iran, North Korea and the rest of their friends take notes on how their axis can hoodwink our allies.
Because theirs is a long-term relationship, they also have the motivation to move closer to each other in not only fighting the Great Satan but in worrisome financial and military bonds.
On Aug. 3, the No. 2-ranking official in North Korea, president of the Supreme People’s Assembly Kim Yong Nam, arrived in Tehran for a 10-day visit, longer than many honeymoons and suspected to be chock-full of meetings on how the two can widen cooperation in a range of fields and battle sanctions hand-in-hand.
Pyongyang just opened an embassy in Tehran to, as the state-run Korean Central News Agency declared, “boost exchanges, contacts and cooperation between the two countries for world peace and security and international justice.”
They’ve already had a share-and-share-alike relationship when it comes to missile technology, with Iran’s Shahab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of striking Israel almost mirroring the North Korean No Dong 1 — and Pyongyang, in the line of nefarious hand-me-downs, likely borrowed their engine technology from Russia.
Iran was an investor in the No Dong before it even went to the testing ground. This long-running “you do the research, we provide the cash” marriage is basically tailored for a post-P5+1 deal world: Iran rakes in the dough from lifted sanctions, continues their ballistic missile program that wasn’t included in the deal, and has extra cash from above board or under the table to send North Korea’s way for continued nuclear development and testing that will be shared with Tehran in the end.
To avert a potentially devastating conflict, the State Department is dangling the offer of conditional talks with North Korea. And Iran would be an invisible yet powerfully influential presence in the negotiating room.
Johnson is a senior fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center and D.C. bureau chief for PJ Media.