At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 22, 2026, convened to discuss US foreign policy amid the Iran war, General Xavier Brunson, commander of US Forces Korea, was asked how relations between China and Russia were affecting stability on the Korean Peninsula.
His answer it was revealing.
“If you were to imagine an Oreo, the rest of China’s cookies and the rest of Russia’s cookies, and the DPRK in between, that has changed the region significantly,” the general said.
“It’s changed by how North Korea gets material that they then use to put pressure on South Korea. The connection between these three nations is something we can’t believe. We have to pay attention to that because it changes the way North Korea operates.”
Brunson’s metaphor captured a growing strategic reality. North Korea is no longer simply an isolated dictatorship surviving on the fringes of the international system. It is increasingly part of a hostile network linking China, Russia and North Korea.
This alignment has ramifications not only for South Korea, but for Japan, US alliances, and the balance of power throughout the Indo-Pacific.
Pyongyang is now part of active war networks
On April 27, 2026, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov revealed a memorial in Pyongyang honoring North Koreans killed in the war in Ukraine.
At the ceremony, Moscow thanked Pyongyang for sending troops, while Kim praised North Korean soldiers who killed themselves rather than be captured.
An estimated 15,000 North Korean personnel were deployed to help Russia retake territory at Kursk, with more than 6,000 killed.
This development should put an end to the outdated assumption that the North Korea problem is static. Pyongyang is exporting manpower, gaining battlefield experience, gaining political leverage and deepening military cooperation with a revisionist power engaged in a major European war.
What matters is not just that North Korea is helping foreign wars. These are the reasons why the regime can do this so easily.
A state that can send thousands of its citizens to die abroad without consent or accountability reveals how it governs at home. Pyongyang’s behavior abroad cannot be separated from the system of repression that keeps it at home.
Why human rights are a matter of national security
Yet people too often, even now, treat North Korean human rights as a moral side issue, separate from “real” security concerns like missiles, troops, and deterrence.
This distinction is false.
When an individual’s rights are violated, we call it human rights violations. When the rights of millions of people who collectively make up a state are violated, we call it a national security threat.
The nature of both is the same. Both rely on coercion, fear and violence. Both destroy human freedom.
A regime that terrorizes its own citizens will inevitably threaten others as well. A state that imprisons the truth at home will stay out. A government that normalizes forced labor domestically will sell weapons, spread technology, and traffic conflicts abroad.
North Korea’s prison camps, censorship system, forced labor networks, and dynastic dictatorship are not separate from its missile and nuclear programs. They are what support those programs.
Totalitarian regimes fear freedom more than sanctions
As Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky puts it EVIDENCE in discussing totalitarian systems, when escape is an option, the fear used to control people no longer works.
This insight applies directly to North Korea.
Authoritarian regimes do not survive by force alone. They survive by convincing citizens that resistance is futile, alternatives do not exist, and the outside world is unreachable.
Once people have access to outside information, listen to uncensored broadcasts, see the prosperity of free societies, or know that escape is possible, the regime’s psychological monopoly begins to weaken.
This is why Pyongyang fears USB drives, radios and defectors more than rhetorical condemnations at the United Nations.
A lesson Seoul once understood
South Korea once understood this most clearly.
On October 1, 2016, during her Armed Forces Day remarks, then-President Park Geun-hye publicly called on North Koreans to come to the bay of freedom in the South.
Whatever Park’s political point of view, her strategic logic was sound. The existence of a free, prosperous and democratic South Korea is itself a challenge to Pyongyang’s legitimacy.
The most dangerous contrast for the North Korean regime is not military pressure. It is a civilized comparison.
No quick fix, but a realistic long game
There is no quick fix to the North Korea issue.
Sanctions can impose costs but not transform the regime. Summit diplomacy may ease tensions, but not change the system. Military deterrence remains essential, but it can only contain threats.
A sustainable strategy requires constant pressure on the internal foundations of the dictatorship.
This means supporting the displaced, expanding access to information, documenting crimes against humanity, targeting forced labor networks, protecting refugees and making human dignity a permanent part of diplomacy rather than an occasional slogan.
It also means closer coordination between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo. North Korean, Japanese and American abductees, separated families, victims of forced labor and defectors are not simply humanitarian concerns. They are common concerns of the alliance.
Human rights as a national security strategy
North Korean human rights should no longer be treated as an afterthought to the nuclear negotiations. It is the foundation of the North Korean problem itself.
The same regime that starves, censors, and terrorizes its own citizens also builds nuclear weapons, exports weapons, and sends troops to foreign wars. To separate internal repression from external aggression is to misunderstand the two.
If the free world seeks lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula, it must think beyond crisis management and missile counting. Advocacy for human rights is slow, difficult and often frustrating.
But over time, she strikes the fear on which totalitarian power depends.
This is not naive idealism. It is realism measured in decades.
Hanjin Lew is a political commentator specializing in East Asian affairs. Jio Lew contributed research for this article.
