Russia’s Alliance with North Korea: Balancing Military Inferiority with Recklessness

The effect of the Russian alliance with North Korea has often been perceived as limited to North Korea's bargaining with the West and its assistance to Russia in the war with Ukraine through military equipment. However, this alliance challenges some of the premises of U.S. nuclear deterrence, concepts the United States has developed over time, overconfidently assuming that the U.S. construction of the levels of escalation was shared by its enemies.
This article interprets the Russian-North Korean alliance by using classical theories of deterrence by Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn and Reinhard Selten, but treating the game structure as socially constructed. The argument of the article is that the alliance between North Korea and Russia makes sense from the point of view of deterrence only if we conclude that Russia and the US are playing different games. Both sides tend to be overconfident of their own bargainig leverage based on their own perceived game setting.