How about that; you demonize two countries and they end up establishing better relations between themselves. From Ted Galen Carpenter at antiwarcom:
The summit meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has led to a surge of pearl clutching among the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its allies in the corporate news media. Warnings are growing that the meeting signals greater military cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang, which portends an increased security threat to the United States and its allies in both Europe and East Asia. Having made that diagnosis, though, the analysts have very few ideas for a cure or even a modestly beneficial treatment.
Those issuing the alarms also fail to grasp that the Biden administration and the overall foreign policy blob have no one to blame but themselves for this development. The unifying factor in most alliances is the existence of a common enemy. In this case, the common enemy for Russia and The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is the United States and its compliant military allies. U.S. leaders have pursued clumsy, tone-deaf policies toward both Moscow and Pyongyang, thereby creating a powerful incentive for them to boost their security cooperation.
The United States and NATO engaged in one provocation after another toward Russia, with NATO expansion and rising Western arms shipments to Ukraine being the culmination. Such an aggressive intrusion into a region that Moscow considered not only as its rightful sphere of influence but Russia’s core security zone was bound to turn out badly, as perceptive analysts had warned for years. Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the bitter fruit of that policy.
U.S. officials and pro-NATO propagandists have insisted that the invasion had nothing to do with Russian fears about the expansion of the alliance. However, recent statements by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have fatally undermined that narrative. He now concedes that NATO expansion was a major factor in the Kremlin’s decision to launch the February invasion.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 