Russia and North Korea Are Scrambling Trump’s Alliance Strategy

Russia and North Korea Are Scrambling Trump's Alliance Strategy

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Analysis:

Russia and North Korea Are Scrambling Trump’s Alliance Strategy

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Analysis

Russia and North Korea Are Scrambling Trump’s Alliance Strategy

Pyongyang’s military is sharpening itself on Ukrainian battlefields. What does that mean for U.S. defense coordination?

By **Donggak Heo**, a member of the youth advisory group of the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of National Defense and a former policy aide at the country’s National Assembly. He is also a nonresident Kelly fellow at Pacific Forum.

!Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with North Korean Foreign Affairs Minister Choe Son Hui during a meeting in Moscow on July 19.

*Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with North Korean Foreign Affairs Minister Choe Son Hui during a meeting in Moscow on July 19.*

Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with North Korean Foreign Affairs Minister Choe Son Hui during a meeting in Moscow on July 19. Alexander Shcherbak/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

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August 28, 2026, 9:44 AM

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision last week to scale down the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercise with South Korea came at an awkward moment, given Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent warning that North Korea’s military capacity is expanding. U.S. and South Korean military planners had designed this year’s drills to account for expected changes in modern warfare, including drones, GPS disruption, and cyberattacks. But the drills were also intended to help prepare for a North Korea that is gaining invaluable wartime experience from its involvement in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

In the days after Zelensky’s warning—when he also appealed to South Korea for help strengthening Ukraine’s air defenses—Russian forces used North Korean ballistic missiles in a deadly attack on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, and Pyongyang launched another ballistic missile from its east coast. Lessons from that battlefield will shape any future military clash that the United States and South Korea might face in Northeast Asia.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision last week to scale down the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercise with South Korea came at an awkward moment, given Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent warning that North Korea’s military capacity is expanding. U.S. and South Korean military planners had designed this year’s drills to account for expected changes in modern warfare, including drones, GPS disruption, and cyberattacks. But the drills were also intended to help prepare for a North Korea that is gaining invaluable wartime experience from its involvement in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

In the days after Zelensky’s warning—when he also appealed to South Korea for help strengthening Ukraine’s air defenses—Russian forces used North Korean ballistic missiles in a deadly attack on the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, and Pyongyang launched another ballistic missile from its east coast. Lessons from that battlefield will shape any future military clash that the United States and South Korea might face in Northeast Asia.

These developments expose a problem for the Trump administration’s foreign-policy strategy—specifically, its intended division of defense labor among U.S. allies. Washington wants its allies to assume more responsibility for security in their own regions, freeing the United States to concentrate resources on other priorities. But Russia and North Korea are making those regions increasingly difficult to separate, leaving allies such as South Korea to carry more of the burden even as conflicts elsewhere make the threats that they face harder to deter. Washington can regionalize responsibility, but it cannot regionalize threats.

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The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy calls for “burden-sharing and burden-shifting,” requesting that wealthy allies assume primary defense responsibility for their regions so the United States can act as the “convener” and “supporter” of a broader burden-sharing network. The 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) further specifies that European allies are expected to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense and the lead in supporting Ukraine. South Korea is described as capable of taking primary responsibility for deterring North Korea, with “critical but more limited” U.S. support.

According to the NDS, greater South Korean responsibility will grant U.S. forces more flexibility to respond to contingencies elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific. This has raised concerns in Seoul about South Korea’s ability to deter North Korea with less U.S. support.

The burden-sharing and -shifting strategy is part of the Trump administration’s answer to what the NDS calls the “simultaneity problem”: the possibility that U.S. adversaries could act together or exploit crises opportunistically, across several theaters. If allies can maintain favorable balances in their own regions, the logic goes, then Washington can focus its forces where they are most necessary rather than trying to dominate every zone at once.

The strengthening Russia-North Korea relationship exposes a complication with that logic, because one theater is changing the threat in another. North Korea has supplied Russia with large quantities of artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles, and it has sent roughly 15,000 troopsto Russia’s Kursk region. Zelensky recently claimed that another 30,000 to 50,000 troops could be deployed to Russia (which North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, has since dismissed as