By Samuel Ramani
Pyongyang’s defense ties in Africa have been overlooked by the West.
On June 11, 2015, a UN report revealed that North Korea had provided marine engines and military patrol boat replacement parts to Angola, in violation of UN sanctions. Similar long-term contracts for military equipment have also been developed between North Korea and East African nations, like Uganda and Tanzania. North Korea’s trade partnerships with anti-Western regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa have largely been formed under the radar of the Western media, which has typically focused its coverage on Chinese economic investment in Africa as the principal link between Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
Insufficient attention to North Korea’s bilateral defense linkages has helped give North Korean foreign policy an irrational image. In Africa, however, North Korea possesses a coherent strategy and its bilateral defense ties with African countries must be considered in the broader context of Kim Jong-Un’s attempts to create allies for North Korea through shared opposition to Western neo-colonialism.
North Korea’s attempts to forge durable cooperation with African strategic partners are based on a two-pronged strategy: soft power building and the strategic strengthening of African nations’ defense sector production capacities. While North Korea’s abysmal economic performance in recent decades, totalitarian regime structure, and communism’s decline as an ideological force has caused it to be viewed as a pariah state in the West, its Africa strategy is a salient example of how the regime has attempted to ameliorate its international isolation and craft an anti-Western identity that can be projected on the world stage.
Read the full story at The Diplomat