Chinese Premier Li Qiang landed in Pyongyang on October 9, 2025, for a three-day visit to attend the 80th anniversary celebrations of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party — the highest-level Chinese trip to the DPRK in years and a clear signal that Beijing is back at the front of Pyongyang’s diplomatic stage. The Chinese state apparatus framed the trip as a routine strengthening of “traditional friendly and cooperative relations,” but Americans should read the choreography for what it is: a public reassertion of influence over a dangerous regime.
The guest list made the point even plainer: China sent its premier, Russia dispatched Dmitry Medvedev and other allied autocracies sent senior officials to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Kim Jong Un as he celebrated his party’s milestone. This was not a benign family reunion of dictators — it was a strategic summit in Pyongyang showing how Beijing and Moscow are knitting together a blunt instrument of anti-American power projection in Northeast Asia.
Kim used the occasion to double down on the very policies that threaten regional stability, promising to build a “socialist paradise” while publicly emphasizing nuclear and military programs; the event was expected to feature a major military parade showcasing Pyongyang’s latest missiles. These are not mere posturing lines in state media — they are blueprints for coercion that could put American cities and our allies at risk if left unchecked.
Let’s not forget the broader choreography: just weeks earlier Kim had been in Beijing, standing beside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at China’s giant military parade on September 3, 2025 — an unmistakable photo opportunity that cemented a trilateral message of resistance to U.S. influence. China’s willingness to host and elevate Kim, and Russia’s reciprocal embrace, underlines a dangerous new normal where authoritarian regimes coordinate to blunt American power and rewrite regional balances.
Beyond the parades and platitudes lies a transactional reality: North Korea has been supplying vast quantities of munitions to Russia and tightening military ties in return for political cover and materiel, while Beijing quietly protects and empowers Pyongyang’s economy and diplomacy. Americans cannot pretend these are isolated bilateral courtesies; they are part of a strategic supply chain that bolsters Moscow’s warfighting and props up a nuclear-armed rogue state on China’s flank.
The lesson for patriotic Americans is blunt: weakness invites coordination among our adversaries. We need clear-eyed deterrence, robust alliances with Seoul and Tokyo, and an American foreign policy that mixes economic pressure with credible military readiness — not appeasement theatre dressed as diplomacy. If Washington lets Beijing and Moscow normalize their patronage of Pyongyang, the next generation of Americans will pay the price in blood and treasure; it’s time to act like the superpower we remain and stop pretending these rehearsals for aggression are anything but what they are.
