Suranis wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2024 11:01 am
Vlad Putin is on a charm offensive net to an important trading partner... North Korea? And
VIDEO: Putin and Kim Jong-Un on who enters the car first.
The Korean forced the Russians to leave the room because according to the rules Kim must enter first
Putin regretting his life decisions
Sorry not sorry. You are stuck with your crappy dictatorship allies now. The only way you are going to Europe again is in handcuffs to the Hague Mr Putin.
Putin and Kim Jong Un couldn't stop waving to each other as Putin was leaving for Vietnam.
This is, frankly, pathetic. Therefore we all know who is calling this a show of strength and how masterful and strong Putin is.
Russia, with a GDP of $1.6 trillion, is sucking up to a shithole country with a GDP of around $50 billion. Lame... Though to be fair, the GDP is probably understated because it doesn't include narcotrafficking and other criminal enterprises. And defense technology could amount to a decent sized chunk of the overall economy.
Back in the height of the cold war, in the 1970s, Defense Intelligence Agency estimates were that Russia was spending ~15% of nominal GDP on defense versus about 4% to 5% for the US. That's a big tax burden for the taxpayer to finance (and they couldn't engage in deficit financing before communism collapse because they didn't participate in the international financial system).
North Korea is likely spending more to try to keep pace with the South Koreans, who spend about 2.7% of their $1.7 trillion GDP on defense, an amount approximately equal to the entire GDP of North Korea.
If we assume that NK has a $20 billion defense industry, that's an opportunity to buy a lot of capacity for Russia, whose defense budget before invading Ukraine was ~$50 billion, of which one third to one half might be stolen, and much of the rest is soaked up by the air force and nuclear sub force.
Similarly, DPRK doesn't have much air force capability or large navy to dilute spending on producing massive amounts of ground attack weapons -- mortars, rockets, etc. So they have enough capacity to make a significant number of bullets for Putin despite their small overall size. And bullets are a lot easier to make than stealth fighters, so even a small, focused country like North Korea can do a better job there than the corrupt, comically inept Russians.
