North Korea has been shaping up as Russia’s leading weapons supplier, reportedly providing Moscow with extensive military packages, including ballistic missiles and over 3 million artillery shells.
its just amazing how far russia has fell. When north korea is the stable place helping you out you have to start asking yourself the hard questions.
There’s a great book called The Dictator’s handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn’t give less of a damn. There’s a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.
The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.
Which they’ve done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.
