North Korea and Syria would be collaborating on chemical weapons

The confidential report of the United Nations, published by the New York Times about the collaboration between Syria and North Korea, if confirmed opens a disquieting scenario, which will not have implications on world foreign policy. According to this confidential information, Pyongyang would have provided all the necessary material to Damascus to build chemical bombs. It must be remembered how the Assad regime, in 2013, undertook to destroy its chemical arsenal and this promise was enough for Obama not to intervene in Syria: a failure to intervene that would have probably avoided all the years of war that followed and the huge human losses that the conflict caused, but it would also have limited the expansion and success of the Islamic State, which would have been easier to eliminate. Actually Assad's promise has not been kept, as demonstrated several times in the traces left by the chemical devices left in the theaters of war by the Syrian regular army. Although Assad has always denied the use of chemical bombs, blaming his opponents, the most likely hypothesis is that he has kept a part of his chemical arsenal well protected by the partial promise made to Obama. Certainly a part of the arsenal has been destroyed and, given the confidence with this type of weapons, the one indicated by the United Nations confidential report has a good chance of being true. North Korea, increasingly subject to sanctions, would be able to export its military technology to the chemical field in Syria, in exchange for payments necessary for the survival of the Pyongyang regime. A collaboration between two rogue states, as was once defined as this type of nation, very dangerous because it signals an informal alliance between two governments able to alter world stability with unconventional methods. From a practical point of view, to make this collaboration possible it seems unlikely that transactions between two countries so controlled have been carried out exclusively between themselves; without international complicity, through well-known fictitious societies in the countries to which they belong, this can only be achieved by some international actors who were aware of these contacts. If this is true, not thinking of Russia, Iran and China seems impossible; in fact, it is about who is closer to the two countries suspected of these traffics concerning chemical weapons. Certainly such a hypothesis will be all to be shown, yet to imagine the American reaction is not difficult. The US, among other things, has just been strongly criticized by Beijing for sanctions imposed on companies that have violated the North Korean embargo by allowing Pyongyang to procure oil and export coal. If the news of the UN report will be recognized as reliable, North Korean transactions will have been other and of a much more serious nature. The fact that North Korea also specialized in the construction of ballistic missiles and nuclear devices heavily aggravates the situation, because it also makes it a potential exporter of military technology difficult to reach for a country like Syria. However, it must be remembered that the collaboration between the two countries is not new: in the past the two nations have collaborated for the construction of a nuclear site, then destroyed by Tel Aviv and Korean military pilots have flown by the Syrian side in some raids against Israel in the sixties and seventies of the last century. Just the reaction of Israel will be an element to be evaluated carefully for the regional balances. Now it will be necessary to wait for the reactions of Russia and China, which if they want to be reliable subjects can only sanction the two countries in a serious way, but this hypothesis does not seem credible for the respective interests that Moscow and Beijing have from the fact that the Damascus regimes and Pyongyang remain alive. At this juncture, the American alarms therefore appear more than justified, given that the danger of North Korea, even if at a very high level, appears even less than a Syria located in the center of the Mediterranean with a chemical arsenal that can be increased and that perhaps , sees the possibility of having armaments of another kind.