North Korea’s ongoing direct military involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War through its first and second troop deployments, alongside plans for a third, is drawing attention to its politics of troop deployment and hyper-strategy. Underpinned by Pyongyang’s confidence in having completed its nuclear armament, North Korea’s hyper-strategy, characterized by ambitions to maximize strategic interests through external expansion, represents a distinct departure from the passive foreign policies of the Cold War era. Moreover, a series of deployments — rather than a single, one-off dispatch — is understood as a method for implementing hyper-strategy and as a systematic effort to institutionalize it as an operational tool. Conceptualizing North Korea’s hyper-strategy, characterized by the principles of strategic equivalence, expansion, and offensive posture, offers insights for evolving strategic countermeasures and formulating new foreign strategies that achieve both pragmatic interests and security objectives. In this context, a multilayered diplomatic-security framework may serve as an effective means of offsetting North Korea’s hyper-strategy.

1. Introduction

2. Diagnosing North Korea’s Politics of Troop Deployment

3. North Korea’s Troop Deployment and Hyper-strategy

4. Diplomatic and Security Implications