North Korea’s leader will attend a military parade in Beijing next week to commemorate the end of World War II, an event looking increasingly likely to be characterized by opposition to the West.
Kim Jong Un will be hosted by China’s Xi Jinping on Sep. 3, alongside the leaders of Belarus, Cuba, Pakistan, and Russia, among others, with no North American or European top officials expected to attend.
Though defense analysts will be watching for the hardware on display, experts at the Brookings Institution in Washington argued that such parades were also part of efforts by China and Russia to wage a “memory war” in order to override Western narratives of World War II with their own.