Russia’s burgeoning “alliance-like agreement” with North Korea is establishing the two regimes as “a fundamental force” challenging U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, a senior White House official warned.

“In the early months of that relationship, one might have been able to make an argument that perhaps this was a transactional relationship,” the White House National Security Council’s Mira Rapp-Hooper said Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute. “I think it is very clear that the DPRK and Russia have bought into a longer-term partnership that we have to reckon with as a fundamental force in both regions.”