I recently returned from the Halifax International Security Forum with a familiar feeling of despair.

For three days, I listened to Western leaders and foreign policy experts warn about threats to the international order: Russian aggression, China’s ambitions, the erosion of norms. All urgent, all valid.

But North Korea remained almost entirely absent from serious discussion in the sessions and hallway conversations, despite playing a transformational role in the very war consuming everyone’s attention.

During a session with U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, I asked what explains the gap between Pyongyang’s outsized contribution to Russia’s war effort and its near-total absence