North Korean Army - a modern-day Honve'dse'g in the East Asia grand strategy?

History does not repeat itself .... but there are patterns that do seem to recur.

What if we are all sitting on the brink of a cataclysm, such as faced the world in the summer of 1914?

If that is so then a coming together of unlikely forces is possible.

And taking that further, could the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army soon mobilize so as to protect and further China's interests? Perhaps then, a comparison might be made with the highly efficient, well armed German Army under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Being strong enough and ready to fight a war alone is good but having well armed allies standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you is even better.

So, stretching the 1914 analogy further, it would be useful to China to have the Koreans as allies, with the ROK Army being like the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Landwehr and the DPRK Army like the Honve'dse'g.

And just for the hell of it, the Japanese Self Defence Force might be equated with the army of old Bulgaria or Roumania in this analogy.

(Of course the analogy falls apart when we look for a modern-day equivalent of the old Ottoman Empire ....... or does it?)