As American and Israeli missiles rain down on Tehran, how does it all look from Pyongyang?
On one level, Pyongyang won’t be thrilled about possibly losing a friend on the global stage. But there are also vast differences between North Korea and its fellow charter member of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.”
North Korea embarked on its nuclear program decades ago. Precisely when is unclear, but after standoffs with the U.S. in the 1990s and again a decade later, the Kim dynasty made a remarkable dash for the bomb—conducting six nuclear tests from 2006 to 2017 and following that up with an array of intercontinental ballistic missile launches. In 2012, third-generation leader Kim Jong Un had North Korea’s nuclear status written into the constitution.
By the time Donald Trump shook hands with Kim Jong Un in 2018, the North’s nuclear status was a fait accompli.
So, as the Trump administration seizes Nicolás Maduro and decapitates the Iranian leadership, North Korea’s leaders can take heart in one unassailable truth: There’s no deterrent like a nuclear deterrent.
Kim Jong Un, wrapping up a congress of his ruling party days before the weekend strikes on Iran, reaffirmed the North’s status as a nuclear state—“permanently and irreversibly.”
North Korea’s most dramatic nuclear advances came under Kim Jong Un. But the origins of the nuclear program, and indeed the foundations of the state, were laid not by Kim Jong Un or his father, but rather by his grandfather Kim Il Sung, who ruled for half a century.
It was Kim Il Sung who had North Korea’s first nuclear reactor put in place in the 1960s. During the 1970s, he turned his focus toward building a nuclear arsenal; by his death in 1994, the North was well on its way to mastering the technology.
To be clear: KOREAN MESSIAH isn’t about North Korea’s nuclear program. The word “nuclear” appears just seven times in the book—fewer than you’ll find in this short piece.
But the state that Kim Il Sung established—as in Iran, a religious society built around a divinely-sanctioned supreme leader—set North Korea on a path apart from its peers in the USSR, East Germany, and rest of the socialist bloc.
In the post-Cold War era, the robustness of what Kim Il Sung built—a nuclear-armed familial personality cult transmitted through a second, third, and perhaps soon a fourth generation—means that the fate that has befallen Venezuela, Iran, and perhaps soon Cuba is not likely to come to North Korea.
Under Kim Il Sung and his successors, North Korea has never seen any periods of political relaxation. Nor has it ever seriously contemplated compromising on its nuclear program. Instead, what the Kim dynasty has pursued over the past eighty years is a single-minded focus on the task of building: a fortified state armed with nuclear weapons, yes, but also a self-contained society of 25 million people with absolute devotion to the leader.
And seen through that lens, the view from Pyongyang looks pretty good these days.
Also posted on LinkedIn.