North Korea: The Second Spring of the Kim Regime

The greetings that ruler Kim Jong Un received on Wednesday came from the most powerful men in the world: China's President Xi Jinping congratulated the 42-year-old on his recent successes, and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would like to expand the strategic partnership with his ally. And Donald Trump has been trying for weeks to get a meeting with the North Korean dictator - so far in vain. It sounds amazing, but it's true: the North Korean state is celebrating its 78th anniversary and is currently stronger than ever.

Anyone who describes the country's history as turbulent is understating things. When Kim Il Sung proclaimed the “Democratic People's Republic of Korea” in September 1948, she was perceived as a puppet of the Soviet Union. But just two years later, Kim pressured his political sponsor Stalin to authorize an attack on capitalist, US-backed South Korea. The Korean War (1950–1953) claimed several million lives and cemented the division of the Korean peninsula.

Thanks to its geographical proximity to Russia and China, the northern part was considered the economically superior of the two Koreas until well into the 1960s. Pyongyang played its allies Moscow and Beijing off against each other in order to obtain the largest possible concessions. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, the country's main oil supplier, North Korea's economy virtually collapsed. The result was a famine with over half a million deaths.

But perhaps the greatest transformation has occurred in the “hermetically sealed kingdom” over the last two decades. Frank Jannuzi speaks of a “fundamental change” whose significance can hardly be overestimated. The 62-year-old Jannuzi has been observing North Korea for more than half his life; he has already advised Joe Biden and John Kerry in the US Senate.

Previously, North Korea's highest political doctrine was unification with the hostile South - if necessary under military force. Since the end of 2023, however, Kim Jong Un has made a radical about-face: he declared South Korea the main enemy with which he refuses any contact. Kim continued to mine the demarcation line, blew up the last historic railway connections, and quickly demolished the iconic “Arch of Reunification” – a 30-meter-high monument in Pyongyang.

The regime has undergone a similarly drastic change in its foreign policy: once an internationally outlawed pariah state, North Korea has long been under the protective hand of Moscow and Beijing. Since the end of 2024, Pyongyang has sent at least 15,000 soldiers to support Russia in the Ukraine war, as well as large deliveries of artillery ammunition and rockets. In return, Putin is guaranteeing his new ally a de facto assistance pact, economic aid and military technology.

The international economic sanctions imposed on North Korea over its nuclear program now only exist on paper. China no longer even appears to make any effort to follow them. Trade between Pyongyang and Beijing is booming, and the consequences are visible in the capital's cityscape. In 2025 alone, around 10,000 modern apartments were completed in Pyongyang, and the middle class has long had domestically produced smartphones. In the once car-free city center, traffic jams are part of everyday life.

Kim's greatest achievements are military: While having his own nuclear bomb was a bold vision in the early 2000s, North Korea already has up to 120 warheads, according to South Korean estimates. There are also intercontinental ballistic missiles whose range extends to the US West Coast.

"Are we in a new situation today? Absolutely! It's a completely new situation," says expert Januzzi. “There is no reason to believe that North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons any time soon.”

In South Korea people seem to have already come to terms with this. The goal of nuclear disarmament is now viewed much more flexibly by President Lee Jae-myung: First we have to start talking together and slowly build trust again. Only then should one attempt to negotiate North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

“The reality has changed, the strategy must also follow,” says South Korea’s Vice Defense Minister Kim Hong-cheol. However, the former air force major general also says: “Acknowledging reality does not mean legitimizing it.”

Kim Jong Un has come a big step closer to the goal that his grandfather and state founder Kim Il Sung dreamed of: being recognized by the international community - albeit tacitly and out of necessity - as a nuclear state.

But the geopolitical “honeymoon” that Pyongyang is currently experiencing is unlikely to last forever. “The experience of the last 70 years has clearly shown that the Russian and North Korean economies are not compatible with each other,” says Andrei Lankow from Kookmin University in Seoul. The Russian-born man, who once studied in Pyongyang, is considered a leading North Korea expert. He knows that the Kim regime is only useful to Moscow as long as it sends cheap workers or soldiers to the front. If the war in Ukraine ends, Putin could abandon his ally again.

The paranoid party cadres in Pyongyang dislike the overwhelming dependence on China anyway. “They deeply distrust China,” says Lankow. The People's Republic is probably the only country powerful enough to interfere in North Korea's internal politics.

It is precisely this constellation that could create an opportunity for the West in a few years. Because perhaps North Korea's leadership is seeking a rapprochement with Washington or Seoul again in order to diversify its dependencies. If Trump gets his hoped-for summit with Kim, it would already be clear that North Korea's ruler will negotiate from a position of strength.