geopolitics; asia; intelligence; conflict · 11 min
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Documentaries about North Korea tend to linger on the military parades and the satellite photos of a country in darkness, but the strange thing about the place, when you think about it, is that it keeps existing. Every year, every decade, analysts predict its imminent collapse, and the regime survives anyway. This is a state founded in 1948 under Stalin's patronage, which lost its main protector in 1991, went through a famine in the nineties that killed hundreds of thousands, and lives under the harshest sanctions in the international system. Far from crumbling, it has developed nuclear weapons, exports ammunition to Russia and can afford the luxury of sending a handful of soldiers to fight in Ukraine.
By any sensible reckoning North Korea should not exist, and yet there it is. Working out why means facing something uncomfortable about the nature of power.
With Pyongyang the numbers always need a grain of salt. North Korea publishes no economic statistics, so what we know is pieced together from the Bank of South Korea, satellite imagery, defector testimony and Chinese and Russian trade data. Allowing for all that, the picture is roughly this: a country of some 26 million people whose GDP grew 3.7% in 2024, the fastest growth in eight years, while its total exports barely top $360 million, less than a mid-sized company in any Latin American country brings in.
Most of the economy still runs on central planning and pays lip service, at least, to the Juche doctrine of self-reliance, an ideology Kim Il-sung designed to get out of the dilemma of depending too much on Moscow or too much on Beijing. In practice, North Korean self-reliance is a polite word for scarcity. The country never got its productive capacity back after the Soviet collapse, and the famine of the nineties, the so-called "Arduous March," forced the regime to put up with an informal economy of markets (jangmadang) that now works as a sort of clandestine capitalism with the state looking over its shoulder.
For a decade Kim Jong-un tried to stabilise the currency by informally tying the system to a partially dollarised economy, and for a while it held. Then, in the second half of 2024, the North Korean won lost two-thirds of its value against the dollar, sliding from around 8,000 units per dollar to nearly 27,000 by year's end; by 2025 the rate had passed 36,000. The price of rice tripled in two years. Several things went wrong at once. The regime printed money to pay for wage increases, the partial reopening of the Chinese border opened up a trade deficit, and underneath it all sits a system that has no monetary policy tools because it does not believe in them.
The 2024 growth also came from a very particular place. Heavy manufacturing grew 10.7%, the largest jump on record, on the back of ammunition and arms production for Russia, so North Korea is growing because it makes artillery shells that end up on the Ukrainian front. You might picture a subsistence economy that happens to have nuclear weapons on the side, when what you actually have is an economy that subsists thanks to its weapons and its capacity to produce them.
Everything in North Korea's logic leads back to nuclear weapons. Pyongyang is not suicidal, and the bomb matters far less to it as an offensive instrument than as the most effective insurance policy in modern history. Kim Jong-un has the examples to hand. Saddam Hussein had no atomic bomb and ended up on a gallows; Gaddafi gave up his nuclear programme in exchange for Western promises and ended up lynched in a ditch. The North Koreans studied both cases with the attention others reserve for strategy manuals.
Estimates vary. The consensus from the U.S. Congressional Research Service puts the arsenal at roughly 50 assembled nuclear warheads, with enough fissile material for between 70 and 90. South Korean analysts at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA) go a good deal further, estimating between 127 and 150 warheads, with projections of more than 400 by 2040. The gap comes down to how little anyone knows about the uranium enrichment facilities Pyongyang operates outside Yongbyon.
What is known is that the programme keeps moving. In 2025 the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon remains operational, the experimental light water reactor is in final testing, and the Punggye-ri test site has been restored and stands ready for a seventh nuclear detonation whenever Kim sees fit. U.S. intelligence put it bluntly in its 2025 threat assessment: Kim views nuclear weapons as the "guarantor of regime security" and has "no intention" of giving them up.
Put yourself in his shoes and he is hard to blame. Disarmament hasn't done much for the people who tried it. And Russia now gives Kim a diplomatic cover he lacked a decade ago, especially since Lavrov declared in 2024 that the denuclearisation of North Korea is a "closed issue."
The arsenal turns a poor, isolated country into an actor nobody can ignore. Any military solution to the North Korean problem carries the risk of nuclear catastrophe in Seoul, in Tokyo or even on the American mainland, and solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Hwasong-18 are specifically designed to slip past the missile defences of the United States and its allies. That capability is incomplete, rudimentary if you like, but it is real, and it does far more to keep the regime alive than socialism or Juche.
North Korea's dealings with its two powerful neighbours are realpolitik straight out of the textbook. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has much affection for the regime in Pyongyang, but each needs it for reasons of its own, and they both pay to keep it going.
China is the senior partner, with over 90% of North Korean foreign trade, and the main supplier of food, energy and consumer goods. The Chinese Communist Party regards the Kims with a mixture of condescension and irritation, and if Beijing puts up with them it is for an elementary strategic reason. A North Korean collapse would mean a unified Korea under Seoul's aegis, with American troops on the banks of the Yalu River, which China will not accept. North Korea serves as its buffer state, a cushion between the Chinese world and the American military presence in the Pacific, and Beijing will keep it on life support for as long as it does that job.
The war in Ukraine turned the Russian relationship upside down. Before 2022 Moscow was a secondary partner; now it's a client. North Korea has supplied Russia with millions of artillery shells, along with short-range ballistic missiles and multiple rocket launcher systems, and Ukrainian estimates put its share at up to 50% of the shells Russia fires on the front. South Korean intelligence reckons Pyongyang has sent more than twelve million artillery rounds in total.
Then came the soldiers. Starting in October 2024, between 10,000 and 12,000 North Korean troops were deployed to the Kursk region, North Korea's first participation in a major armed conflict since the Korean War. They took heavy casualties (the British Ministry of Defence speaks of more than 6,000 killed and wounded) and the deployment carried on regardless. In April 2025 North Korea officially confirmed, for the first time, that it had sent troops. Kim spoke of "annihilating the neo-Nazi Ukrainian occupiers," though what he was really after was combat experience and Russian military technology, and money too.
In return North Korea gets a great deal. Estimates put the flow of Russian capital to Pyongyang at between $5.6 and $9.8 billion, and Russia is handing over military technology that lets Kim modernise a conventional arsenal that had been stuck for decades. In 2025 North Korea launched its largest naval destroyer, tested a supersonic cruise missile that bears a suspicious resemblance to a Russian model, and unveiled AI-equipped suicide drones as well as new air defence systems. So a war that in theory has nothing to do with the Korean Peninsula is paying for the largest North Korean military modernisation in decades.
There is plenty of irony in a sanctions regime designed to suffocate Pyongyang being more or less neutralised by the active complicity of a permanent member of the Security Council. Russia buys North Korean weapons and has gone further, declaring through Lavrov that it "respects the nuclear aspirations" of Pyongyang. Multilateral bodies recite the rules-based international order like a mantra while its own architects sabotage it whenever it suits them.
None of this would work without the internal control system. The bombs and the allies help, but what holds North Korea together is the most complete apparatus of surveillance and control on the face of the earth.
The songbun system sorts the entire population into three categories (loyal, wavering, hostile) according to the family's political background, going back to the founding of the state. Where you live, what you eat and which school your children attend depend largely on what your grandfather did in 1950. It is a caste system with Marxist-Leninist characteristics or, if you prefer, feudalism dressed up as revolution.
Nothing contemporary compares with the personality cult around the Kim dynasty; neither Mao nor Stalin nor Castro himself built anything so totalising. It is a quasi-religious structure that works as a secular substitute for religion, with its trinity of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, its sacred scriptures and obligatory rituals and its own calendar. A Christian familiar with the structure of creeds will recognise in the Kim system an almost perfect inversion, the same form emptied of all transcendent content and filled with the State, the Leader standing where God should be and fear where hope should be.
I suspect that spiritual hollowing out runs deeper than anything else in the regime. North Korea is a project to replace the whole of human religious experience with devotion to political power, and that explains, incidentally, its hidden fragility. A system resting on a faith that cannot admit to being faith, because it presents itself as science and historical reason, needs absolute control of information to hold up, since a single sustained contact with the outside world could be enough to bring the whole mythology down.
The regime knows its legitimacy would not survive informational competition, and it acts accordingly. Internet access is restricted to a national intranet and mobile phones run on a closed network. Possessing foreign media is a crime that can cost you your life, and defectors describe public executions for watching South Korean dramas.
People have been asking since 1991 whether this can last, and if so for how long. The honest answer is that we don't know. Those who predicted collapse have been wrong for over three decades, while those who predict eternal stability forget that every totalitarian regime in history, without exception, has eventually fallen. So it comes down to the time horizon. The Soviet Union lasted 74 years, Maoist China transformed itself beyond recognition, and the North Korean dynasty is already at 77.
Both positions have reasonable arguments behind them. On the side of stability, the nuclear arsenal removes the external threat, China and Russia guarantee a minimum of economic sustenance, the internal control apparatus shows no visible cracks, and the dynastic succession, three generations in, has passed power down in a way few authoritarian regimes manage.
Anyone betting on collapse, or at least on an existential crisis, can point to an economy that is structurally fragile, to a 2024-2025 currency devaluation that suggests serious problems of economic governance, and to information that seeps through however tightly it is controlled. Defectors say the younger generation is growing more cynical about the propaganda. Whether North Koreans believe in the system matters less than how many are pretending to, and what happens when they stop.
There is a third possibility, less discussed and perhaps more likely, which is slow transformation, a kind of inverted Chinese model in which the regime keeps absolute political control while allowing an increasingly visible market economy. Kim Jong-un has already tolerated the jangmadang and permitted some private accumulation of capital, and there is now a class of North Korean nouveaux riches, the donju, who operate with the complicity of the state. If he could find a way to decompress the economy without losing political control, he could buy himself decades more.
The trouble, as always, is that economic reform breeds political demands. Perestroika showed it and so did the Prague Spring, and Kim, who studied in Switzerland and is nobody's fool, knows it.
North Korea is an unpleasant reminder that power exercised with enough brutality, and enough intelligence, can hold on far longer than decency would wish. The Pyongyang regime is an adaptation, an organism that found its ecological niche in the cracks of the international system and thrives there in its own way because that system is too fragmented and too hypocritical to get rid of it.
Nobody knows whether North Korea will fall, or when. What bothers me more is what it says about us that it is still standing.