There is something strange about North Korea, and it is not what you see in the documentaries. Not the military parades, not the television anchors screaming, not the satellite photos of a country in darkness. What is strange is that it keeps existing. That every year, every decade, analysts predict its imminent collapse, and every year, every decade, the regime survives. That a state founded in 1948 under Stalin's patronage, which lost its main protector in 1991, which suffered a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the nineties, which lives under the harshest sanctions in the international system, has not only failed to crumble: it has developed nuclear weapons, exports ammunition to Russia, and affords itself the luxury of sending a handful of soldiers to fight in Ukraine.
North Korea should not exist. And yet it does. Understanding why means understanding something uncomfortable about the nature of power.
The Economics of the Absurd
The numbers, as always with Pyongyang, should be taken with a grain of salt. North Korea does not publish economic statistics. What we know comes from the Bank of South Korea, satellite imagery, defector testimony and Chinese and Russian trade data. Within those limitations, the picture is roughly this: a country of some 26 million people with a GDP that grew 3.7% in 2024, the highest growth in eight years, but whose total exports barely exceed $360 million. To put that in perspective: a mid-sized company in any Latin American country invoices more.
The bulk of the economy operates under a centrally planned system that still adheres, at least rhetorically, to the Juche doctrine of self-reliance, an ideology Kim Il-sung designed as a response to the dilemma of depending too much on Moscow or too much on Beijing. In practice, North Korean self-reliance is a euphemism for scarcity. Since the Soviet collapse, the country never recovered its productive capacity. The famine of the nineties, the so-called "Arduous March," forced the regime to tolerate an informal economy of markets (jangmadang) that today functions as a sort of clandestine capitalism under state supervision.
Kim Jong-un spent a decade trying to stabilise the currency by informally pegging the system to a partially dollarised economy. It worked, until it stopped working. In the second half of 2024, the North Korean won lost two-thirds of its value against the dollar, going from around 8,000 units per dollar to nearly 27,000 by year's end. By 2025, the exchange rate had surpassed 36,000. The price of rice tripled in two years. The causes are multiple: money printing to finance wage increases, the partial reopening of the Chinese border generating a trade deficit, and the structural incapacity of a system that lacks monetary policy tools because it does not believe in them.
The revealing thing about the 2024 growth figure is not the number itself but its origin. The heavy manufacturing sector grew 10.7%, the largest jump on record, driven by the production of ammunition and armaments for Russia. In other words: North Korea is growing because it manufactures artillery shells that end up on the Ukrainian front. The North Korean economy is not a subsistence economy that also happens to have nuclear weapons; it is an economy that subsists thanks to its weapons and its capacity to produce them.
The Nuclear Life Insurance
The entire North Korean logic converges on a single point: nuclear weapons. Not as an offensive instrument, Pyongyang is not suicidal, but as the most effective insurance policy in modern history. Kim Jong-un is clear on this: Saddam Hussein did not have an 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 those cases with the attention others reserve for strategy manuals.
Estimates vary, but the consensus from the U.S. Congressional Research Service places the North Korean 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) have been more aggressive: they estimate between 127 and 150 warheads, with projections of more than 400 by 2040. The discrepancy reflects how little we know about the uranium enrichment facilities Pyongyang operates outside Yongbyon.
What we do know is that the programme is not stopping. 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 said it plainly in its 2025 threat assessment: Kim views nuclear weapons as the "guarantor of regime security" and has "no intention" of giving them up.
It is hard to blame him, if you put yourself in his shoes. Nuclear disarmament has not exactly been a great deal for those who tried it. And the Russian position on the matter, with Lavrov declaring in 2024 that the denuclearisation of North Korea is a "closed issue," gives Kim a diplomatic cover he did not have a decade ago.
The nuclear arsenal transforms North Korea from a poor and isolated country into an actor nobody can ignore. There is no military solution to the North Korean problem that does not carry the risk of nuclear catastrophe in Seoul, Tokyo or even the American mainland. The solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles, like the Hwasong-18, are specifically designed to evade the missile defences of the United States and its allies. That capability, incomplete, rudimentary if you like, but real, is what keeps the regime alive. Not the ideology, not socialism, not Juche: the bomb.
Russia and China: Partners Who Didn't Choose Each Other
North Korea's relationship with its two powerful neighbours is a textbook case of realpolitik. Neither Beijing nor Moscow feel great affection for the Pyongyang regime. But both need it, each for their own reasons, and both pay the price of sustaining it.
China is the dominant partner. It accounts for over 90% of North Korean foreign trade and is the main supplier of food, energy and consumer goods. Beijing tolerates Pyongyang not out of ideological solidarity, the Chinese Communist Party regards the Kims with a mixture of condescension and irritation, but 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. For China, that is unacceptable. North Korea is a buffer state, a cushion between the Chinese world and the American military presence in the Pacific. As long as it serves that function, Beijing will keep it on life support.
The relationship with Russia changed radically with the war in Ukraine. Before 2022, Moscow was a secondary partner. Now it is a client. North Korea has supplied Russia with millions of artillery shells, with Ukrainian estimates suggesting up to 50% of the shells Russia fires on the front, as well as short-range ballistic missiles and multiple rocket launcher systems. South Korean intelligence estimates that Pyongyang has sent more than twelve million artillery rounds in total.
And then there are the soldiers. Between 10,000 and 12,000 North Korean troops were deployed to the Kursk region starting in October 2024, the first North Korean participation in a major armed conflict since the Korean War. Casualties were significant, the British Ministry of Defence speaks of more than 6,000 killed and wounded, but the deployment continued. 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," but the real reason was different: combat experience, Russian military technology, and money.
What North Korea receives in return is enormous. Estimates place the flow of Russian capital toward Pyongyang between $5.6 and $9.8 billion. Russia is transferring military technology that allows Kim to modernise a conventional arsenal that had been stagnant 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, introduced AI-equipped suicide drones and unveiled new air defence systems. The war in Ukraine, which in theory has nothing to do with the Korean Peninsula, is financing the largest North Korean military modernisation in decades.
The irony is plain: the international sanctions regime designed to suffocate Pyongyang has been essentially neutralised by the active complicity of a permanent member of the Security Council. Russia does not merely buy North Korean weapons; through Lavrov, it has declared that it "respects the nuclear aspirations" of Pyongyang. The rules-based international order, which multilateral bodies repeat like a mantra, crashes against the reality that its own architects sabotage it when it suits them.
The Perfected Cult
Something must be said about the internal control system, because without it none of the above works. North Korea survives not only because of its bombs and its allies. It survives because it has built the most complete apparatus of surveillance and control that exists on the face of the earth.
The songbun system classifies the entire population into three categories, loyal, wavering, hostile, based on the family's political background going back to the founding of the state. Your fate, where you live, what you eat, which school your children attend, is largely determined by what your grandfather did in 1950. It is a caste system with Marxist-Leninist characteristics, or, if you prefer, feudalism dressed up as revolution.
The personality cult around the Kim dynasty has no contemporary parallel. Neither Mao, nor Stalin, nor Castro himself built anything so totalising. It is a quasi-religious structure, with its trinity of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, its sacred scriptures, its obligatory rituals, its own calendar, that functions as a secular substitute for religion. 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. Where God should be, there is the Leader. Where hope should be, there is fear.
That spiritual hollowing out is probably the deepest key to the regime. North Korea is not simply an authoritarian state; it is a project of total substitution of the human religious experience with devotion to political power. Which explains, incidentally, its hidden fragility: a system that depends on a faith that cannot admit to being faith, because it presents itself as science and historical reason, requires absolute control of information to sustain itself. A single sustained contact with the outside world would be enough to demolish the entire mythology.
The regime knows this, and acts accordingly. Internet access is restricted to a national intranet. Mobile phones operate on a closed network. Possession of foreign media is a crime that can cost your life. Defectors report public executions for watching South Korean dramas. This is not paranoia: it is lucidity. The regime understands perfectly well that its legitimacy would not survive informational competition.
Collapse or Eternity?
It is the question that has been asked since 1991. Can this last? And if it can, for how long?
The honest answer is that we do not know. Those who predicted collapse have been wrong for over three decades. Those who predict eternal stability ignore that every totalitarian regime in history, without exception, has eventually fallen. The question is the time horizon: the Soviet Union lasted 74 years, Maoist China transformed itself beyond recognition, the North Korean dynasty has already lasted 77.
There are reasonable arguments for both positions. In favour of stability: the nuclear arsenal eliminates 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 now, has demonstrated a capacity for power transfer that few authoritarian regimes achieve.
In favour of collapse, or at least an existential crisis: the economy is structurally fragile, the currency devaluation of 2024-2025 suggests deep problems of economic governance, and the flow of information, though controlled, seeps through. Defectors report that the younger generation harbours a growing cynicism toward the propaganda. The question is not whether North Koreans believe in the system; it is how many pretend to believe, and what happens when they stop pretending.
But there is a third scenario, less discussed and perhaps more probable: neither collapse nor stability, but slow transformation. A kind of inverted Chinese model, where the regime maintains absolute political control but allows an increasingly visible market economy. Kim Jong-un already tolerated the jangmadang. He already permitted a degree of private capital accumulation. There already exists a class of North Korean nouveaux riches, the donju, who operate with the complicity of the state. If Kim could find a way to decompress the economy without losing political control, he could buy additional decades of survival.
The problem, as always, is that economic reforms generate political demands. That is the lesson of perestroika. That is the lesson of the Prague Spring. And Kim, who studied in Switzerland and is nobody's fool, knows it.
North Korea is, ultimately, an unpleasant reminder. It reminds us that power, when exercised with sufficient brutality and sufficient intelligence, can sustain itself far longer than decency would wish. That nuclear weapons change the rules of the game in a way that has no going back. That international sanctions work until they stop working. And that the international order, that concept so dear to the bureaucracies of Brussels and Geneva, is exactly as solid as the willingness of its most powerful members to uphold it, which, in light of the evidence, is not very much.
The Pyongyang regime is not an anachronism. It is an adaptation. An organism that found its ecological niche in the cracks of the international system and that thrives, in its own way, precisely because that system is too fragmented and too hypocritical to eliminate it.
The question is not whether North Korea will fall. The question is what it says about us that it is still standing.