Kim Jong-un's Calculation: Why North Korea Might — or Might Not — Move Closer to Iran

Kim Jong-un is not a difficult man to understand, once you accept the right frame. Every decision he makes is filtered through a single overriding priority: the survival of the regime he inherited and the system of absolute personal power that sustains it. His weapons programmes, his diplomatic outreach, his arms sales, his provocations — all of them make sense as expressions of that priority. The question of whether he will more openly align with Iran in the current crisis should be evaluated through exactly the same lens.

What North Korea Has Already Done

The framing of "will North Korea get involved?" somewhat obscures the degree to which it already is involved — just at a level of deniability that suits all parties. North Korea has been selling ballistic missile technology, artillery ammunition, and drone components to Iran's regional proxies for years, with the transactions routed through a web of intermediaries specifically designed to make direct attribution difficult. UN Panel of Experts reports have documented North Korean-origin components in weapons systems recovered in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.

More recently, and more significantly, North Korea has sold enormous quantities of 152mm and 122mm artillery shells to Russia — an arrangement that has given Pyongyang a significant influx of cash, food aid, and access to Russian military technology. That relationship has demonstrated that Kim is willing and able to be a significant arms supplier to states in conflict with Western interests, and that doing so carries manageable costs as long as the transactions maintain plausible deniability.

The Case for Deeper Engagement

From Pyongyang's perspective, the Hormuz crisis creates several opportunities. The United States is stretched — military attention, diplomatic bandwidth, and financial resources are all being consumed by the Persian Gulf, reducing the bandwidth available for Korean Peninsula issues. This creates space for North Korea to conduct missile tests, advance its nuclear programme, or make moves in the inter-Korean domain with reduced risk of a focused American response.

There is also an economic incentive. Iran, if it survives the current conflict with its government intact, will need weapons, military technology, and deniable procurement channels for years of rebuilding. North Korea is well positioned to supply all three. The financial relationship that has developed with Russia since 2022 has demonstrated that weapons sales can be enormously lucrative and can substitute for some of what sanctions have cut off.

The Case Against

The risks of open, visible alignment with Iran are, however, substantial. The most important is the China factor. China is North Korea's economic lifeline — the source of approximately 90% of its trade, the guarantor of its fuel supply, and the diplomatic shield that prevents full international isolation from becoming absolute economic asphyxiation. Beijing has called explicitly for a ceasefire in the current conflict and has no interest in seeing it escalate. An overt North Korean move to support Iran militarily would embarrass China diplomatically and risk the one relationship that Kim cannot afford to damage.

There is also the nuclear deterrence calculus. North Korea's nuclear weapons are, from Kim's perspective, the ultimate insurance policy against regime change — the lesson he drew from the fates of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, both of whom abandoned weapons of mass destruction programmes and subsequently were removed from power by Western military action. That insurance policy is only valuable as long as the United States takes it seriously. Actively joining a military confrontation with the U.S. would test whether the deterrent holds — a test Kim has every incentive to avoid.

The Most Likely Scenario

What Kim Jong-un will almost certainly do — and indeed is almost certainly already doing — is precisely what he has always done: exploit the crisis at the margins for maximum benefit with minimum direct exposure. He will continue arms sales through intermediaries. He will use the American distraction to advance his weapons programmes quietly. He will make provocative statements that signal solidarity with the anti-Western bloc without committing to anything operationally significant. And he will watch, very carefully, to see how the conflict resolves — drawing lessons about the effectiveness of asymmetric strategies, the reliability of great-power patrons, and the costs and benefits of open confrontation with the United States.

The Korean Peninsula will not become a second front in this conflict. But the crisis will leave Pyongyang better armed, better funded, and better informed — which is, from Kim's perspective, as good an outcome as he could reasonably hope for.