Kim Jong Un Was Right – and Everyone Else Is Taking Notes |
Flashpoints | Security | East Asia
Kim Jong Un Was Right – and Everyone Else Is Taking Notes
The war in Iran, alongside the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has vindicated North Korea’s mantra: nuclear weapons are the only guarantee of sovereignty.
In this file photo, provided on April 14, 2023, by KCNA, Kim Jong Un and his daughter observe the test-launch of the Hwasong-18 ICBM at an undisclosed location in North Korea.
The war in Iran has already produced consequences of historic magnitude, upending global energy markets and deepening fractures within an already strained international order. Yet its longest lasting and most destructive consequence remains largely invisible. The war in Iran, alongside the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has vindicated North Korea’s knife-edge calculus: nuclear weapons are states’ only guarantee of sovereignty.
In 1994, Kyiv held the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal. It surrendered its weapons voluntarily under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for binding security assurances from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia.
This calculation held for barely 20 years before Russia began chipping away at Ukrainian territory. First came the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, then a proxy war involving pro-Russian separatists that seized control of parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Then, in February 2022, Russian troops crossed into Ukrainian territory in the largest land invasion Europe had seen since World War II. The guarantees that had substituted for Ukraine’s nuclear deterrent proved, in a matter of hours, completely meaningless. Still, for many observers, Russia’s invasion, while alarming, remained a bounded case. Russia was acting outside the norms of the post-Cold War order under circumstances that would surely not be replicated.
Iran’s relationship with the international community over its nuclear program has been long and contentious, but not without positive progress. Under the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated between Tehran and the P5 1, Iran accepted significant constraints on its uranium enrichment capacity, agreed to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and dismantled substantial portions of its nuclear infrastructure.
In exchange, Iran received sanctions relief and, implicitly, a degree of legitimacy as a state willing to engage with certain international norms. When the United States unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, Iran’s nuclear program gradually resumed. Yet even in the years that followed, Tehran continued to engage with diplomatic overtures, participating in negotiations aimed at reviving the deal as recently as 2022.
Iran remained, in the technical language of the non-proliferation regime, a non-nuclear weapons state that experts agree was not “weeks away” from developing a nuclear weapon. Whatever its other transgressions, Iran had signaled an openness to trade nuclear capability for security assurances and economic integration.
That openness did not protect it.
The United States-led military campaign against Iran in 2026 can be debated on many grounds, including its legality under international law, its strategic rationale, and its humanitarian consequences. But the fact remains that Iran was a non-nuclear state that had engaged, however imperfectly, with the diplomatic architecture designed to make such a conflict unnecessary. It was attacked regardless. The causal chain that non-proliferation advocates have long relied upon – that restraint begets security – was once again severed, visibly and violently, for the whole world to observe.
For states that had viewed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a product of specific historical grievances, particular leadership, or a unique set of NATO-related tensions, the American campaign against Iran introduced an uncomfortable possibility: Ukraine was not an exception,........