A former US diplomat who had served in South Korea once remarked how the first North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, had watched Operation Desert Storm, during the Gulf War, ‘very carefully’. Back in 1991, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were a long way from reality, but just two years earlier, the United States had invaded Panama to oust the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega. Pyongyang was taking notes. It would be 15 years later, on 9 October 2006, when the hermit kingdom would conduct its first successful nuclear test. Yet as the diplomat mentioned, by the end of 1991, the then-ageing Kim had learnt a fundamental lesson that he could pass on to his son and successor, Kim Jong Il. If Washington so desired, it could build up its forces to ‘overwhelming superiority’ and ‘attack with devastating speed and success’.

Nearly three decades later, North Korea is now in its third generation of Kim family rule under Kim Jong Un. The regime is doing all it can to signal to its people and the world that the ‘Baekdu bloodline’ of the Kim dynasty is not disappearing. It takes a lot for a totalitarian state to survive for over three generations. After 1991, Pyongyang watched closely as, one by one, authoritarian regimes fell, whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 or Libya under Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In Pyongyang’s eyes, these cases reinforce just what can happen if the United States is not kept at arm’s length, and if states do not put up a fight against what North Korea has long-called the ‘hostile policy’ of the United States, wherein Washington’s goal is to overthrow the Kim regime.

While it may be a truism, the totalitarian regime of North Korea wants to survive, but regime survival is not the only goal of the impoverished country with a standing army of 1.3 million. Upon becoming the country’s third Supreme Leader in December 2011, Kim Jong Un wasted little time in declaring that his ultimate objective would be for North Korea to gain international recognition as a de facto nuclear-armed state. Through a combination of severe societal control of its 26 million-strong population and a dogged pursuit of its ‘treasured sword’ of weaponised nuclear capabilities, North Korea has insured itself from suffering the same fate as the Iraqi and Libyan leaders of old.

The United States’ recently conducted Operation Midnight Hammer – at three of Iran’s uranium enrichment sites of Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – would not have gone unnoticed in Pyongyang. After all, it is well-known that Iran and North Korea have historically been partners-in-crime. During the Iran-Iraq War, from 1980 to 1988, Iran received munitions, mustard gas and nerve agents from North Korea in exchange for oil and foreign exchange.

Nevertheless, it is likely that this month’s recent strikes will not lead to North Korea changing its foreign policy strategy. Instead, they only confirm what Pyongyang has known ever since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003: if you want to resist regime change, then you need a credible nuclear deterrent. While Saddam and Gaddafi were known to have pursued the development of weaponised nuclear capabilities (among other weapons of mass destruction) not least during the Cold War, neither state managed to build a bomb. Libya possessed fissile material for uranium enrichment and plutonium separation and was en route to building a nuclear weapon when, in December 2003, Gaddafi surprisingly declared the disarmament of Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programmes. While then-US President George W. Bush pledged to build a ‘more free and prosperous’ country should Libya reform internally, such reform never happened. In 2011, as the country descended into civil war, the fall of Tripoli to opposition forces would lead to the fall of Gaddafi, as NATO airstrikes struck a convoy containing the leader. North Korea had learnt two lessons: first, never trust the United States when it speaks of improving your country; and second, to avoid the fates of Gaddafi and Saddam, acquire the ‘strongest treasured sword for frustrating outside aggressors’ moves’ – a nuclear bomb.

Of course, no two US interventions are identical. How one assesses North Korea’s likely actions in response to America’s recent intervention in Iran depends in large part upon how one views the North Korean regime’s strategic calculus. While it is possible to portray the regime as being constantly on high alert, seeking to respond immediately to US manoeuvres against its adversaries, it is equally possible to view the Kim regime as biding its time; acting only when necessary and preferring the continuation of the status quo.

The reality, however, sits somewhere in between the two. So far, Pyongyang’s responses have been predictable. Its foreign ministry denounced the US strikes as a violation of sovereignty and territorial integrity, citing the UN Charter for good measure. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East was blamed on the US-led liberal international order, as ‘the inevitable product of Israel’s valour… and that of the Western-style free order which has so far tolerated and encouraged Israeli acts’. These statements are typical of Pyongyang’s response – akin to its reaction to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Russia-Ukraine War, mutatis mutandis – as it seeks to take every opportunity to side with the West’s foes and de-legitimise the United States as a malign international actor.

But perhaps there is something unique about Operation Midnight Hammer taking place at a time of heightened security cooperation between North Korea and Russia, as well as Russia and Iran. Possible collaboration between Tehran and Pyongyang cannot be discounted, such as an exchange of North Korean missiles for Iranian Shahed drones. If Iran is willing to provide these drones to Russia, then why not North Korea? We know that North Korean ballistic missiles have entered the hands of Hamas, most likely transferred via the middleman of Iran. The emergence of another network of cash-for-munitions should not be ruled out.

In May 1989, the then-Iranian President, Ali Khamenei, visited North Korea, months before he would be anointed as the Islamic Republic’s second Supreme Leader. Speaking to Kim Il Sung, Khamenei praised his North Korean counterpart for having ‘proved in [North] Korea that you have the power to confront America’. Over 35 years have passed since that meeting, but a now-nuclear North Korea knows that the only way to confront America is never to abandon its ‘treasured sword’.