"Today's reality clearly demonstrates the legitimacy of our nation's strategic choice and decision to reject the enemies' sweet talk and permanently secure our nuclear arsenal." The man saying this runs concentration camps, starves his own people, and has never permitted a free election in his life.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, speaking to the country's Supreme People's Assembly on March 23, 2026, pointed at the US-Israel war on Iran to justify his decision to keep and expand his country's nuclear weapons arsenal. "We now possess the power to pose a threat if necessary," he told the Assembly. "The nuclear shield firmly guarantees the development of all sectors of the country."
A few days later, Kim oversaw the testing of an upgraded solid-fuel engine for missiles capable of reaching the American mainland. The speech and the missile test were not separate events. They were the same message, delivered twice.
Kim's argument rests on a historical pattern he did not manufacture. Iraq had no nuclear weapons when the United States invaded in 2003, alleging Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) stockpiles that did not exist. Libya's Gaddafi surrendered his nuclear programme under American assurances of normalised relations, only to be killed by NATO-backed rebels eight years later. These are the cases Kim did not need to name. Every government watching this war already knows them.
North Korea openly claims nuclear status and seeks recognition from Washington as a nuclear-armed state. Iran is the opposite case. Tehran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, ratified it in 1970, and has maintained that its programme is for peaceful purposes, with IAEA inspectors present. And yet US and Israeli forces struck Iran on February 28, claiming a preemptive campaign to eliminate imminent threats. A month into the war, with nearly two thousand Iranians dead and the country's civilian infrastructure, universities and research facilities under bombardment, Iranian politicians are pushing to exit the NPT entirely. The programme the war was launched to stop may be replaced by something far less constrained. The cure is accelerating the disease. The treaty designed to prevent nuclear proliferation is now, paradoxically, a casualty of a war fought in its name. In the process it has stripped Washington of the moral authority it claimed to defend.
Here is the paradox Kim is counting on the world to notice. North Korea has missiles that can reach the American mainland. Iran did not. By any conventional logic of threat and deterrence, Pyongyang was always the more urgent target. Yet Iran was attacked and North Korea was not. The difference is not military capability. Iran sits on the world's fourth largest oil reserves and controls the Strait of Hormuz. North Korea has neither. Washington may also have calculated that a post-strike Iran, like post-Maduro Venezuela, could be reshaped into a compliant partner — regime change dressed as denuclearisation. Venezuela's oil fields are now being managed from Washington. Iran's, one suspects, were next on the list. The weapons were the pretext. The prize was always something else. Whether that calculation proves correct is another matter. That it was made at all is the point.
Kim Jong Un is not reasonable. His regime is a monument to human cruelty, and nothing he says should be mistaken for wisdom. But a monster can state a fact. The fact is that the Iran war has demonstrated, with brutal clarity, that in American strategic thinking, countries are attacked not because of what weapons they have, but because of what Washington wants from them.
This is the lesson Pyongyang is broadcasting, and it is the lesson every government without a nuclear arsenal is quietly absorbing. Iran's own politicians are arriving at the same conclusion from inside the rubble.
Kim didn't need to make the argument. Washington made it for him.
