North Korea frequently lashes out against its neighbour south of the Demilitarized Zone. But since the now-suspended South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law on December 3, 2024, North Korea has stepped up its criticism.
After the South Korean National Assembly voted to impeach Yoon, North Korean state media chastised the South Korean ‘puppet’ for leading a ‘fascist dictatorship’. Following his arrest in January, state media called the ‘reckless’ South Korean leader a ‘ringleader of insurrection’.
While the political climate in South Korea remains uncertain, 2025 is set to be a turbulent year. The country’s domestic upheaval and the changing geopolitics around the Korean Peninsula play into the hands of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, who arguably finds himself in a stronger position than ever to command regional and international attention.
Should South Korea’s Constitutional Court decide to remove the president from office, Kim will not be disappointed. Despite Yoon’s domestic troubles, his foreign policy was markedly effective. His hardline approach to North Korea was a vast improvement on the efforts of his left-leaning predecessor, Moon Jae-in, and earned him the respect of allies in Japan and the United States. In March 2023, Yoon visited Tokyo to meet the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida – the first time a South Korean leader had done so in 12 years – seeking to strengthen the historically frosty bilateral relations.
Since Yoon came to power in 2022, ties between South Korea, Japan and the US have strengthened at a time of increasing threats from North Korea and China. Yet now, Seoul’s uncertain political future, the unstable administration of Shigeru Ishiba in Tokyo and the onset of Donald Trump’s second presidency have cast doubt on these relationships.
Transactional Trump
Faced with Trump’s transactional foreign policymaking, questions persist as to whether South Korea and Japan will be forced to increase their financial contributions towards their alliance with the US. Trump’s rhetoric will also cause alarm. During his first week in office, he referred to North Korea as a ‘nuclear power’. Though possibly a slip of the tongue, these words raised concerns that the US would abandon its decades-long policy of refusing to recognize North Korea as a nuclear state. Trump also said that he would ‘reach out … again’ to Kim Jong Un.
Nevertheless, we must separate rhetoric from reality. The new US administration is aware of the growing security threats its East Asian allies face. While Kim Jong Un might respond to an approach from Trump, the North Korean leader will not forget the embarrassment he experienced at the failed Hanoi Summit of February 2019, when he left empty-handed.
Amid all this change, North Korea is likely to continue exploiting the South’s political instability. While wanting to prolong the survival of his regime, Kim Jong Un ultimately wishes for North Korea to gain international recognition as a de facto nuclear-armed state. In Kim’s playbook, the only way to do so is to improve his nuclear and missile capabilities, both in quality and quantity.
Nuclear expansion
Since outlining his five-year defence plan in January 2021, Kim has acquired, revealed and tested new and improved capabilities, including reconnaissance satellites, drones, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines. Each successive test, such as of a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile that flew 1,500km this January, has demonstrated an improvement in Pyongyang’s capabilities.
North Korea in 2025 is a far cry from North Korea in 2017, when Trump first took office. The stakes for US–North Korea negotiations have risen and the ‘hermit kingdom’ is increasingly emboldened, having revived its relationship with its Cold War patron, Russia.
As the Ukraine war rages on, North Korea continues to supply Russia with artillery, ballistic missiles and, to date, more than 11,000 soldiers. In return, Pyongyang is receiving food, financial assistance and oil, and is likely to gain advanced military technology, although the extent of the latter remains unknown. With the two states having signed a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership treaty’ in June 2024, this relationship is expected to survive the war in Ukraine, even if it may not look the same.
It is not just political change in Tokyo, Seoul and Washington that will influence the West’s response to North Korea over the next few years. Any effective response will also be stymied by a toothless UN Security Council, which Russia, China and North Korea have reduced to its most impotent since its inception in 1945.
