Geopolitical Fragmentation Is North Korea’s Greatest Asset

For years, the U.S.-led international campaign to isolate North Korea depended on a united front between the United States, China, and Russia. From the Obama administration’s targeted sanctions to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, U.S. policymakers have long assumed that comprehensive isolation could raise the costs of nuclear development enough to change Pyongyang’s strategic calculus.

But that consensus has collapsed. Instead of facing a coordinated international front, North Korea has been gifted perhaps its greatest strategic asset: a fractured world in which great-power rivalry has steadily eroded the political foundations that once made these sanctions effective. Not only has North Korea found an economic lifeline to keep the regime running, but it has also gained a diplomatic free pass to expand its nuclear and missile programs without consequence. This reality forces a tough reckoning for Washington and its allies. Sanctions aren’t entirely dead—they still make it difficult for the regime to operate—but relying on economic isolation alone to compel North Korea’s denuclearization is no longer a viable strategy in an era of intense geopolitical rivalry.

For years, the U.S.-led international campaign to isolate North Korea depended on a united front between the United States, China, and Russia. From the Obama administration’s targeted sanctions to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, U.S. policymakers have long assumed that comprehensive isolation could raise the costs of nuclear development enough to change Pyongyang’s strategic calculus.

But that consensus has collapsed. Instead of facing a coordinated international front, North Korea has been gifted perhaps its greatest strategic asset: a fractured world in which great-power rivalry has steadily eroded the political foundations that once made these sanctions effective. Not only has North Korea found an economic lifeline to keep the regime running, but it has also gained a diplomatic free pass to expand its nuclear and missile programs without consequence. This reality forces a tough reckoning for Washington and its allies. Sanctions aren’t entirely dead—they still make it difficult for the regime to operate—but relying on economic isolation alone to compel North Korea’s denuclearization is no longer a viable strategy in an era of intense geopolitical rivalry.

Few countries have faced a sanctions regime as extensive and multilayered as North Korea’s. Over the past decade—following North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006—the United Nations Security Council has expanded punitive measures on Pyongyang. Beijing and Moscow cooperated with Washington based on shared concerns over regional stability and nuclear proliferation by restricting the regime’s access to hard currency, coal and textile exports, overseas labor, and refined petroleum imports.

For a time, this pressure campaign produced tangible results—and by 2017, the Security Council had constructed one of the world’s most comprehensive sanctions regimes. China’s enforcement of restrictions on coal imports and cross-border trade significantly reduced Pyongyang’s export earnings, and pandemic-era border closures compounded the strain. The North Korean economy experienced one of its sharpest contractions in decades, demonstrating that sanctions could impose substantial costs when major powers maintained a unified front.

Yet nearly a decade later, the regime is not collapsing. Instead, it is expanding trade, modernizing parts of its rebounding economy, and deepening strategic ties with both Russia and China—largely because these two states are no longer willing partners working together to isolate the country. The shift became unmistakable after a May summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, where the two parties released a joint statement explicitly opposing the use of economic sanctions or diplomatic isolation against North Korea in a rejection of the very U.N. pressure campaign they once helped build.

Indeed, the effectiveness of the U.N. sanctions regime has steadily eroded since 2022, when China and Russia vetoed a U.S.-led resolution that sought to tighten sanctions following Pyongyang’s renewed intercontinental ballistic missile testing. Two years later, Russia blocked the renewal of the U.N. Panel of Experts on North Korea, the principal mechanism responsible for monitoring sanctions implementation. Despite U.N. resolutions capping refined petroleum imports at 500,000 barrels annually, South Korean intelligence estimates indicate Pyongyang imported at least seven times that amount from China and Russia in 2025, while Russia has refused to report its supply shipments to the U.N. for more than two years. North Korea also continues to generate illicit hard currency, exporting an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of coal last year and often falsely labeling the origins as Russian to evade sanctions.

Importantly, neither Moscow nor Beijing abandoned sanctions because they suddenly became comfortable with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Instead, both concluded that other strategic priorities outweighed the benefits of collective pressure.

For Russia, the imperative of nonproliferation has been overshadowed by the demands of its war in Ukraine, which has transformed its relationship with North Korea into a strategic alliance and provided Pyongyang with a vital escape from economic asphyxiation. In return for North Korean ammunition, missiles, and manpower, Russia has abandoned the sanctions framework it once supported and dismantled the very rules it helped draft—resuming direct shipments of refined petroleum that far exceed the annual cap, unfreezing millions of dollars in sanctioned North Korean assets, and integrating Pyongyang’s banks into Russian financial networks. In June 2024, Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, a pledge to develop trade and financial settlement mechanisms independent of Western influence. (The two were later seen driving together in a luxury Russian-made car.)

For China, the goal of denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula has been subordinated to intensifying strategic competition with the United States. As Pyongyang’s top trading partner for more than two decades, China remains the indispensable structural bedrock of the North Korean economy, accounting for approximately 98 percent of Pyongyang’s total trade in 2024. Total commerce between the two countries reached $325.8 million in April, the highest since December 2017.

Beijing’s permissive enforcement and continued trade allow North Korea to absorb sanctions and sustain the regime’s long-term stability. Although Beijing remains uncomfortable with Pyongyang’s growing dependence on Moscow, preserving North Korea as a strategic buffer against U.S. influence remains a higher priority. To Beijing, a stable North Korea—even a troublesome one—is far preferable to a collapsed state or a unified Korea under Seoul, as either scenario would likely bring the U.S.-South Korean military alliance and U.S. troops directly to China’s doorstep.

In response, the Kim regime has monetized the geopolitical divide. Large-scale production of artillery shells and ballistic missiles for the Russian military has revitalized North Korea’s heavy industry, transforming its sanctioned defense sector into a lucrative export engine. Meanwhile, the restoration of bilateral trade with Beijing has secured a steady influx of industrial materials and fuel, allowing the regime to restart domestic manufacturing.

North Korea has also increasingly exploited the global economy’s digital gray zones, generating billions of dollars through cybertheft and cryptocurrency-related operations. North Korean hackers stole $2.02 billion in cryptocurrency in 2025, a 51 percent increase from the previous year. The growing flow of illicit revenue has provided Pyongyang with greater resources to support Kim’s plans for domestic modernization, including the 20×10 policy, a decadal plan to construct factories, hospitals, grain management facilities, and technology infrastructure across the country. South Korea’s central bank recently estimated that the North Korean economy grew by 3.7 percent in 2024, its highest growth rate in eight years.

Now, shielded by Chinese and Russian opposition to new U.N. measures, buoyed by new revenue streams from arms exports and cyberoperations, and increasingly integrated into Russia’s wartime economy, North Korea faces fewer obstacles to military modernization than at any point in the past decade. The collapse of great-power consensus has made pursuing nuclear ambitions easier, cheaper, and less strategically risky.

The scale of North Korea’s nuclear progress is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. In September 2023, Pyongyang codified its nuclear force-building policy in the country’s constitution. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, North Korea has assembled roughly 60 nuclear warheads and possesses enough fissile material to produce at least 30 more. In June, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported expanding uranium-enrichment activity and evidence of new enrichment facilities. North Korean state media recently claimed that the country’s capacity to produce weapons-grade nuclear material has more than doubled over the past five years and unveiled a new enrichment plant to further strengthen the nuclear deterrent. Pyongyang has also continued to develop more survivable and maneuverable missile systems, including solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to improve the credibility of its nuclear deterrent.

In the past, major weapons tests triggered devastating new sanctions and heightened international pressure; today, they are met with U.N. paralysis. The geopolitical divide has significantly lowered the costs of nuclear expansion and created a far more permissive environment for the regime’s military modernization.

This doesn’t mean the Security Council’s restrictions are costless. By severing Pyongyang’s access to the formal global financial system and legal export markets, U.N. resolutions force the regime to rely on illicit networks, ship-to-ship transfers, and informal border trade. Pyongyang uses these back channels to smuggle restricted components for its weapons programs, secure vital fuel, and procure luxury goods to maintain elite loyalty. This shadow economy operates with inefficiencies and exorbitant friction costs, creating an asymmetrical dependence that locks the country out of foreign direct investment while its civilian infrastructure suffers from chronic power shortages and technological obsolescence. Still, ordinary citizens have largely borne the brunt of this economic burden, while the regime’s nuclear development has continued uninterrupted.

North Korea offers a particularly revealing example of a broader phenomenon: As strategic rivalry deepens, sanctions are increasingly colliding with competing geopolitical priorities. States once willing to subordinate their interests to collective enforcement are becoming less inclined to do so. North Korea’s experience suggests that the effectiveness of sanctions ultimately depends on the political alignments of the states responsible for enforcing them.

Rather than treating sanctions as a strategy in themselves, policymakers must view them as one instrument within a broader framework that combines pressure with diplomacy, arms control, and risk reduction. If denuclearization remains the ultimate objective, the more immediate task may be to prevent further nuclear expansion through interim measures such as nuclear freezes, constraints on sensitive technology transfers, and mechanisms that reduce the risk of crisis and escalation.

Denuclearization may remain the destination, but arms control and nuclear risk reduction offer more realistic near-term objectives in a world in which coercive pressure no longer enjoys the unified international support that once made it powerful.