In a moment of high diplomatic theater in September 2025, the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea strolled shoulder to shoulder, chatting and laughing, against the imposing backdrop of centuries-old Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. Allies, partners, and aides followed behind, including the president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian. The occasion: the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. The objective: to reinforce the emergence of a new Cold War alignment in an increasingly multipolar world. It was a pointed and unprecedented show of unity by Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un with an underlying mission: to unnerve neighbors and adversaries, and to reassure audiences back home.
For Kim in particular, the moment was a personal and political triumph. No longer was he the young heir to an impoverished nation treated like a junior partner (if not a problematic dependent) by North Korea’s superpower neighbors. The inclusion of Kim in the Victory Day tableau of a powerful triumvirate was a crowning moment for Kim and for North Korea, a scenario unimaginable 14 years earlier when he first emerged as his ailing father’s virtually unknown heir apparent at age 26. The historic image of the three leaders would be replicated and reproduced back home to reassure North Koreans that the regime was in good standing with China and Russia after years of self-imposed isolation. It would be promoted to justify Kim’s economic, military, and strategic priorities, which have come at great cost for the isolated, disenfranchised North Korean people. The image also served as a challenge to North Korea’s main adversaries, the United States and South Korea, as Pyongyang pushed ahead with weapons testing while shutting the door to nuclear negotiations.
Though Kim strove in that moment to show he was collegial and comradely with Xi and Putin, his more senior, more powerful counterparts, the truth behind the propaganda was far more complicated. For several years, North Korea had been engineering a major foreign policy pivot toward Russia, eclipsing its diplomatic relations with China. This was Kim’s first meeting with Xi in six years, a notable gap. Indeed, these have never been easy relationships, historically or in modern times. Just beneath the surface, deep fault lines threaten to expose the weaknesses in the relationships among these purported Axis partners and their vulnerability to shifting geopolitical circumstances that could drive them apart. While standing together in a show of unity against the U.S.-led liberal world order, each leader harbors an ambition to transform his nation’s relationship with the United States. That underlying ambition shapes and sometimes constrains each leader’s commitment to their Axis partners’ calls for support. Two conflicts, Russia’s war on Ukraine and the US-Israeli war on Iran, have provided opportunities to deepen these Axis relationships. They have also revealed the limitations of their commitment when the support does not serve each nation’s separate, longer-term diplomatic interests. The evolution and eventual end to these wars could again change the leaders’ calculus, and the U.S. role in the conflicts, as an antagonist or mediator, could also factor in calculations on commitment to the Axis.
When U.S. and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on a Saturday morning in late February 2026, Kim Jong Un was watching. The coordinated strikes flattened military installations, missile production sites, nuclear weapons laboratories, and the official residences of Tehran’s leadership. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had overseen decades of his country’s own pursuit of deterrence against the United States, was killed. For all of Iran’s vast arsenal of missiles and drones, it did not have the one capability that might have given Washington pause: a nuclear weapon.
North Korea had drawn precisely this lesson years earlier, from the fates of Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and more recently, Ukraine in 2022. Pyongyang responded to the Iran strikes with characteristic calculation.The day after the initial strikes, it issued a formal condemnation. In the days and weeks that followed, Kim made a series of visits to defense and military facilities and presided over a series of missile launches that included nuclear-capable cruise missiles. They were ostensibly timed to coincide with the annual spring U.S.-South Korean military exercises, but there was clearly another underlying message. The timing was deliberate; the message was unmistakable. North Korea possesses what Iran did not. As Kim reiterated at the Ninth Party Congress in February 2026, North Korea would never give up its nuclear weapons. The contrast between a nuclear-armed Pyongyang and a nuclear-aspiring Tehran that Washington felt emboldened to strike illustrates, in the starkest possible terms, the animating logic of this report.
North Korea has historically been perceived as a junior player in the "Axis," but a combination of its foreign and defense policy choices and the shifting geopolitical landscape has changed that in the past several years. Stories of chronic hunger and alleged human rights violations have given way to the significant strides North Korea has made in its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missile programs, including six nuclear tests and multiple test-launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). With his first handshake with then-U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore in June 2018, Kim Jong Un sought to reshape his image as a global statesman. More recently, Kim's decision to dispatch his own men to fight side by side with Russia against Ukraine and the West has elevated North Korea's international stature. This change in North Korea's international stature no doubt will change the country's calculations vis-à-vis the members of the "Axis" – China, Russia, and Iran – and further complicate policy options for Washington.
To assess North Korea's positions on these three countries and identify potential weaknesses, we should first review broader trends in North Korea's foreign policy, going back to the collapse of the second U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi in February 2019, which triggered a foreign policy reorientation and therefore forms the basis of Pyongyang’s bilateral relations with China, Russia, and Iran.
North Korea’s Foreign Policy Reorientation
North Korea's foreign policy has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. It has shifted away from its three-decade policy of normalizing relations with the United States by working toward denuclearization, and realigned with China and Russia, the two giant neighbors Kim Il Sung had sought to keep at bay in the 1990s by using the United States as a buffer. This policy shift was implied in Kim Jong Un's September 2022 speech to the parliament, as North Korea had already begun reorienting its foreign policy. He in effect publicly renounced denuclearization by stating that "there will never be […] denuclearization first, nor will there be any negotiations to this end," and that North Korea had "drawn the line of no retreat regarding our nuclear weapons so that there will be no longer any bargaining over them." One could argue, with good reason, that North Korea had never intended to denuclearize, at least not fully. From a North Korean propaganda analyst's perspective, however, the supreme leader's public statement indicates the regime's full commitment to the issue and should be distinguished from international media coverage of North Korea's intentions regarding denuclearization.
This profound policy reorientation can be attributed to two factors: mistrust of the United States within Pyongyang's leadership circles in the wake of the 2019 Hanoi summit's collapse, compounded by North Korea's understanding of the decline of U.S. global leadership. The failed summit was a turning point for the North Korean leadership to rethink the country’s prospects for its relations with Washington. One month after the summit, Kim summoned back “self-reliance” as a key policy, proclaiming the country’s “confrontation” with the United States was “bound to be drawn out.” Kim Jong Un’s depiction of U.S.-North Korea relations as being in a “protracted confrontation” at a year-end Party plenary meeting that same year encapsulated the essence of the North Korean leadership’s longer-term thinking on Washington.
Just as important for North Korea’s foreign policy recalibration was its changing view of global order, specifically a perceived decline in the U.S. role on the global stage. North Korean state-run propaganda outlets closely tracked intensifying U.S.-China competition and the tumultuous pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, two key examples of waning U.S. global power.Kim Jong Un made his first public remark about a changing global order by explicitly mentioning that “the change from a unipolar world advocated by the US into a multipolar world is being accelerated significantly.” This observation, coming from Kim himself, was unusual and notable for two reasons. First, while North Korean media had discussed the multipolarization of the global order, it was unusual for Kim himself to refer to it, reflecting the seriousness with which the country’s top leadership was taking this development. Second, Kim’s remarks followed the China-Russia joint statement adopted on February 4, 2022, which declared a friendship with “no limits” and pledged to “advance multipolarity […] of international relations.” Judging from Pyongyang’s swift and decisive pivot to Russia following the adoption of this joint statement, it seems the North Korean leadership saw in the document a new global order where U.S. leadership was waning on the world stage.
On the latter point, notably, North Korea's pivot to Russia was not an overnight development, nor did it start with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The North Korean Foreign Ministry's unusual support for Russia's (and China's) positions on key foreign policy and international issues in the summer of 2021, in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, would turn out to be a key signal of Pyongyang’s reorientation of its foreign policy. North Korea's gravitation to Moscow became quicker and more decisive after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A key inflection point occurred in July 2023, when North Korea invited the then Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, alongside a Chinese delegation, to a military parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of Armistice Day. In the past, North Korea observed this event with the Chinese.
This reorientation is more than a diplomatic realignment: It is a fundamental reconfiguration of the strategic landscape that U.S. policymakers must now navigate. For three decades, Washington operated on the assumption that North Korea’s desire for economic normalization and its structural dependence on China provided meaningful leverage over Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un’s reorientation has substantially eroded both pillars of that assumption. North Korea no longer considers normalization with the United States a primary policy goal; it has found alternative sources of economic sustenance, military technology, and diplomatic protection in Moscow and, to a lesser extent, in Beijing. The central question this report seeks to answer is whether meaningful leverage still exists, and if so, where. The analysis that follows suggests that the answer lies in the nature of North Korea’s relationships with its three partners: how deep those relationships actually run, how durable they are likely to prove, and where the structural fault lines exist that Washington might yet exploit.
A View From Pyongyang: Positions on China, Russia, and Iran
China
Signs of North Korea's return to a policy of alignment with China began to emerge as early as the summer of 2020, when the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) International Department issued a rare statement supporting China in the face of U.S. criticism. This was more than a year before the Foreign Ministry started to voice support for Moscow's positions on key policy issues. However, as of May 2026, the bilateral relationship still appears to be on the path to recovery, after more than two years of strain. Pyongyang's attitude toward Beijing had noticeably cooled since the July 2023 Armistice Day celebrations. The subdued language in state media's readout of Kim's meeting with a visiting Chinese delegation in September 2023 and Kim's letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping the following month were a couple of the earliest signs of change. Similarly, although 2024 marked the 75th anniversary of diplomatic ties between North Korea and China, only one high-level Chinese delegation visited Pyongyang, a stark contrast to a steady stream of Russian delegations that visited North Korea that same year. Kim's September 2025 summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing marked an initial step toward restoring ties, but how far that relationship will progress remains to be seen, given that Russia still seems to be the preferred partner.
It is difficult to conclude why North Korea-China relations have become strained, or whether Kim Jong Un is playing by his grandfather's Cold War playbook of pitting one great power against the other to maximize its gains. Irrespective of the reason, North Korea seems to be using the extra space afforded by its improved relations with Russia to de-risk from China, which accounts for more than 90 percent of North Korea's trade volume. It is also possible that Pyongyang's closer alignment with Russia has enabled it to fundamentally review its policy toward China, as it did with its policy toward the United States following the collapse of the Hanoi summit.
This de-risking dynamic is not only analytically significant but also potentially exploitable. Washington can work to accelerate Pyongyang’s strategic exposure of its dependence on China without offering North Korea what it wants in terms of sanctions relief or diplomatic normalization. The most direct mechanism is targeted pressure on China: the more Beijing is forced to visibly curtail this lifeline, whether by U.S. secondary sanctions pressure or reputational cost, the more North Korea is confronted with the actual costs of its isolation, and the more the gap between its “self-reliance” rhetoric and its structural dependence on China becomes apparent to the North Korean leadership itself. The goal is not to rupture the relationship but to narrow the space China provides Pyongyang, thereby giving Kim Jong Un stronger incentives to consider diplomatic alternatives he has, until now, been able to defer.
Russia
The deepening Pyongyang-Moscow relationship offers North Korea immediate and short-term benefits, including Russian supplies of food and oil in exchange for North Korea's weapons exports and possibly transfers of military technology to Pyongyang. The greater concern is what longer-term opportunities Kim Jong Un sees in this relationship. Every step North Korea has taken since the summer of 2023, starting with the unusual invitation of a high-level Russian military delegation to celebrate Victory Day in July 2023 and the signing of the 2024 North Korea-Russia treaty, to the institutionalization of bilateral cooperation and exchange across all sectors, indicates that North Korea has longer-term stakes in this relationship. Whether Putin's Russia reciprocates in kind remains to be seen, but what is important is the opportunities Kim perceives, materialized or not, because this will shape his current and future thinking on domestic and foreign policy.
Whether this realignment is best characterized as opportunistic, strategic, or driven by calculated necessity is a question worth addressing directly, because the answer shapes how durable these alignments are likely to be. The opportunistic interpretation that Kim seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a windfall and has been improvising since is supported by the speed of the relationship’s expansion, but is difficult to reconcile with the depth of its institutionalization across every sector and level of government. The necessity-driven interpretation that North Korea turned to Russia because the 2019 Hanoi summit collapse foreclosed other options, captures part of the picture but understates Kim’s evident agency in shaping the terms of the relationship.
The strategic interpretation is the most consistent with the available evidence: North Korea appears to have entered this relationship with a long-horizon vision to build a defense industry-led economy and diversify its strategic patron base away from exclusive dependence on China. This does not make the alignment irreversible, but it does mean that disrupting it will require more than simply waiting for tactical friction to accumulate. It is also worth noting that North Korea’s role in the relationship is not passive. The deliberate sequencing of the Shoigu invitation in July 2023, Kim’s use of the word “alliance” in June 2024, and the calibrated rollout of North Korean media language normalizing the Russia relationship for domestic audiences all reflect a leadership that is shaping the relationship on its own terms, not merely responding to Russian overtures.
Although this relationship seems rock solid at the moment, it is not without potential loopholes. Two such limitations, both, in essence, issues of self-reliance and trust, may be explored to identify and exploit fault lines. First, just as it is concerned about economic overreliance on China, the Kim regime will have anxieties about overdependence on Russia for military technology. A review of North Korean state media shows that there are signs of such misgivings already, including at the topmost levels of the North Korean leadership.Second, it is North Korea's perception of Russia's lukewarm responses to the predicaments of its key Middle Eastern allies: the downfall of Syria's Assad regime in December 2024 and Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iran in June 2025. North Korea continued to align with Russia even after these events. In fact, it appears to have coordinated with Russia before issuing Foreign Ministry statements on Israel's attack on Iran and U.S. bombings of Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025.That said, North Korea may well have taken note of Russia's treatment of Syria and Iran and drawn its own conclusions about the risk of future abandonment.
Iran
North Korea and Iran have a track record of cooperation on military technology, particularly ballistic missile development, that goes back decades. Pyongyang has long been accused of providing Iran with missile technology and hardware, including Scud missiles, and is believed to have helped Iran map out dozens of underground tunnels at its nuclear sites. Since the two nations signed an agreement to cooperate on science and technology in 2012, Iranian scientists reportedly have been spotted attending weapons tests in North Korea, such as its third nuclear test in 2013.
North Korea and Iran also share the broader goal of undermining the U.S.- and Western-led global order. Pyongyang, for example, was quick to denounce the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025 and to blame the West for instigating conflict in the Middle East. Their bilateral cooperation, however, faces several major limitations. First, the regional and strategic interests of North Korea and Iran do not completely align. Hence, their cooperation tends to be limited and transactional. Second, it is difficult for the two countries to substantially expand military technology cooperation due to international sanctions and intense scrutiny from the broader international community. Collaboration on missiles, in particular, carries the risk of additional sanctions and further diplomatic isolation. Third, substantial economic cooperation, including investment and trade expansion, is difficult because both countries are excluded from the international financial system and are subject to international sanctions. Lastly, Iran’s Islamic revolutionary ideology and North Korea's Juche ideology and socialism are incompatible, making it difficult for the relationship to develop into a longer-term, strategic partnership. In sum, due to these constraints, North Korea and Iran have been unable to institutionalize cooperation – at least not officially – and relations have not blossomed into an alliance.
Some experts have discussed a potential for North Korea's relations with Iran to strengthen due to the former's improved relations with Russia. However, North Korea's lack of explicit support for Iran in its official statements on the Israel-Iran conflict in June 2025 was noticeable and raises questions about whether the relationship will change in any meaningful way.That, however, does not mean North Korea and Iran will stop cooperating. They will almost certainly continue to cooperate through clandestine channels as needed, as they have for the past few decades. And if Russia can help broker an arms deal with Iran, all the better for North Korea.
The Russia-facilitated dimension of the North Korea-Iran relationship is, in this regard, the most important near-term policy concern. The traditional focus of U.S. and allied policy has been on direct bilateral channels between Pyongyang and Tehran, including missile technology transfers, nuclear cooperation, and illicit procurement networks. However, if Russia is now providing institutional cover and a brokering function for an expanded relationship, the relevant interdiction target shifts: it is not only the bilateral channel that needs to be monitored and disrupted, but the multilateral architecture through which that channel is increasingly being routed. This creates a specific role for European partners, who have their own strong interests in constraining Iranian missile capabilities and maintaining diplomatic channels with Tehran that Washington currently does not. Coordinated allied messaging to Iran that frames its North Korean connections as an obstacle to any broader normalization of its international standing could raise the political costs on Tehran’s side of the ledger, potentially introducing friction into the relationship.
Challenges for U.S. Policy
The United States has historically sought to exploit North Korea's inherent mistrust of its great-power neighbors China and Russia, a mistrust rooted in its complex bilateral relationships and Pyongyang's long-standing desire for self-reliance. However, North Korea's foreign policy reorientation and the evolving geopolitical shifts present significant challenges to this U.S. strategy.
North Korea's current leadership appears to have reevaluated the strategic value of the United States for its domestic and foreign policy objectives, following the failure of the 2019 Hanoi summit and what they perceived as a decline in U.S. global power. As a result, it seems to believe it can achieve its economic and security objectives without rushing to mend ties with the United States, relying instead on its strengthened relationships with Russia – and probably China at some point in the future.
The U.S. ability to exploit North Korea's mistrust of China has become increasingly limited. While Pyongyang has historically been wary of overdependence on China, the widening U.S.-China rift has given the North more room to maneuver. China's vetoes of UN Security Council sanctions and its turning a blind eye to sanctions evasion since 2018 have offered Pyongyang a lifeline, further reducing the immediate need to improve ties with Washington.
While the long-term implications of this shift are yet unknown, the traditional levers of influence the United States has sought to employ, particularly by leveraging Pyongyang's historical mistrust of its neighbors, may not be as effective as they once were.
This new reality calls for a re-evaluation of U.S. policy approaches. North Korea is actively seeking a role in a new anti-U.S. and anti-Western sphere of influence with Russia, empowered and emboldened by its improved relations with Moscow and its elevated status in the world. And the challenge for the United States is to navigate this complex and evolving landscape.
That re-evaluation must begin by answering a foundational strategic question: Should Washington accept the new reality and work around it, or are off-ramps still worth offering and if so, to what end? The analysis in this report supports a two-track answer. The new baseline must be accepted: North Korea’s foreign policy reorientation is real, deliberately pursued, and will not be reversed by pressure alone. Treating the current alignment as a temporary aberration that can be corrected through traditional tools of coercion and isolation is a mistake. At the same time, off-ramps retain strategic value, not as concessions to Pyongyang or primarily as a path to denuclearization, but as instruments for disrupting North Korea’s partnerships with China, Russia, and Iran. If, for example, Washington can credibly signal that alternatives to deep entrenchment with Moscow exist, alternatives that would allow North Korea to meet its economic and security objectives without subordinating itself to Russia’s strategic agenda, it introduces doubt into Kim Jong Un’s calculus about whether his current course is truly optimal. In this framing, off-ramps are not about rewarding North Korea. They are about giving Kim a reason to hesitate before the Russia relationship becomes structurally irreversible.
In this context, it is increasingly vital for U.S. policymakers to grasp both the historical and current dynamics of North Korea’s bilateral relationships with China, Russia, and Iran. This would enable them to identify and leverage divisions within this Axis to disrupt adversarial cooperation and strengthen U.S. strategic interests amid a renewed and evolving era of great-power competition.