Iran War Raises Questions For Kim Jong Un

The fighting in Iran may be thousands of miles away, but in North Korea, the regime is studying the conflict carefully. A few days ago, North Korea’s state-run media strongly criticised the United States and Israel, accusing them of carrying out an aggressive war against Iran. However, the reports made no mention of the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Leaving that detail out was likely deliberate. In North Korea, the leadership is portrayed as almost untouchable, and the system depends heavily on that image. If state media were to show another ruler being violently removed from power, it could quietly raise an unsettling thought: that even the most protected rulers are not immune to being targeted. For officials in North Korea, allowing that idea to circulate among ordinary people would risk weakening the carefully maintained image of absolute authority.

Inside North Korea, Kim Jong Un and a tight circle of party and military officials are likely examining every move coming out of Washington. Their focus would be on how the United States is handling the situation and what it might signal for countries that stand outside the US orbit. One point that may become clear to them is how quickly Donald Trump can shift from diplomacy to the use of force. That reality alone could leave Kim wondering whether it might be wiser to reach out and speak with Trump directly.

Later this month, Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Asia for talks with Xi Jinping of China. So far, there’s been no indication that a meeting with Kim Jong Un is on the agenda while he’s in the region. Even so, some analysts say the possibility can’t be ruled out.

North Korea’s security agencies will probably spend a lot of time going through the Iran episode piece by piece. The whole exercise will be about one thing—making sure that what happened to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei can never happen to Kim Jong Un. During Kim Jong Un’s public appearances, state media footage often shows a tight circle of security personnel surrounding him. According to intelligence assessments from US and South Korea, this kind of security reflects the scale of North Korea’s leader-protection system. Over decades, North Korea has developed one of the most complex security setups in the world to safeguard Kim Jong Un.

At the same time, Kim has plenty of reasons to feel confident. North Korea is believed to have built dozens of nuclear warheads and missiles that could potentially reach the United States, even if not all of them have been fully proven in tests. The country has also made it official in law that it can launch a preemptive nuclear strike, calling its nuclear program permanent and irreversible.

Kim might be thinking about reconnecting with Trump. Their relationship has always been personal—back in 2018, they even walked together in a Singapore garden and compared armoured cars. Trump went from calling Kim “Little Rocket Man” to “my friend", and in 2019, he became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea at the demilitarised zone. For a while, Kim was a key part of Trump’s foreign policy story, but in the latest State of the Union, North Korea didn’t come up at all. That might leave Kim wondering where he fits in the current US diplomatic picture.

At North Korea’s Ninth Workers’ Party Congress in February, Kim left just a small door open for talks with Washington—but only on his terms. He suggested the two countries “could get along” if the U.S. ended its “hostile policy” and recognised North Korea as a nuclear-armed state. No one knows if or when those talks will actually happen. But Kim Jong Un faces a sharp dilemma: call Trump or hold back and see what happens.