Why North Korea isn’t coming back to the table just yet

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s favourite mode of transportation is a heavily armoured olive green locomotive that crawls at 60kmh at its fastest because of its weight.

Known as the Taeyangho, the locomotive is wrapped in bulletproof steel and reinforced glass. Built to shield its passengers from external threats, it is less a train than a moving fortress.

In many ways, the train is a metaphor for the isolated regime. For decades, the outside world has tried to force Pyongyang out of its shell through sanctions, diplomatic isolation and economic pressure.

Yet rather than capitulate, North Korea has adapted to isolation, institutionalised it and, increasingly, turned it into a strategic advantage.

That reality presents a dilemma for policymakers seeking to engage the regime.

That challenge was underscored by Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan’s rare trip to Pyongyang in May, where he held meetings with his counterpart Choe Son Hui and Jo Yong Won, chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly, and came to the conclusion that the regime had little appetite for diplomatic engagement.

That should not be surprising. Over decades of seclusion, Pyongyang has built up a formidable nuclear arsenal, with an estimated stockpile of approximately 50 nuclear warheads and enough fissile material produced to build an additional 70 to 90 weapons.

Despite international sanctions, North Korea defied the odds to emerge as a nuclear power too dangerous to ignore and too strategically consequential to remain isolated from international diplomacy.

Much anticipation surrounded a possible rekindling of the “bromance” between US President Donald Trump and Kim when the former visited Beijing in May, but hopes quickly faded when no such meeting materialised.

South Korea has nevertheless held out hope for renewed diplomacy. Chinese President Xi Jinping will be visiting North Korea this week to mark the 65th anniversary of the two countries’ friendship treaty. His visit could revive dialogue, including engagement between Washington and Pyongyang, South Korea’s news agency Yonhap reports.

Self-Imposed and reinforced 

North Korea’s isolation since the end of the Korean war in 1953 has been a combination of choice and circumstance. It began with Pyongyang’s own pursuit of self-reliance and was later compounded by international efforts to constrain its behaviour.

Its roots lie in founder of the Kim dynasty Kim Il-sung’s idea of juche, or self-reliance. Originally conceived to preserve North Korea’s autonomy between the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War, it has since evolved into a political doctrine that justified central control and economic autarky.

North Korea’s rapid economic growth in the early post-Korean war years, even surpassing South Korea’s, was made possible by substantial aid from its two powerful neighbours. 

But its aggressive pursuit of heavy industry and massive defence spending eventually took its toll on the economy which started to stagnate in the late 1960s, while the South’s export-led economy caught up and leapfrogged the North’s. 

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 proved decisive. Bereft of its principal benefactor and protector, second-generation leader Kim Jong Il came to see nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantee of regime survival and a means of deterring external threats.

Following North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, the international community responded with a unified punitive approach through the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), with sanctions aimed at cutting off Pyongyang’s access to funds, technology and materials for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and pressuring the regime to return to negotiations and abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The result was the opposite. North Korea became one of the world’s most heavily sanctioned states, suffering chronic food shortages, energy constraints and economic hardship. Yet the regime used these pressures to reinforce its narrative that hostile external forces were seeking to destroy the nation.

The regime did not cave. Instead, it dug in. Such developments only legitimised the country’s emphasis on military strength and self-reliance, while providing justification for tighter domestic controls.

The world wanted to corner Pyongyang into compliance through sanctions. Instead, the regime seized the opportunity to retreat further into isolation.

Inflexion point

A turning point came after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia needed ammunition and military supplies to sustain its war effort, while North Korea sought economic assistance, political backing and a strategic partner beyond China. 

The convergence of interests culminated in a mutual defence treaty signed in 2024, marking the most significant upgrade in ties between Moscow and Pyongyang since the Cold War and signalling North Korea’s re-emergence as a player in a shifting geopolitical landscape.

In September 2025, Kim embarked on a 24-hour journey on Taeyangho for Beijing to attend China’s Victory Parade, a grand military event that commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

It marked his first appearance at an event involving multiple leaders since taking power in 2011, and saw him and Russian leader Vladimir Putin flanking Chinese President Xi during the parade. 

Kim was flexing his new-found solidarity with Russia and China and signalling that North Korea was no longer isolated in the same way it was a decade ago. Those deep ties have safeguarded Pyongyang’s interests internationally.

In 2022, Russia and China vetoed a US-drafted UNSC resolution aimed at strengthening sanctions on North Korea over a spate of missile launches that year. It was the first time that the five permanent members of the UNSC, which include the US, Britain and France, showed a divide on the issue since punitive measures against Pyongyang began in 2006.

More recently in May 2026, both Putin and Xi released a joint statement following their summit, explicitly opposing threats to North Korean security, and urging “relevant parties to halt actions that escalate regional tensions, provoke arms races, and abuse politicised measures and to take practical steps to eliminate the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula”.

For North Korea, this was a significant shift. The international consensus that once underpinned sanctions and other efforts to isolate and pressure the regime had begun to fracture.

This is why when hopes resurfaced in 2025, with the return of Trump to the White House, that he and Kim might revive their diplomacy, Pyongyang showed little enthusiasm.

The collapse of the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in 2019 had reinforced Pyongyang’s scepticism about trading away leverage for uncertain rewards. US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities since would have also deepened Kim’s conviction that nuclear weapons are the ultimate insurance policy against regime change.

For now, North Korea pursues highly selective external engagement on its own terms.

It has found a new friend in fellow Russian ally Belarus, and is seeking to strengthen relations with Vietnam, another socialist nation that has integrated into the global economy without losing political control. 

As senior fellow Andrew Yeo at the Washington-based think-tank Brookings Institution puts it: “Kim is expanding his diplomatic reach with countries that do not pose an ideological challenge to his authoritarian rule. Perhaps he feels he needs to strengthen his international legitimacy further before engaging with Western nations.”

At home, the regime has turned more uncompromising. Earlier in 2026, North Korea abandoned unification efforts and formally defined South Korea as its “principal enemy”, stripping away references to national reconciliation and a shared homeland in its Constitution.

Beyond sanctions

These developments raise an uncomfortable question: If sanctions no longer exert meaningful pressure, what comes next?

Denuclearisation remains the international community’s stated objective, but that appears removed from reality.

After all, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is larger than ever, while its willingness to negotiate over it appears lower than ever.

Even South Korea now recognises this with its new phased END initiative which stands for Exchange, Normalisation and Denuclearisation, an acknowledgement of the importance of engagement to achieve the end goal of denuclearisation. 

Professor of International Relations at University of Seoul Hwang Ji-hwan suggests that North Korean policy needs to be pursued from a “longer-term perspective rather than with expectations of rapid transformation”.

He argues that sanctions should be reinforced but paired with sustained engagement.

“The objective should not be to secure immediate policy concessions, but rather to gradually reshape North Korea’s preference order and strategic incentives over time. Such a strategy would require patience, policy consistency and close international coordination,” he told The Straits Times, adding that the cooperation of China and Russia remains essential, given their significant influence over Pyongyang. 

Brookings Institution’s Yeo, however, holds a slightly different view. 

He argues that partial removal of sanctions may entice North Korea back to the negotiating table, as it could be the first step to providing other diplomatic carrots like investment in North Korea – something Trump might be open to offering.

During his visit to Pyongyang, Balakrishnan had invited Pyongyang to return to the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), one of the rare, few multilateral security platforms that Pyongyang participates in, and the only regular regional forum that brings together North Korea, the US, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

Though North Korea skipped the forum’s annual meeting held in Kuala Lumpur in 2025, after Malaysia severed diplomatic relations with Pyongyang in 2021, its return in 2026, with the Philippines, a US ally whose ties with Pyongyang have been limited and who chairs ASEAN in 2026, remains uncertain.

Whatever the case, the irony of the current situation is not lost on most observers of developments on the Korean Peninsula.

The world spent decades trying to push North Korea into a corner. It now faces the more difficult task of persuading Pyongyang to come back out.