After Iran, could North Korea be the US's new target?

North Korea was among the countries that condemned the United States' strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend, accusing President Donald Trump's government of violating Iran's territorial integrity and the United Nations Charter.

The regime in Pyongyang, which had previously described the Israeli missile strikes on Iran as a “heinous act”, called on the international community to “raise the voice of unanimous censure and rejection against the US and Israeli acts of confrontation”.

Nuclear-armed North Korea has good relations with Iran. For decades, there has been suspicion of military cooperation between the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang, including in the development of ballistic missiles, which Iranian scientists have since refined.

About 20 years ago, North Korea began sending engineers with expertise in drilling deep tunnels to Iran. North Korean experts reportedly designed and helped build the deep, reinforced underground tunnels at Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

Since the start of the Korean War in 1950, North Korea has hidden much of its key military assets in underground bases. The regime is now likely to be working to determine the effectiveness of its underground bunkers by analyzing the impact of the GBU-57 bombs dropped by the US on Iranian targets in Operation Midnight Hammer.

“They certainly watched closely what happened in Iran,” said analyst Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean lieutenant general and senior fellow at the U.S. think tank National Institute for Deterrence Studies. “The priority now will be to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them.”

“I think the conclusions North Korea will come to will be that they need to increase their nuclear weapons capabilities and further strengthen their storage areas,” he said. He said the North Koreans would need to adopt additional protective measures, such as improved air defense and retaliatory options.

Learning from Iran's mistakes

What the expert rules out is that the attack on Iran will make North Korea want to talk. “Absolutely not. That’s just not in their nature.”

But he believes that North Korea is as shocked as other countries in the world by the Trump administration's "decisive stance" and that it would also have been taken by surprise by an American attack.

All indications are that the North Korean regime is moving to ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen to it. “North Korea will learn from Iran’s mistakes,” says international studies professor Leif-Eric Easley of Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

“In the case of Iran, Israel exploited Tehran’s strategic and tactical mistakes, using superior intelligence, technology and training to weaken Iran’s air defenses, capable personnel and retaliation options,” he said.

Pyongyang knows that its situation is completely different from Tehran's, both in terms of the country's geography and its allies: China and Russia are better positioned to help Pyongyang than Tehran.

And then there’s the status of the nuclear program itself. “Pyongyang’s nuclear program is much more advanced, with weapons potentially ready to be delivered on multiple delivery systems, including ICBMs,” Easley says. North Korea is capable of striking the U.S. mainland, and Seoul is also within range of its weapons.

Kim and the threat of regime change

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is also expected to rely on his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin to obtain the latest weapons and technology in sufficient quantities to preserve his regime.

“It is no coincidence that Moscow rushed to receive Iran’s foreign minister after the US strikes, and that Putin sent Sergei Shoigu to meet Kim Jong-un while the G7 was meeting in Canada,” says Easley.

“Russia’s coordination with Iran and North Korea shows how security in multiple regions is increasingly intertwined,” he notes.

Chun, however, says Kim’s priority now is to ensure his own personal security and the future of the only hereditary communist dictatorship. He must have been deeply alarmed by Trump’s suggestions that the American military knew where Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was hiding and about a regime change in Tehran.

“Kim is very well protected from the threat of a military decapitation strategy, with veils of secrecy surrounding his location and movements. I am confident that he will maintain this secrecy and ensure that information about his whereabouts is as limited as possible,” he said.