For North Korea, U.S. strike on Venezuela reaffirms nuclear arsenal's necessity

This image, posted on U.S. President Donald Trump‘s Truth Social account on Jan. 3, shows what President Trump says is Venezuela‘s President Nicolas Maduro onboard the USS Iwo Jima after the U.S. military captured him on the same day. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

[NEWS ANALYSIS]
 
While U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies framed the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as a surgical strike against narco-authoritarianism, the raid’s most profound impact may be felt half a world away. In Pyongyang, the sight of a sitting leader in U.S. custody appears to have deepened the darkest anxieties of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and reaffirmed his belief that only nuclear weapons can guarantee regime survival.
 
The Jan. 3 raid, dubbed Operation Absolute Resolve, saw elite U.S. special forces extract Maduro and his wife from a Caracas safe house in a matter of minutes. 
 
To the Kim regime, the Maduro precedent is the ultimate confirmation of a long-held paranoia that the United States remains an apex predator that will hunt down hostile leaders the moment they lack a credible shield — to him, the nuclear sword, proven by Kim's subsequent launch of a hypersonic missile just 24 hours later.
 
Experts note that while Kim is likely confident that the United States would not dare launch a similar raid against a nuclear-armed North Korea, the Maduro case may nonetheless harden his skepticism toward future summits — particularly with Trump — and reinforce a more guarded, confrontational stance in the months ahead.
 

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watches the launch of the Hwasong-11E hypersonic missile in this photo released by the state media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Jan. 4, a day after Maduro‘s incident. [NEWS1]

 

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A hypersonic counter-signal

 

 
Within hours of the first reports of Maduro’s capture reaching Pyongyang, North Korea pivoted to a heightened military readiness and launched a propaganda offensive.
 
Kim presided over the test-launch of the Hwasong-11E, a "hypersonic" ballistic missile that state media claims reached a distance of roughly 1,000 kilometers (about 621 miles) before impacting the East Sea, on Jan. 4. 
 
Pointedly citing the "recent geopolitical crisis and complicated international events," he argued that the current global landscape "clearly shows why we need such a strong level of deterrence." Although he stopped short of naming Venezuela, the allusion was unmistakable.
 
Experts broadly agree that the timing and framing of the missile test were closely tied to the Maduro operation. 
 
"The launch was intended to show that physical pressure, such as a decapitation operation, would not apply to North Korea, preemptively warning that any such attempt would be met with a devastating hypersonic response,” said Lim Eul-chul, an inter-Korean relations professor at Kyungnam University's Institute for Far Eastern Studies.
 
Lim added that the U.S. operation in Venezuela likely delivered two powerful messages to Kim Jong-un: that he faced an existential threat and that he had renewed justification for accelerating his nuclear ambitions.
 
“Maduro’s humiliating capture decisively reinforced Kim’s belief that giving up nuclear weapons would be tantamount to suicide,” he said. 
 
Answering a question from the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), an unnamed North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson denounced the raid as a "wanton violation of the UN Charter" and "the most serious form of encroachment on sovereignty."
 

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a press conference as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, second from right, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, third from left, and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, far right, look on following a U.S. strike on Venezuela where President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured, from Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 3. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

The official statement, however, cloaked the details of the American operation, simply by referring only to "the present Venezuelan situation." The commentary was also absent — at least as of Friday — from the Rodong Sinmun, the ruling Worker's Party's newspaper, which is widely read by ordinary people, shielding them from the jarring reality of how decisively U.S. forces could penetrate an entrenched leader’s inner sanctum. 
 
Analysts observed that the tone of the condemnation was significantly harsher than the North’s reaction to the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 — another limited American military operation against an anti-U.S. state. 
 
While the Iran statement “strongly denounced the attack [...] for severely violating the UN Charter,” it stopped short of the visceral language deployed after Maduro’s capture, compared to the recent use of phrases such as the “rogue and brutal nature” of Washington.
 
At the same time, the absence of any direct reference to Trump points to deliberate calibration.
 
“Rather than unleashing an all-out denunciation, North Korea appeared to be taking stock of international opinion and carefully drawing its lines,” said Yang Moo-jin, a distinguished professor at the University of North Korean Studies. 
 

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi gives a speech in Rome in this Aug. 30, 2010 file photo. [REUTERS/YONHAP]

 

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The ghosts of Hussein and el-Qaddafi

 

 
For the leadership in Pyongyang, the Venezuelan operation serves as a jarring revival of two grim historical precedents that haunt its strategic calculus: the falls of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi.
  
While neither case is directly comparable to the U.S. operation against Venezuela, given the vastly different triggers, geopolitical contexts and North Korea’s current nuclear status, Pyongyang has long viewed them as cautionary tales of dictators who were overthrown and killed only after they were stripped of their weapons of mass destruction.
 
Following its fourth nuclear test in 2016, Pyongyang’s state media explicitly invoked the two fallen leaders, warning that their regimes "could not escape [...] destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord." The commentary argued that both had succumbed to a U.S.-led trap "bent on regime change," famously quipping that asking North Korea to abandon its nukes was as futile as "wishing to see the sky fall."  
 
Lim noted that Kim has consistently treated the collapses of the Iraqi and Libyan regimes as "direct lessons for his rule and his own survival."
 
Cheong Seong-chang, vice president at the Sejong Institute, said the U.S. military’s capture of Maduro would have delivered a profound shock to the North Korean leadership, likely prompting an immediate tightening of Kim’s personal security. At the same time, Cheong assessed that a similar operation against North Korea would be far more difficult to execute, given North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
 
"If Kim were killed," Cheong said, "nuclear command authority would pass to the second-in-command of the Central Military Commission, Vice Marshal Pak Jong-chon, who could authorize a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States. 
 
"If Kim were captured alive, senior figures such as Pak or Kim Yo-jong, who has overseen North Korea’s policy toward South Korea and the United States, could threaten nuclear attacks on the United States or its ally South Korea unless Kim were immediately returned," Cheong added.
 

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting in Moscow on May 9, 2025. [AFP/YONHAP]

 

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The shattered 'paper umbrella'

 

 
The Maduro situation cast a spotlight on the strategic impotence of China, a longtime friend of Venezuela and North Korea.
 
For years, Beijing has been the primary life-support system for the Maduro government, funneling billions of dollars into Venezuela’s oil industry and serving as its diplomatic shield on the global stage. 
 
Yet, on Jan. 3, China’s vast economic and political clout proved hollow. Despite roaring condemnations from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which denounced Washington’s “unilateral bullying” and demanded Maduro’s immediate release, Beijing was powerless to stop the U.S. extraction.
 
Publicly, however, North Korea continues to manage its relationship with China carefully. During President Lee Jae Myung’s visit to Beijing this week, Seoul again sought China’s help to mediate with Pyongyang, while Xi Jinping responded only in theory, saying it would play a constructive role in stabilizing the Korean Peninsula.
 
Experts say the Maduro incident is unlikely to push North Korea decisively into either Beijing’s or Moscow’s camp.
 
Oh Gyeong-seop, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said that while China and Russia may serve as supplementary pillars, neither can replace what the regime views as its only reliable shield. Instead, it has reinforced a conclusion long embedded in Pyongyang’s strategic thinking that regime survival ultimately depends on its own nuclear deterrent. 
 

A photo released by the White House on X on Jan. 6 showed U.S. President Donald Trump at Gimhae International Airport in Busan, where he held a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Oct. 30, accompanied by the terse message “No games, FAFO” — shorthand for “f* around and find out.” [SCREEN CAPTURE]

 

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Diplomacy in a nuclear shadow

 

Despite heightened tensions, analysts say the U.S. military operation is more likely to make North Korea cautious than eager for renewed talks, deepening Pyongyang’s longstanding distrust of denuclearization negotiations.
 
There is a historical precedent suggesting that Kim occasionally pivots toward the negotiating table when under extreme duress. 
 
Most notably, the "fire and fury" rhetoric of 2017 eventually paved the way for the unprecedented 2018 Singapore Summit. However, the 2026 landscape is fundamentally different from the one Trump encountered during his first term. While Kim may have been shaken enough to talk in 2018, the North has since crossed the threshold of "nuclear completion." 
 
“While all possibilities technically remain open, the collapse of the Maduro regime is likely to have convinced Kim that even stepping onto the negotiating stage carries risk,” said Lim. “Rather than diplomacy, Kim appears to be doubling down on a strategy of constantly displaying overwhelming strike capabilities — aimed at raising the cost and risk for the United States of any pre-emptive military action.” 
 
Cheong said the episode is likely to make Kim’s attitude toward another summit with Trump “more passive and negative.” Still, he pointed to China as a potential — if uncertain — variable.
 
“If President Xi were to invite Kim to Beijing as a state guest during Trump’s visit to China in April, a bilateral U.S.-North Korea meeting, or even a trilateral summit involving the United States, China and North Korea, could take shape quite naturally in Beijing,” Cheong said.
 
Such a scenario, however, would hinge on tangible incentives.
 
“For that kind of meeting to materialize,” Cheong added, “China would likely need to offer North Korea what it wants — such as assistance with medical infrastructure in Pyongyang and provincial regions.”

BY SEO JI-EUN [seo.jieun1@joongang.co.kr]