North Korea has always struggled to produce enough food throughout almost its entire history since being split from South Korea.

A starvation crisis caused by food shortages cannot be reversed quickly because food can't be produced in an instant—you have to wait for it to grow.

No nation has ever put itself in a place of lasting power by hollowing out its own infrastructure and making itself more dependent on others for basic necessities.

Historically, dictatorships have fallen not usually because of excessive pressure from the outside, but instead by consuming themselves when they become too confident and push their own people too far past the breaking point they are willing to tolerate.

When evaluating the strength of a dictatorship like North Korea, one must not look at its comparative strength to other nations on the outside where conflict is exceedingly unlikely, but instead should look to the internal strength and sustainability of the dictatorship itself.

North Korea has transferred massive quantities of weapons to Russia in recent years, particularly artillery shells and ballistic missiles, with more than 13,000 shipping containers full of munitions traveling between North Korea and Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine.

North Korean weapons supplies prevent Russia from getting too close to total collapse too quickly, giving Russia a chance to stay in the fight long enough for western nations to hopefully eventually lose interest and allow Russia to win the war.

Artillery shells require resources and people to create them, and for every effort invested in creating military gear, something else is being set aside that could be created instead.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's International Food Security Assessment published in September 2022 estimated that close to 70% of North Korea's population was 'food insecure.'

Wide-scale famines have happened within the past generation to the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before them, due to similar underlying reasons of dictatorial regimes prioritizing production of strategic goods like steel, iron and coal over food security.

North Korea is no different from and no less short-sighted than the Soviet Union, and the regime has been lucky to avoid catastrophic harvest failures, but all it takes is for them to get unlucky once for the regime to potentially come crashing down.

The arrangement where North Korea trades food production for weapons production in exchange for food shipments from Russia is inherently insecure because if Russia thought exchanging food production for weapons production was a good gamble, Russia would have done it themselves.

Kim Jong Un is gambling on a future of warfare and only on that future, hindering his options if the dictators' worst nightmare comes to fruition and peace in Ukraine is actually achieved.

North Korea has received military protection agreements and potential access to Russia's nuclear missiles, which on the surface raise fears that North Korea is on the warpath.

North Korea always was and always will be in a position where they are not militarily strong enough to stand up to the United States, let alone the combined west.

When the center is hollow, it doesn't matter what material the surface is made out of—it might look intimidating and impenetrable from the outside, but just a little pressure and it will collapse in on itself.

Soon, we could be watching the collapse of modern dictators in the same way the generations before us watched the collapse of their dictators in catastrophic and successive fashion.

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Russia is relying on North Korea for weapons delivery precisely because Russia's own domestic capacity is not sufficient for Russia's needs, yet North Korea is a much smaller and much more limited nation than Russia by every measure.

If the United States, the largest economy in the world, sees the cost of building further military infrastructure to supply the specific weapons needed for the war in Ukraine as more risky than its worth, how could North Korea, one of the world's smaller economies, possibly afford to take on such risks?