In October 2025, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT) – a coalition of 11 states formed in 2024 to replace the defunct United Nations Panel of Experts on North Korea (PoE) – published its second reportdetailing how Pyongyang finances its weapons programs through cybertheft and fraud of information technology workers. The team estimated that North Korea stole approximately $1.6 billion in cryptocurrency during the first three quarters of 2025 only.
If the coalition exists, it is because the UN monitoring body has collapsed: in 2024, Russia vetoed PoE renewalputting an end to the universal consensus on sanctions that had governed the North Korean issue since 2006.
The Panel reported to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and held the authority of a universal mandate; The MSMT is a voluntary coalition of like-minded states that can investigate and publish, but cannot bind governments that refuse to participate. Russia and China, no longer part of the watchdog, are now challenging its findings from outside. For states inclined to trade with or quietly tolerate North Korea, the difference between a UN Security Council mandate and a coalition communiqué is the difference between an obligation and an opinion. The MSMT’s own members have called on the Security Council to rebuild PoE into the form it had before – an implicit recognition that documentation, no matter how comprehensive, is not the same as universal application.
The analysts have discussed in depth the repercussions from the end of PoE. But while the end of international accountability attracts attention, Pyongyang is simultaneously working to change the way the world understands North Korea’s actions. This campaign is carried out in Korean, in laws and in state media which constitute the authoritative record of the regime. These nuances are regularly lost in the English summaries that most foreign analysts read.
In September 2022, the Supreme People’s Assembly codified North Korea’s status as a nuclear weapons state and presented the program as a permanent element of national security rather than a bargaining chip. In particular, the law was made possible thanks to a diplomatic shift: the May 2022 Russian and Chinese veto of a sanctions resolution drafted by the United States. It was the first time a U.N. Security Council effort to sanction North Korea had been blocked since the first such resolution passed in 2006, and it ended nearly two decades of consensus among major powers. Two years later, the dissolution of the PoE and the deepening partnership between North Korea and Russia marked the definitive end to nearly two decades of major power consensus on opposition to North Korea’s nuclear program.
As international pressure fades, North Korea has stepped up its rhetorical efforts to present its nuclear program as justified and necessary. Three terms, recurring in state media, show the campaign at work.
First, North Korea increasingly describes itself as a “responsible nuclear-weapon state” (책임있는 핵보유국). English media coverage generally translates this as “nuclear-weapon state” or “nuclear power”, dropping the adjective 책임있는, “responsible”. This erases the meaning intended by Pyongyang.
“Responsible” deliberately borrows the vocabulary that established nuclear powers use about their own arsenals. The reclamation of this term positions North Korea not as a rogue proliferator, but as a status quo nuclear state entitled to comparable treatment. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) does not recognize recent nuclear states; “responsible” is an attempt to manufacture such a status.
Washington and Seoul continue to oppose Pyongyang’s nuclear status; Beijing and Moscow (among others) could be persuaded to accept a “responsible” nuclear North Korea. It is important to note that it is China and Russia whose North Korea policies determine whether sanctions are applied in practice. Tracking where the word “responsible” appears and whether responses implicitly accept it or explicitly reject it is a concrete measure of North Korea’s normalization campaign that the truncated English translation renders invisible.
Second, North Korean texts overwhelmingly favor 핵억제력 – “nuclear deterrent capability” – to the detriment of the neutral 핵무기, “nuclear weapons”. The English cover renders the two interchangeably as “nuclear weapons”, “arsenal” or “program”. But the Korean choice incorporates a claim for legitimacy in the language. The term “deterrence” presents North Korea’s nuclear capability as inherently defensive, the same justificatory framework that established nuclear powers use for theirs. This point is not unique to North Korea – the language of deterrence is universal – but the phrase is now used almost exclusively by North Korean media. Its increasing frequency in the Rodong Sinmun compared to earlier, more neutral formulations is a quantifiable marker of doctrinal standardization since the passage of the Nuclear Policy Act of 2022. Yet the distinction is only visible to a reader working on the Korean corpus.
Third, North Korea attributes its position to the United States’ “적대시정책,” translated into English as “hostile policy.” The standard translation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. 적대시 literally means “to regard or treat as an enemy”; 적대시정책 therefore denotes a continued attitude of treating North Korea as an adversary, not as a discrete set of hostile acts.
This distinction is important for anyone reading Pyongyang’s signals. By presenting the problem as a behavioral stance, North Korea preserves a conditional logic – a posture, being an attitude, could in principle be withdrawn – even as it legally codifies its own agenda as permanent. “Hostile policy” obscures the continuation of conditionality, which is exactly the vein that an analyst assessing the regime’s negotiating room should see.
These terms come directly from publicly available North Korean media. Yet in each case the analytically significant content – “responsible”, “deterrence”, the question of attitude versus action – is obscured in English. Taken together, these three terms describe a deliberate effort to reframe North Korea’s nuclear status from negotiable to permanent, and from rogue to “responsible.”
The terms are mutually reinforcing: a “responsible” state exercising “deterrent” power in response to being “treated as an enemy” is a coherent self-portrait, assembled piece by piece, in which each word supports the next.
When UN Security Council consensus was reached, the normative question arose: Is North Korea a legitimate nuclear power? – was responded to by a united sanctions regime that treated the program as illegal. As law enforcement migrates toward a coalition that Russia and China reject, the answer becomes questionable in practice — and North Korea is shaping the terms of that debate.
Governments that only read the English summaries risk completely missing North Korea’s normalization drive and losing ground through inattention. If uncontested, North Korea’s claim to be a “responsible nuclear power” gradually erodes the rhetorical basis of the denuclearization goal that the United States, South Korea and Japan still formally defend. For Seoul and Tokyo, the stakes are both domestic and diplomatic: a North Korea widely accepted as a permanent nuclear power reshapes their own public debates on deterrence and proliferation, and sets a precedent that other aspiring proliferators will read carefully. To challenge it would be to treat the vocabulary itself as a political issue – rejecting the “responsible” formulation as consistently as Pyongyang proposes.
Even if MSMT members ask the Security Council to rebuild the group of experts, the toughest fight may well be the one that takes place word by word.