North Korea’s Kim expected to cling to nuclear security blanket after Venezuela operation
Xi will ‘continue to support Kim if he sees the US and its allies undercutting China’s own influence in the region’, analyst says
In a statement on Sunday, the North Korean foreign ministry said Pyongyang was monitoring the Venezuelan situation caused by Washington’s “high-handed act”, describing the military operation as a further example of the “rogue and brutal nature of the US”.
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, an international relations professor at King’s College London, said the events in Venezuela would further increase North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s “anxiety about the same potentially happening to him”.
“Even though North Korea is a harder target, the same could happen to his government,” Pacheco Pardo said. “Plus, the US has had plans to strike North Korea in the past, and Kim knows this.”
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North Korea and Venezuela have separately had decades of friction with the US – the former over its nuclear weapons programme and the latter because of disputed oil interests and US President Donald Trump’s accusation that the country engages in narcoterrorism.