The UN report was released on Monday and detailed how North Korea had evaded sanctions in 2020 and continued to advance its nuclear weapons program, having “produced fissile material, maintained nuclear facilities and upgraded its ballistic missile infrastructure.”

One of the most eye-catching elements in the report was the accusation Pyongyang was engaging in cyber-crime, and that over the past year it had stolen over $300 million online to sustain the state’s income in light of the tough UN measures and self-imposed border restrictions to protect against Covid-19.

These revelations follow Kim Jong-un’s own public statements that the country will continue to advance its capabilities, and come as the Joe Biden administration toys with the idea of increasing pressure on Pyongyang yet again as the US pursues its longstanding goal of complete denuclearization in North Korea. Put simply, though, this is not going to happen.

The allegation of Pyongyang acquiring cash through cybercrime is difficult to verify, but it’s believable if you accept that North Korea is prepared to use whatever means necessary to sustain its national survival and build up its nuclear program, in the process revealing the complete futility of Western sanctions designed to stop it.

We need to understand that North Korea has a long-term, strategic vision, and it is prepared to impose tremendous costs on itself in the short term as it strives to achieve it.

The North Korean state is built upon the logic of securing total sovereignty and independence from foreign interference. Shaped by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the trauma of national division and confrontation with the US, North Korea’s official ideology has evolved from simple Marxist-Leninism into the doctrine of ‘Juche’ – which literally translates to ‘agency’ or, as it is better known, ‘self-reliance’.

The doctrine teaches that a state must sustain its procedural and ideological independence from the world and avoid domination. Instead, it must ‘resist fate’ by utilizing struggle to achieve things on its own terms, even if it means short-term pain along the way.

This ideology emerged and grew increasingly relevant throughout the Kim Il-sung era, becoming even more prominent in the post-Cold War environment of the 1990s, when the world was dominated by the US, which could remove regimes at will, and the protection of the Soviet bloc was gone.

It underlines the incentives for North Korea pursuing a nuclear weapons program and its own security doctrine. By going nuclear, Pyongyang has long calculated that it will be able to punch above its weight as a poor and small country, by using it as leverage against larger powers, creating diplomatic space for itself and deterring hostile actions against it.

Taking all this into account, sanctions do not deter the country, because it is engaged in a long-term struggle and prepared to suffer the consequences in pursuit of realising the vision. Kim Jong-un’s strategy is to continue upping his nuclear capabilities until the US is forced to pragmatically accept the country’s status.

So, although the process is detrimental to North Korea’s economy, Pyongyang sees the gradual development of its own technology as a symbol of its own sovereignty, independence, and achievement. This is considered preferable to denuclearizing and relying on the patents of other countries.