North Korea's girl dad dictator

In 2022, a Wall Street Journal reporter noticed something strange in satellite imagery of North Korea. For decades, the country had appeared as a black hole on night maps—a place so poor and starved of electricity that it was literally invisible from space. But the new images showed something different: Pyongyang was getting brighter. Last year alone, more than 10,000 homes were built in the capital—more than in either Los Angeles or Chicago. Visitors who had not been to North Korea since before the pandemic returned to find traffic jams, Chinese EVs, and people staring at smartphones. The Hermit Kingdom, it turns out, is quietly modernizing.

Where the money comes from

This economic rebound is surprising because just five years ago, Kim Jong-un stood before a party congress and admitted his economic policy had failed. Then COVID hit, and North Korea—lacking public health infrastructure—sealed its borders, cutting off trade with China and asphyxiating its economy. The turnaround came from three unlikely sources. The first was Russia's invasion of Ukraine. North Korea began supplying massive quantities of munitions to Russia, and the two countries signed a mutual defense pact. Last year, North Korea deployed some 11,000 troops to fight alongside Russian forces on the front lines. This injected billions of dollars into the regime. To put that in perspective, North Korea's GDP