North Korea is still officially at war with the United Nations. When the fighting in the three-year Korean War came to an end on July 27, 1953, it finished because of an armistice, not because of a peace agreement. That was supposed to be negotiated later. But just over 64 years on, no such peace deal has been made. North Korea considers itself still at war.

This is the reality of the rising tensions between the regime in Pyongyang and the rest of the world. The increased sanctions on the regime agreed by the UN Security Council last week will, therefore, be seen by the paranoid hermit regime of Kim Jong-un as further evidence that its old foe intends to destroy it. The only difference is that the tightened sanctions on the regime ordered by the Security Council were backed by Beijing, North Korea’s long-standing ally, whose intervention in the Korean War saved the regime from defeat by the US-led UN forces. Yet the Chinese leadership has stopped short of cutting off the oil supplies without which the North Korean economy would come grinding to a halt.

Pyongyang’s 25 million citizens live in abject poverty. The per capita annual income fell from an already alarming $1,800 a decade ago to nearer $1,000 two years ago. South Korean estimates now suggest that that figure has slipped further. The North has faced repeated famine that has been alleviated by humanitarian shipments of food from the international community, including China.

For a state that is on a permanent war footing, where the majority of government spending is on the military and its nuclear weaponry, this is hardly surprising. It is arguable that no government in history has ever sustained such skewed spending for so long. Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany was on the verge of bankruptcy as a result of six years of aggressive rearmament. The outbreak of World War Two in 1939 obscured the Third Reich’s insolvency even as it embarked upon a hate-filled military campaign that ended in its total ruin.

To the outside world, the dictatorship in Pyongyang lives in a fantasy world. Its leadership includes North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung who having died in 1994, now holds the position of “Eternal President”. His son, Kim Jong-il, the present dictator’s father, who died in 2011, was appointed “Eternal General-Secretary”.

What the Trump administration needs to understand is that there is nothing fantastical about North Korea’s worldview. It is rooted in the real belief that its possession of nuclear warheads and the rocketry to deliver them even to the United States is its surest defense from attack. It has seen the example of Israel with its hidden arsenal and Iran with its clear drive to arm itself with atomic weapons. Iran is busy dishonoring the deal to suspend its nuclear program. It knows that if, like Pakistan and India, it can grapple its way into the “nuclear club,” it will be able to behave even more aggressively to its neighbors with considerably less fear of outside intervention. The different attitude of Washington to the atomic ambitions of Tehran and Pyongyang, let along Israel, is highly instructive.

And perhaps most important of all, Kim Jong-un will not have forgotten the grisly fate of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who under international pressure abandoned their own nuclear programs.