North Korea’s ICBM test is a win for Iran

North Korea’s recent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile is a game changer. Only last month, Secretary of Defense James Mattis told Congress that the despotic nation was the “most urgent and dangerous threat to peace and security.” Kim Jong-un’s new missile launch confirms Secretary Mattis’s assessment. Perhaps even more concerning is the potential for North Korea to compound the threat by transferring this dangerous technology to another rogue regime, namely its longtime ally Iran.

Tehran checks every box for being a global menace, just like its friends in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Both are state sponsors of terror, have clear nuclear ambitions, and directly threaten U.S. interests and those of our allies with ballistic missiles. Iran looks to North Korea to support and enable its nuclear ambitions. For years, experts have suspected North Korea as being the key supporter behind Iran’s missile and nuclear programs. Today, many of the missiles Iran would use to target American forces in the Middle East are copies of North Korean designs.

North Korean engineers are in Iran helping to improve its missiles to carry nuclear warheads, according to a report released last month from Iran’s main opposition movement—the same movement that exposed Tehran’s secret nuclear facilities at Natanz and Arak in 2002. According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s new report, the Islamic Republic is using North Korean blueprints to build underground missile sites and experts are regularly traveling between the two countries to assist the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ efforts to develop nuclear warheads and guidance systems. This would enable the jihadist state to launch nuclear weapons at the large U.S. bases in the Middle East that restrain Iran’s expansionist ambitions.

Fortunately, Iran is still behind the DPRK in acquiring a nuclear device. But like the ill-fated 1994 agreement with North Korea to halt its nuclear program, the nuclear deal President Barack Obama signed with Iran in 2015 is destined to fail. Once it does, Iran will be able to quickly mount nukes on its massive arsenal of ballistic missiles thanks to North Korean assistance that has occurred since the deal was signed. This time, Iran’s missiles will be better protected because North Korea has helped it build as many as thirteen secret underground launch facilities modeled after their own.