This article explores how North Korean leaders tried to maneuver between Iran and Iraq to gain greater leverage in the Cold War. Both of these Middle Eastern countries seemed potentially attractive partners for Pyongyang, but they were often on hostile terms with each other. The article considers how the Iraq-Iran rivalry and domestic changes in Iraq and Iran affected North Korean policy. Even when Pyongyang's cooperation with one or the other of the two states reached a high level, the North Koreans also reached out to the other country, regardless of the position of either state and of external actors such as the Soviet Union and China. The North Koreans generally avoided taking a public stand on the Iraq-Iran dispute, but on occasion they became more deeply involved. Mainly, the North Korean government sought to maximize the number of its partners, rather than to make a stable commitment to just one state. In turn, both Iraq and Iran eventually came to perceive North Korea as a state that was mostly out to benefit itself rather than helping either of them.

Earlier historical studies often suggested that the Soviet leader Iosif Stalin, distrustful as he was of Ho Chi Minh's policies and attributing little importance to Vietnam, remained unwilling to recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam until the Chinese Communist leaders threw their weight behind their Vietnamese comrades. On the basis of Soviet press articles, Hungarian archival documents, United Nations (UN) records, and other sources, this article shows that in fact Soviet interest in Vietnam significantly increased as early as 1948–1949, well before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China. This interest, expressed in growing press coverage and sporadic efforts to represent North Vietnam's cause in various UN organs, seems to have been linked to Moscow's strong disapproval of France's attempts to create an anti-Communist “puppet state.” From the outset, the USSR took the position that the Communist North was the sole legitimate representative of the Vietnamese nation and, hence, that the Bao Dai regime in the South was ipso facto illegitimate. The article concludes that Chinese support to Ho Chi Minh was only one of the three major factors that persuaded Stalin to recognize North Vietnam; the two others were the “Bao Dai factor” and Moscow's dissatisfaction with France's new European policy.

North Korea pursued a highly confrontational strategy vis-à-vis South Korea and the United States throughout the 1960s. This article places Pyongyang's strategy into the context of the Vietnam War. Recently declassified evidence reveals that certain North Korean actions, including the Blue House raid in January 1968 and a series of belligerent acts committed in 1970, were considerably influenced by the military operations in Vietnam and Cambodia. But in some other incidents, such as the seizure of the USS Pueblo intelligence-gathering vessel, the Vietnam War played a far more marginal role. In any case, North Korean actions seem not to have been motivated by an intention to lessen U.S. and South Korean pressure on Hanoi. In 1969 Pyongyang disapproved of, rather than welcomed, the start of de-escalation in Vietnam. Mainly, the North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, sought to achieve his own aims by taking advantage of America's preoccupation with the Vietnam War.