Seeing what China next door has done with solar and batteries, I wonder if they'll do an electric end-run around oil, similarly to some places in Africa.

It's not the lack of oil that enabled this. The west* fought a bloody war to defeat North Korea. We just didn't win (though we did prevent the north from taking the south...). Now you've got a dictatorship protected by their ability to deal devastating damage to South Korea via nukes, huge stockpiles of conventional artillery (and Seoul is within range), etc. Moreover one backed by a superpower (China, and before China the soviet union... indeed these countries are the reason the west didn't win the first war as well).

They could have all the oil in the world and we'd be no more in a position to do anything about it.

*US, Uk, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, France, New Zealand, Phillipines, Tukey, Thailand, South Africa, Greece, Belgum, Luxembourg, Ethopia, Columbia, and South Korea.

> hundreds stave to death there daily

Yeah, you will need a solid source for that.

This isn't the 1990s, while malnutrition may happen, and there have been occasional shortages (covid was one example), it's unlikely people are starving to death in 2026, let alone multiple, let alone per day.

On top of that: North Korea is not that isolated as people think. North Koreans have smartphones and plenty of those living near the chinese border have chinese sim cards. Ever wondered why defectors say they regularly phone their family? Because virtually every north korean knows somebody with a chinese phone.

Of course flow of information outside is still tightly controlled and such, but there's zero direct evidence for starvation happening.