At the beginning of each year, North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un gives an annual address to ostensibly layout policy direction for the coming year. This year Kim forewent the address for a meeting of the leading Korean Worker’s Party. From that plenum has come what appears to be the core takeaway statement: “we will never allow the impudent U.S. to abuse the DPRK-U.S. dialogue for meeting its sordid aim but will shift to a shocking actual action to make it pay for the pains sustained by our people so far and for the development so far restrained.”

As fearsome as this sounds though, this statement, and the rhetoric generally from the plenum, was predictably vague. North Korea has long talked like this – bellicose, dramatic, hyperbolic, yet thin on detail and specific commitments. Is it possible that they mean it this time? Sure. Will the North Korea-watching community pay attention? Yes, and it should. But for most people in the West, South Korea, and Japan this will sound like more the same.

Importantly, Kim did not permanently foreclose talks with U.S. President Donald Trump, which many feared would be the outcome of North Korea’s self-imposed year-end deadline. Nor did the North Koreans test a missile, or worse, a nuclear device, as was similarly feared. Nor did the ‘Christmas gift’ materialize. The U.S.-North Korean peace process of the last few years is still stalemated, and the North Koreans still are not testing. That is, the recent status quo is unchanged.

This tells us a few basic things which should hardly count as major insights given how often North Korea acts like this:

The North Koreans love the media attention their threats gin up:

No other small country in the world has the ability to unhinge foreign imagination like North Korea. We broadcast all sorts of wild behavior and conspiracy theories onto it, routinely suggesting its elites are mad, that it wants to launch a huge war, that it discovered unicorns and so on. It regularly shows up as the geopolitical villain in Western action movies; it even invaded the United States in 2012. So when the North Korean's threw out the ‘Christmas gift,’ Western media went into overdrive. Even the U.S. president felt compelled to respond. In retrospect, it looks like we were all trolled.

All this consequent attention and hysteria likely serves North Korean prestige beliefs. What better way to demonstrate that North Korea is a powerful and important country than watching foreign elites falling all over themselves to comment on whatever latest outrage comes from KCNA (the North Korean Central News Agency)? South Korea may be the ‘real’ Korea – modern, open, adjusted, integrated with the world – but North Korea captures the limelight despite its backwardness. So if the year-end deadline and Christmas gift pass with no actual action, the North Koreans still gain from all the hysteria.

The North Koreans do not actually want to start a Cuban Missile Crisis, much less a war, with the U.S.:

That North Korea would lose any serious confrontation with the U.S. is obvious and should routinely check the most outlandish interpretations of North Korean behavior. For example, the North almost certainly did not build nuclear weapons to actually use them, as apparently even Trump thought in 2017. They serve to deter North Korea’s enemies – most obviously the United States - from attacking it.

What the North Koreans probably want now is acceptance of their nuclear status, and that would come from a deal with Trump. The threatened tests of the ‘Christmas gift’ and year-end deadline were likely prods to Trump to offer a better deal in the negotiations. They are not precursors to some kind of breakdown or collision. North Korea’s goals are actually rather conservative: to win grudging toleration of its nukes, its existence (rather than being understood as a failed competitor with the South who should just go away like East Germany did), and the status quo of a divided Korean peninsula. Obviously these goals do not accord with those of South Korea, Japan, or the West, but they are not revolutionary. They are the ratification of the status quo.

The Korean status quo is very deeply baked-in now and very hard to change:

This is a point I have made repeatedly over the last two years of the Trump-Kim peace process. The strategic and ideological gaps between North Korea and its primary opponents are so wide that ‘decisive leadership’ – Trump’s personal willingness to meet Kim, or South Korean President Moon Jae-In’s extraordinary accommodation of Pyongyang – was never likely to be enough to really change peninsular dynamics. Something more structural is probably necessary – a North Korean leadership distinct from the personality cult of the Kim family, a Chinese aid cut-off to North Korea, a U.S. retrenchment from Asia – to really shake things loose.

Trump learned this the hard way when he collided with an official Washington deeply suspicious of any unreciprocated concessions to Pyongyang. Not even the presidency was enough for Trump to overcome the massive bureaucratic, Congressional, and media/analyst resistance (a lesson President Carter learned too).

So what ‘big lesson’ is there to draw from this year’s annual comments? Not much actually - or more accurately, not much that we did not already know. Perhaps the North really will do something disruptive like an above-ground nuclear test. But the weight of evidence is actually against such high risk-taking.

The big news is that Kim no longer feels bound by the testing moratorium he supposedly conceded to Trump in 2017. But Kim has been all but violating that for a year, and it was a nonbinding gentleman’s agreement anyway. So any future testing will likely be aimed at embarrassing Trump in an election to push him towards concessions, and, bizarre as it sounds, that is busy as usual with North Korea.