Antoine Bondaz, Director of the Korea Program on Security and Diplomacy at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), examines the EU’s “critical engagement policy” with North Korea, initiated after the first nuclear crisis in 2006. Despite this policy causing a collapse in bilateral trade, the author underscores that European nations have consciously separated humanitarian aid from political agendas, allowing the EU to maintain an important intermediary role in international negotiations with the North Korean regime. However, Bondaz predicts that the rapid shifts in diplomatic priorities for both the EU and DPRK, influenced by geopolitical dynamics, render future political bilateral exchanges highly unlikely.