Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about diplomatic footprints. North Korea has 46 overseas embassies. The State of Palestine has about 80. Both are partially recognized, both operate in this strange limbo where some countries treat them as full equals and others pretend they don't exist. He's asking how partially recognized states actually conduct diplomacy day to day, and what the network of countries willing to host their missions tells us about who's aligning with whom.
Oh this is good. And by the way, DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today, so if anything sounds unusually coherent, that's why.
I was going to say you sound different.
But seriously, this topic hits something most people never think about. We assume diplomacy is this clean binary — you're a country or you're not. But the actual practice is messy and fascinating. North Korea's been around since 1948, still doesn't have relations with the US, France doesn't recognize them, yet they maintain embassies in 46 countries. Palestine has more missions than most fully recognized states, and they're not even a UN member state — they're a non-member observer.
And before we dive into the mechanics, let me flag something. When Daniel's asking about "partially recognized states," he's really asking about two very different cases. North Korea is universally seen as a state — nobody disputes there's a government in Pyongyang controlling territory. The non-recognition is political. Palestine is different. The question of whether it's a state at all is actively contested. So we're comparing apples and... some very geopolitically complicated oranges.
That's the right framing. Let's start with the mechanics though, because the day-to-day operation of a partially recognized embassy is wild. You don't have full diplomatic relations with the host country, so your mission is often called something else — a "representative office," a "liaison office," an "interests section." The building exists, people work there, but legally it's not an embassy.
That naming isn't just cosmetic.
Not at all. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations only applies if the host state recognizes you as a state and accepts your diplomats as diplomats. If you're Palestine's mission in, say, Ottawa, it's technically not an embassy — it's the General Delegation of Palestine. The staff don't carry diplomatic passports from a recognized state. They might travel on Palestinian Authority travel documents, which not every country accepts.
You're physically present but legally precarious.
And here's where it gets interesting. Some host countries grant de facto diplomatic privileges anyway. They'll issue the staff identity cards that function like diplomatic IDs, give them immunity from prosecution, exempt their bags from customs inspection. It's all done through administrative workarounds rather than formal treaty obligations. Which means the host country can revoke those privileges tomorrow with zero legal consequence. There's no treaty to break. It's purely a political gesture. That's the essence of partial recognition diplomacy — everything is contingent on the relationship staying warm.
Let's talk about the footprints themselves. North Korea at 46 missions. What does that network look like?
It's actually shrunk. In the 1970s and 80s they had closer to 70. But the 46 that remain are strategically clustered. You've got the usual suspects — China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba. The old socialist bloc. But then you've also got embassies in places like the UK, Germany, Sweden, India, Indonesia. Countries that aren't ideologically aligned with Pyongyang but see value in maintaining a channel.
Sweden's interesting there. They're not exactly communist sympathizers.
Sweden actually plays a unique role. Their embassy in Pyongyang serves as the protecting power for several Western countries that don't have relations with North Korea, including the United States. So if an American gets arrested in North Korea, the Swedish embassy handles the consular work. That's a whole other layer of this — the protecting power system.
Explain that for listeners who haven't encountered it.
When two countries don't have diplomatic relations, they can ask a third country to represent their interests. Switzerland represents the US in Iran. Sweden represents the US in North Korea. The protecting power's embassy has a small section staffed by, say, Swedish diplomats who handle American consular cases. They're not American employees — they're Swedes acting on America's behalf. It's a centuries-old system that keeps functioning even when direct diplomacy is impossible. And North Korea accepts this because it benefits them too. Sweden's embassy is one of the few Western diplomatic presences in Pyongyang, giving them a channel to the West. Sweden also represents Australia, Canada, and the Nordic countries there.
North Korea's 46 missions reflect a mix of ideological allies and pragmatic partners who want a listening post or trade opportunities.
And some of those missions are barely functional. There was a great Reuters piece a few years back about how several North Korean embassies had essentially stopped paying rent. They were running diplomatic smuggling operations to fund themselves because Pyongyang couldn't send hard currency. The embassy in Bulgaria was caught using diplomatic pouches to move cigarettes and alcohol.
Wait — using the diplomatic pouch for smuggling?
The diplomatic pouch is supposed to be for official correspondence, inviolable under the Vienna Convention. North Korea's been repeatedly caught abusing it. In 2015, their embassy in Bangladesh was found with 27 kilograms of gold in the diplomatic bag. In Egypt, they were smuggling weapons parts. The diplomatic pouch becomes a black market logistics network. For North Korea, the embassy network isn't just about diplomacy — it's an economic survival mechanism, absolutely essential for sanctions evasion. The missions abroad are expected to generate revenue through restaurants, art sales, statues, insurance fraud, counterfeiting. The UN Panel of Experts has documented this for years. Each embassy is essentially a franchise operation expected to remit hard currency back to Pyongyang.
Which is a very different model from what Daniel's also asking about with Palestine. Let's pivot there. Palestine has about 80 missions worldwide. That's more than Israel, more than most medium-sized recognized states.
The number keeps growing. As of this year, 146 UN member states recognize the State of Palestine — more than three-quarters of the General Assembly. But here's the catch — recognition doesn't always mean an embassy. Some countries recognize Palestine but host nothing more than a small representative office. Others upgrade to full embassy status even though the legal basis is questionable.
Because Palestine isn't a UN member state.
It's a non-member observer state, same status as the Holy See, upgraded in 2012 by General Assembly resolution. So when Sweden or Brazil says "we recognize Palestine and we're upgrading the mission to an embassy," they're making a political statement, but legally that mission doesn't have the same status as, say, the French embassy in Stockholm. The receiving state can call it whatever they want domestically. The label "embassy" is itself a political tool.
This is where the Palestinian diplomatic network tells us something interesting about global alignments.
The countries hosting full Palestinian embassies aren't random. You see heavy concentration in the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Non-Aligned Movement, and increasingly in Latin America and Africa. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela — most of South America now has Palestinian embassies. Some of this was ideological solidarity under left-wing governments. Some was about balancing relations with Iran and the broader Middle East. And some was genuinely about the Palestinian cause resonating with post-colonial politics in the region.
Here's what I want to probe. You said 146 countries recognize Palestine. How many of those actually have Palestinian missions on their soil?
So roughly 55 percent of recognizing states host a physical mission. The other 45 percent recognize Palestine but handle relations through non-resident ambassadors — someone accredited from a neighboring country or from the mission in New York at the UN. That gap is telling. Recognition is cheap. Hosting a mission costs money, diplomatic bandwidth, and in some cases political capital with Washington or Jerusalem. So you get this tiered system. Tier one — full embassy, resident ambassador. Tier two — representative office with limited privileges. Tier three — non-resident accreditation. Tier four — paper recognition with no practical follow-through. You take what you can get and build incrementally.
The Palestinian diplomatic playbook is actually a masterclass in this. They've systematically used multilateral forums to build legitimacy, then leveraged that legitimacy to secure bilateral upgrades. The UN General Assembly vote in 2012 was the inflection point. Once the GA said "you're a non-member observer state," it became much harder for individual countries to argue Palestine wasn't a state at all.
Even though the Security Council never acted.
Right, and that's the tension. The US would veto any Security Council resolution admitting Palestine as a full member. So Palestine is stuck in this in-between status — recognized by most countries, treated as a state by many international organizations, but blocked from full UN membership by the one body that actually controls admission. Which creates weird situations. Palestine is a member of UNESCO, the International Criminal Court, Interpol. But not the UN itself.
Membership in those organizations creates concrete diplomatic tools.
The ICC membership is the most consequential. Palestine joined in 2015, and that's what allowed the court to open an investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories. That's not symbolic — that's a partially recognized state using international legal mechanisms against a fully recognized state. Israel of course rejects the ICC's jurisdiction because it doesn't recognize Palestine as a state. Which creates this circular legal argument. Israel says Palestine isn't a state so it can't join the ICC. The ICC says 123 member states voted to admit Palestine, so as far as the court is concerned, it's a state party. Both positions are internally coherent and completely incompatible. That's the essence of partial recognition diplomacy right there.
Let me give you another concrete example of how this plays out day to day. A Palestinian diplomat posted to, say, Dublin. Ireland recognizes Palestine and hosts a mission. The diplomat needs to travel to a conference in Geneva. What passport do they use?
Presumably a Palestinian Authority passport, which isn't universally accepted. Some countries don't recognize it as a valid travel document. So the diplomat might need a laissez-passer — a temporary travel document issued by the host country or by the UN. Or they might travel on a Jordanian passport if they have one. The logistics of being a diplomat without a universally recognized state behind you are constant friction. Versus a North Korean diplomat who travels on a DPRK passport that, while viewed with suspicion, is at least issued by an undisputed state. North Korea's recognition problem is different. Almost everyone agrees North Korea is a state. The question is whether you want to have normal relations with it. France, for example, has never established diplomatic relations with North Korea — not because France doubts North Korea exists, but because France sees no benefit in normalizing ties.
Yet France deals with North Korea all the time through other channels.
Through the UN, through the EU, through the French embassy in Seoul which covers North Korea issues, through track-two dialogues with academics and former officials. The absence of an embassy doesn't mean absence of contact. It means contact is routed through less direct, less visible channels.
Which brings us to the core of Daniel's question. What does the network of host countries tell us?
For North Korea, the 46 host countries tell you three things. One, who shares ideological affinity — the China-Russia-Cuba-Vietnam axis. Two, who wants a listening post — Sweden, Germany, the UK, India. Three, who's willing to look the other way on sanctions for economic reasons — various countries in Africa and the Middle East where North Korean construction workers and statue-builders have operated.
The statues are a whole thing, aren't they?
Oh, the Mansudae Art Studio. North Korea's state-run art factory has built monumental statues and memorials across Africa and the Middle East — the African Renaissance Monument in Senegal, statues in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola. It's been a major hard currency earner, run through the embassy network. The cultural attaché is often the point person for statue contracts. The UN sanctioned Mansudae in 2016 specifically because the art sales were funding the weapons program. But enforcement is spotty. Some host countries just don't care, or they've already signed the contract and don't want to lose their monument.
Let's flip to Palestine. What does the host network tell us?
It tells you about four overlapping circles of support. Circle one is the Arab and Islamic world — that's the core, where Palestinian missions have existed for decades and enjoy full embassy status. Circle two is the Global South solidarity bloc — much of Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America. Circle three is the former Eastern Bloc countries that recognized Palestine during the Soviet era and never rescinded it. And circle four is the interesting one — Western European countries that have upgraded Palestinian representation in recent years.
Sweden was the first Western EU member to recognize Palestine, back in 2014.
It caused a diplomatic crisis with Israel. Sweden's foreign minister at the time, Margot Wallström, was declared persona non grata in Israel. The Swedish ambassador was summoned. Israel made clear this was seen as a hostile act. But Sweden did it anyway, and the sky didn't fall. That's the dynamic — each recognition creates a permission structure for others.
Has that cascade continued?
It has, but slowly in Western Europe. Spain, Ireland, and Norway recognized Palestine last year, in May 2024. That was a significant moment because it broke the Western European consensus that recognition should only come through a negotiated peace process. These countries essentially said the peace process is dead, the two-state solution is being foreclosed by settlement expansion, and recognition is a way to preserve the possibility of Palestinian statehood. Israel recalled ambassadors from all of them, as you'd expect. But here's what's interesting — economic relations didn't stop. Security cooperation continued in some cases. The diplomatic downgrade was symbolic and temporary. Within months, ambassadors were being quietly re-accredited. The relationship absorbed the shock.
Which suggests that even dramatic diplomatic gestures have limits. The underlying interests don't change.
And that's true for partially recognized states in both directions. North Korea can open an embassy in a country, but that doesn't mean the host country has suddenly become a Pyongyang ally. It means they've calculated that having a channel outweighs the costs of hosting the mission.
What are those costs? What does a host country actually risk?
One, diplomatic blowback from the state that opposes recognition. For Palestine, that's Israel and to some degree the United States. The US has historically pressured countries not to recognize Palestine or upgrade missions. For North Korea, the pressure comes from the US, South Korea, Japan, and the UN sanctions regime. Two, reputational cost. Hosting a North Korean embassy means you're associated with a regime that runs gulags and threatens nuclear war. Some countries don't want that association. Others don't care. And three, the practical burden of monitoring the mission. North Korean embassies have been caught doing everything from insurance fraud to rhino horn smuggling to weapons trafficking. The host country has to decide whether it's willing to police that. Some countries lack the capacity, some lack the will.
The rhino horn thing is real?
There was a diplomatic pouch incident in South Africa. North Korean diplomats were implicated in wildlife trafficking. The embassy provides cover for activities that have nothing to do with diplomacy. It's a known pattern, documented by the UN and by investigative journalists repeatedly over the past decade. So for host countries, it's a calculated risk. You get a diplomatic channel, maybe some trade, and you accept the possibility that the mission will abuse its privileges.
The calculation shifts over time.
Malaysia had a North Korean embassy for decades. Then Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un's half-brother, was assassinated at the Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017 using VX nerve agent. Malaysia expelled the North Korean ambassador, shut down the embassy, and severed ties. The cost suddenly became unacceptable. Partial recognition is conditional and revocable. Which is why partially recognized states work so hard to build dependencies that make revocation costly. North Korea doesn't just send diplomats — it sends economic ties, military cooperation, construction projects. Palestine builds political solidarity through civil society, through the UN, through the sheer number of countries that have now taken a position. The more entangled the host country is, the harder it is to reverse course.
Let's talk about the diplomatic toolkit more specifically. What can a partially recognized mission actually do?
It varies enormously. At the high end, a Palestinian embassy in Cairo or Amman functions almost identically to any other embassy. The ambassador presents credentials, attends national day receptions, negotiates agreements, provides consular services. At the low end, a North Korean embassy in a country that's hostile or indifferent might be essentially under house arrest. The diplomats can't travel more than 25 kilometers from the capital. Their bank accounts are monitored. Their diplomatic pouch is searched despite the Vienna Convention. They're tolerated but not welcomed. That 25 kilometer restriction has been imposed by various countries at various times. After the Malaysia assassination, several countries tightened travel restrictions on North Korean diplomats. It's a way of limiting the mission's activities without formally expelling them.
Which is itself a diplomatic signal. You're not severing relations, but you're making clear the relationship is on thin ice.
That's the granularity of partial recognition diplomacy. There are dozens of gradations between full embassy and no relations at all. You can have a mission but restrict its size. You can accept an ambassador but delay agrément — the formal approval of their appointment — for months or years. You can invite the diplomat to some events and not others. You can grant immunity for some activities and not others. All of which is invisible to the public but intensely meaningful to the diplomats involved. A good ambassador from a partially recognized state knows exactly how to read these signals and how to gradually expand the mission's space. They cultivate relationships with host country officials, with other diplomatic missions, with journalists and academics. They build a constituency for normalization.
The Palestinian diplomatic corps is quite sophisticated at this, aren't they?
The Palestinian Authority has invested heavily in diplomatic training. Their diplomats are often educated in Western universities, multilingual, skilled in international law and multilateral negotiation. They've had to be — they're operating at a permanent disadvantage, so they compensate with expertise. North Korea's diplomats in Geneva and New York tend to be sharp as well — they've been in the multilateral system for years, they know the procedures. But the average North Korean ambassador in a smaller posting may be less polished, selected primarily for loyalty.
Let's talk about something Daniel implied in his question — the comparison between 46 North Korean missions and 80 Palestinian missions. Is that a fair comparison?
Not entirely, and I think that's part of what makes the question interesting. North Korea is a fully functioning sovereign state with a territory, a population, an army, a nuclear program. It's been around for 77 years. Yet Palestine, which doesn't control its borders, doesn't have a unified territory, doesn't have an army, has nearly twice as many diplomatic missions. It tells us that diplomatic recognition isn't about material power. It's about political legitimacy and solidarity. Palestine has built a global coalition of support based on national liberation politics, post-colonial solidarity, and increasingly, concern about the viability of the two-state solution. North Korea has... not done that. North Korea's diplomatic network is about survival and extraction. Palestine's is about legitimacy and state-building.
It's working, slowly.
The number of countries recognizing Palestine has grown steadily. The status of Palestinian missions has been upgraded in dozens of countries. Palestinian diplomats sit in international forums as representatives of a state. Every small normalization — being addressed as "Ambassador" rather than "Representative," being seated alphabetically under P rather than somewhere else — reinforces the claim.
There's a bureaucratic poetry to that.
There really is. And the flip side is that countries opposing Palestinian statehood fight these same battles. Israel and the US pressure host countries not to use the word "embassy," not to fly the Palestinian flag, not to treat the Palestinian representative as a full diplomat. It's a war of nomenclature and protocol. Which sounds trivial until you realize that international law is built on these distinctions. Whether someone has diplomatic immunity or not is life-changing. Whether a document is accepted as a valid travel document determines whether someone can flee a war zone. A Palestinian refugee who needs a travel document. A North Korean defector who needs consular protection that their own embassy will never provide. These aren't abstractions.
Let's talk about the protecting power system in more depth, because I think it's one of the most elegant inventions in diplomacy.
It dates back centuries. The modern system was codified in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in 1961. The basic idea is that when two states don't have diplomatic relations, a third state can step in to represent one side's interests in the other's territory. The protecting power handles consular services, communicates official messages, and sometimes negotiates on behalf of the protected state. Switzerland has been the protecting power for the US in Iran since 1980, after the hostage crisis. The Swiss embassy in Tehran has a US Interests Section staffed by Swiss diplomats. They handle visas, passport renewals, and emergency consular assistance for Americans in Iran. They also pass messages between Washington and Tehran when direct communication is needed. Without it, there'd be no way to handle the routine business of two countries that need to communicate but refuse to recognize each other diplomatically.
Could Palestine use the protecting power system?
They do, in a sense. In countries where Palestine doesn't have a mission, other Arab states often provide consular assistance to Palestinians. Egypt and Jordan have historically played this role. But it's not a formal protecting power arrangement under the Vienna Convention — it's more ad hoc, because whether Palestine's accession to the Convention is valid depends on whether you recognize Palestine as a state. Everything about partial recognition is circular.
That seems to be the theme.
It really is. And that circularity is both the problem and, for the partially recognized state, the opportunity. Because every time a host country treats you like a state, you accumulate another precedent. Enough precedents, and eventually the circularity resolves in your favor. Customary international law through sheer repetition. This is the Palestinian strategy in a nutshell. Get enough countries to treat you as a state, join enough international organizations, sign enough treaties, and eventually the question of whether you're a state becomes academic. You're acting like one, you're treated like one, you're a state in all but the most formal legal sense.
Has it worked for other partially recognized entities?
Taiwan had a vast diplomatic network in the 1970s — more embassies than the People's Republic of China. Then the UN switched recognition to Beijing in 1971, and Taiwan's diplomatic network collapsed country by country. Today Taiwan has formal relations with only 13 countries, mostly small island states. So diplomatic recognition can evaporate quickly if the geopolitical winds shift. Taiwan now operates through "representative offices" rather than embassies — the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, for example. It functions like an embassy in almost every practical sense, but it's not called one, and the staff don't have formal diplomatic immunity.
Similar to the Palestinian model in some ways.
Similar mechanics, very different political context. Taiwan's partial recognition is about managing the One China policy — most countries accept Beijing's claim that Taiwan is part of China, so they can't have formal diplomatic relations with Taipei. But they still want economic and cultural ties, so they create these quasi-diplomatic offices. Another example is Kosovo. Recognized by about 100 countries, not recognized by Serbia, Russia, China, and several EU members. It split the EU — five members don't recognize Kosovo. They have their own separatist concerns or historical alliances with Serbia. So Kosovo has embassies in most of Europe but not all. Its diplomats can attend some EU meetings and not others. The patchwork is visible on a map.
The non-recognizers within the EU still deal with Kosovo practically.
They have to. Kosovo is a real place with a real government controlling real territory. Spain doesn't recognize Kosovo, but Spanish troops serve in the NATO peacekeeping force there. Spanish officials meet with Kosovar counterparts in multilateral settings. The non-recognition is political symbolism that coexists with practical cooperation.
Which brings us back to Daniel's question about what the footprints tell us. North Korea at 46, Palestine at 80. What's the big picture?
The big picture is that diplomatic recognition isn't a single thing — it's a spectrum, and different countries occupy different points on that spectrum for different reasons. North Korea's missions tell us about the geography of ideological affinity and sanctions evasion. Palestine's missions tell us about the geography of post-colonial solidarity and concern for the two-state solution. Both are maps of political alignment, but they're mapping different things.
The overlap between the two networks?
North Korea recognized Palestine in 1988 and hosts a Palestinian embassy in Pyongyang. But the countries that host both North Korean and Palestinian missions are mostly in the Middle East and North Africa — Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria. Countries in the Arab socialist tradition, historically aligned with both the Palestinian cause and the old non-aligned movement that included North Korea. Outside that region, the networks diverge sharply. Palestine has missions across Western Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. North Korea's network is concentrated in Asia and a handful of strategic outposts.
One last angle — what about the actual physical embassies? The buildings themselves?
Oh, this is a great detail. North Korea's embassies are often in terrible condition. There have been reports of embassies where the electricity is cut off because they haven't paid the bills. The building is crumbling. The diplomats are essentially squatting. In some cases, the host country looks the other way because expelling them would be more trouble than it's worth. Palestinian missions range from modest offices to quite substantial compounds, depending on the host country. In wealthy Gulf states, the embassy might be a proper diplomatic compound. In poorer countries, it might be a rented apartment. But generally, Palestinian missions are funded through a combination of PA budget allocations and host country support, so they're functional. Versus North Korea where the embassy is expected to be self-funding, which leads to all the criminal activity we discussed. The incentives are completely different. A Palestinian diplomat's career depends on building relationships and advancing the national cause. A North Korean diplomat's career depends on sending money back to Pyongyang and maintaining loyalty. The embassy reflects those incentives.
The physical state of the mission tells you something about the nature of the state behind it.
About the relationship with the host country. A well-maintained, well-located embassy suggests the host country values the relationship. A crumbling building in a bad neighborhood suggests indifference or active hostility.
Daniel's question has more layers than I initially thought. We started with a simple comparison of numbers and ended up talking about the nature of statehood itself.
That's how these prompts always go. The interesting thing is that both North Korea and Palestine are, in their own ways, succeeding at partial recognition diplomacy. North Korea has maintained a functional diplomatic network for seven decades despite being one of the most isolated countries on earth. Palestine has built a diplomatic network larger than most recognized states despite not fully controlling its territory. Both are testaments to the fact that diplomacy isn't just for the powerful. It's a tool that weaker actors can use effectively if they're strategic about it. And it's a reminder that the international system is more flexible than we think. The binary of recognized versus unrecognized is a legal fiction. In practice, there's a vast gray area where partially recognized states operate, negotiate, advocate, and gradually shift the terms of their own recognition.
Good place to land. And now — Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The silk of the Darwin's bark spider, native to Tierra del Fuego, has acoustic properties so refined that researchers in the 1960s found individual strands could vibrate at frequencies inaudible to human ears when struck by wind — effectively turning entire webs into natural infrasound detectors.
...I have no idea what to do with that information.
That was deeply unsettling and I will be thinking about it all day.
Before we wrap — the open question I keep coming back to is whether the Palestinian diplomatic strategy eventually hits a ceiling. Recognition from 146 countries is extraordinary, but without the Security Council and without the United States, does it translate into actual statehood? Or does it become a permanent limbo — recognized enough to survive, not recognized enough to thrive?
For North Korea, the question is whether the embassy network can survive if sanctions enforcement keeps tightening. Every few years there's a new crackdown, a new expulsion, a new scandal. At what point does the cost of maintaining these missions exceed the benefit?
We'll see. Thanks to Daniel for the prompt, thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and thanks to all of you for listening.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Until next time.
