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They say aggressive things to imperialist states and nice things to socialist ones and colonial subjects. That set of conclusions is positive, but it also is difficult to call something like "principled" because who the fuck can they sell out to? The imperial apparatus has screwed them over personally maybe more than anyone else in the world that isn't besieged in a hot war or Laos, and selling out to empire basically isn't available to them short of dissolving their government or taking measures that would be literally begging to be invaded.
They are absolutely not the most ideologically advanced country on Earth because they were forced into broadly correct geopolitical positions. Ideologically, they are sub-revisionist and anti-democratic and shitlibs saying the latter does not make it false, they just don't understand the specific nature of it. I'm begging you, tell me how the Supreme People's Assembly is democratic, I would love to know. You can start by pointing to a non-unanimous vote anywhere in their history.
Cuba has an incomparably stronger claim to being the most ideologically advanced and it's wild to me that you'd deny that.
Cuban leaders have very clearly stated, for decades, that they are closely ideologically aligned with the DPRK. After visits there, Cuban revolutionaries decided to use it as an ideal and model. You are just a chauvinist.
Castro in 2014 said that "Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life." I don't put a lot of stock in people complimenting their allies, I'm more concerned about what they say about issues. Cuba is furthermore demonstrably much more democratic than the DPRK, and clearly are not imitating them there or else doing a fortunately bad job of imitating them.
I'm begging you, tell me how the Supreme People's Assembly is democratic, I would love to know.
Do you have westoid brain where democracy is when there's a bunch of divided parties, and the more parties there are and they more divided they are the more democracy there is?
A nation that has moved sufficiently towards socialism would not have divided priorities. Once they have suppressed the different classes out of existence and only the proletariat remain, all that's left is to pass and enact policies that benefit the proletariat as a whole. There is no more major class antagonisms, so there is no more need for a bitterly divided class war to be played out on stage.
In almost all socialist nations we see this trend towards super-majority and unanimity. In China, there is also only one significant party and it has extremely high support - and they aren't even that far along their socialist path to eradicate the other classes. You would expect these features to be even more pronounced in a more progressed and advanced socialist state that has less class antagonisms to deal with.
How is an elected assembly of workers voting in their own intersts not democratic?
I never said them having one ruling party is bad, I think that's a good thing, and I don't have anything against them also being very popular. I don't doubt the elections that much in the sense that I think there were fake or overtly coerced votes, even if there were serious procedural issues that undermine their integrity (most of all the ballots being somewhat less secret than they should be), but I think they've generally also been slowly improving on that issue.
This is a funny question because it's old-hat to talk about how, even in the circumstance of stronger electoral procedures, there are many other ways that a system can be rendered functionally undemocratic. Look at the voting record of the SPA, insofar as such a thing is even available. Class antagonism cannot account for every difference in what people want, e.g. Stalin talks about how a substantial, perhaps the main, force of revisionism is simple ignorance and not some sort of capitalist sabotage (though he of course was very concerned with that as well). Here's a place to start: Can you show me a single time in the past several decades where there is evidence of any disagreement within the SPA? Even DPRK supporters (which I functionally am, believe it or not) often admit to it being a rubber stamp.
Yes, obviously the fetishization of disagreement on the part of liberal democrats is awful and itself ideologically backwards, but the idea that things can be unanimous all the time rather than operate on a basis of majority rule where a minority still at least sometimes exists, especially in pre-communist society, is a fantasy.
A Kim and many SPA members being elected with over 90% of the vote? I genuinely believe this would probably still happen even if my complaints about election procedures were all totally invalidated by future reforms, as much as I wish they'd retire the functionally-hereditary leadership too (and I recognize that there's been a diffusing of authority over time trending toward this being a ceremonial role, to be clear). The SPA membership coming together in unanimous votes every single time, on the other hand, is a sign that something is probably wrong.