There's a pretty easy way for the government to avoid situations like that. If your people are at the mercy of foreign governments in order to survive, it really is in your best interest to not continuously piss them off.
The DPRK has been taught over the years that if they rattle their sabers and then back down, they get foreign aid. As far as they're concerned, it's a winning strategy.
Is it a sane strategy? Decidedly not -- one day the foreign aid won't come, or it won't be enough, and their only option is to escalate. When they become a credible & real threat (which they are very quickly becoming), other nations will have no choice but to act out of self-preservation.
That is working on the assumption that the government in question gives a shit about their population.
The problem here is that the sanctions hits a population that is already suffering under the actions of their own government, and has much less of an effect on the regime it is meant to punish.
