Romania’s close relations with North Korea during the Cold War are well known. The cordial encounters between Nicolae Ceaușescu and Kim Il-sung during their official visits remain symbolic of their bilateral ties. Despite this visibility, scholarly attention to Romanian–North Korean relations has been limited. Much of the existing understanding rests on the broad assumption that their friendship derived simply from their shared communist ideology, without exploring the underlying motivations. Traditional theories of international relations provide only partial explanations of this relationship. The two states faced markedly different security environments, and North Korea was far from an attractive economic partner for Romania. Constructivism, however, by emphasizing the role of non-material factors, offers a more suitable framework for analysis. This paper therefore examines Romanian–North Korean relations through the lens of normative convergence, with particular attention to the 1970s and 1980s, when the regimes of Ceaușescu and Kim Il-sung developed especially close ties.