The world according to Kim
Imagine yourself as Kim Jong Un, North Korean despot. Unlike your father Kim Jong Il, who took the throne in late middle age and died 17 years later, you came to it before your 30th birthday. Yours is the longer, harder road, albeit with the same constant aim: to rule for life and die comfortably in your bed.
Everything else — the purges, the killing of the young American, the missile shots and nuclear tests, the brinkmanship with the Trump administration — serves that ambition. It ought to make you a pragmatist at heart.
For nearly six years you have cultivated a reputation for capricious brutality. They say you fed your uncle to dogs after you had him arrested in full public view. They say you had your armed forces minister dispatched with an antiaircraft gun, to obliterate every trace of him from the face of the earth. They say you executed your deputy premier for education for slouching.
Nothing strange in this. Tyranny is an art, the foremost requirement of which is to instill the appropriate sense of dread and awe. You — the fat kid with the boarding- school education and the basketball mania — had no chance of living without immediately demonstrating a relish for killing. Political murder in regimes like yours is always performance art.
And so you did it, even as you eased economic controls and allowed private markets to flourish. You would not put North Koreans through another Arduous March, as your father had in the 1990s, allowing more than a million to starve so that Pyongyang’s elite could stay fed.
Another l esson for tyrants: you do not subjugate a people by taking everything from them. You subjugate them by giving them something they know you can take away. Desperate people aren’t always obedient. Dependent people usually are.
Similar logic applies to your f oreign policy. The Americans hoped you would be one of two things when you came to power: the modernizer who had seen enough of the world to know how backward your own corner of it is; or the boy king whose incompetence would spell his own — and hopefully the regime’s — demise.
Yo u’v e proved them wrong on the first count. As for the second, it depends on how well you play your nuclear card. Your dad used a cycle of crisis and negotiation, cheat- and- repeat, to wheedle economic and diplomatic concessions and play for time — time that, in his case, was in short supply.
But that’s not an option for you. You need a 50- year solution to your strategic dilemmas, not just another set of piecemeal concessions from Seoul or Washington. That requires changing the game in East Asia by nudging America out. Whoever is helping you make such astonishing progress in your missile and nuclear programs clearly wants to use you to change the game, too.
The tactics are straightforward. Persuade Americans you’re capable of anything. Field missiles and warheads t hat can hold American cities at risk. Foment a sense of nonstop, apocalyptic, unsolvable crisis that, in time, exhausts American endurance and l everages isolationist instincts in the Trump administration. Drive every wedge you can between Washington and Seoul. Some you get for free: who else but Donald Trump would think to start a trade war with Seoul in the midst of a nuclear crisis with Pyongyang? The man’s a gift. Can it work? The Americans are pushing for more sanctions at the United Nations, but the Russians and Chinese seem to want to have none of it. An American retreat from Northeast Asia might eventually induce South Korea and Japan to acquire nuclear arsenals, but even then both countries would be likelier to mollify you with bribes than risk war over this or that crisis. Washington could try to impose stiff sanctions on Beijing for providing you with oil, but there’s a limit to how effective sanctions can be against an economy the size of China’s.
Besides, you have ears. Behind Trump’s “fire and fury” bluster you hear his secretary of defence underscore the perils of war, and his secretary of state disavow any interest in regime change for the North. Even in this administration, nobody knows how to do “crazy” the way you do. They sound desperate for a deal.
A troubling thought for you: what if the Americans really did succeed in pressuring the Chinese to cut you off ? Or what if somebody found a Stuxnet- type solution to cripple your only operational refinery or blow up the pipeline through which you i mport crude from China? Your retaliatory options are few. You can’t simply level Seoul with artillery: that would mean fullscale war and your prompt destruction. When you get down to it, you’re making up in gumption what you lack in nearly every other resource.
Banish your fears. Washington wouldn’t dare. You’re too useful to Beijing. The whip hand in this crisis is yours. Not bad for a tyrant apprentice coming fully into his own.