‘Air Force Un’: Is Kim a fly leader?
With a million-man army, a bevy of intercontinental ballistic missiles and a growing nuclear arsenal, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has sought to project the image of a powerful leader who can face off against President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping.
Yet as he prepares for a possible summit with Trump next month, it’s not clear that Kim possesses another piece of crucial hardware for the aspiring global negotiator — an airplane that could reliably fly him across the Pacific Ocean, or to Europe, without stopping.
“We used to make fun of what they have — it’s old stuff,” said Sue Mi Terry, who served as a senior CIA analyst on Korean issues during the George W. Bush administration. “We would joke about their old Soviet planes.”
Most public speculation over the undecided summit location has focused on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, where South Korean President Moon Jae-in will meet Kim this month. Others have pointed to nearby China or Russia. But some analysts have suggested Trump would favor a grander setting in the U.S. or another country outside the region — such as Singapore, Switzerland or Sweden.
That has raised a question about how Kim, who made his first trip outside North Korea to Beijing in an armored train last month, would get there.
“In terms of his traveling anywhere, it would not be a problem — the South Koreans or the Swedes would give him a ride,” said Victor Cha, who served as senior Asia director at the National Security Council under Bush. “But it would be embarrassing.”
If Kim took his own plane, stopping to refuel on the way to any summit could also prove embarrassing by highlighting the limits of the aircraft — and where to stop would be complicated as well, given the number of countries that have sanctioned North Korea.
The logistics of Kim’s movements are likely to draw less public scrutiny than, say, whether the North is serious about denuclearization or how Trump is preparing. But Kim’s surprise visit to Beijing offers a window into the fundamental dichotomy of North Korea, as he attempts to modernize the regime’s image abroad while presiding over a nation where the vast majority of its 25 million citizens lack sufficient food and electricity.
This sharp contrast is the byproduct of a nation that has remained cloistered since the Korean War armistice in 1953 and invested a lopsided portion of its limited trade revenue into the development of military weapons.
Since assuming power in 2011, Kim, who is thought to be in his early 30s, has tried to project a more charismatic and worldly image than his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, Kim Il Sung. That has included building skyscrapers in the capital city of Pyongyang, constructing a luxury ski resort in Kangwon Province to bolster international tourism, and opening several private runways near Kim family compounds for singleengine personal jets.
Kim Jong Il was afraid of flying and, on the rare occasion that he left Pyongyang, rode in an armored train similar to the one used by his son on the China trip last month. In recent years, the younger Kim staged a series of photo-ops designed to demonstrate that not only does he not share his father’s aversion to the skies — he took international flights to attend boarding school in Switzerland — but that he is actually a pilot.
In December 2014, North Korean state media released a video of him behind the controls of the An-148, a Ukrainian-made plane designed for regional trips that was acquired by Air Koryo, the North’s national airline.
Other options for Kim, such as borrowing a plane from Russia or China, would raise additional security concerns, experts said, including the likelihood that the aircraft would be bugged. Besides, “it would probably not be the kind of signal you’d want to send to his domestic audience if he got off a foreign plane,” said Curtis Melvin, editor of the North Korea Economy Watch blog.
And after the summit was over, Kim would “have to return it,” Melvin added. “God knows how that would go.”