When Kim Jong-Un first appeared in Pyongyang’s carefully stage-managed public spotlight in fall 2010, North Korea watchers began scouring for clues to learn whether the pudgy heir apparent would be a reformist or simply the newest face of a despotic regime.
Fifteen months after taking the reins of the hermit state following the death of his stoic father, North Korea’s 30-year-old leader appears to be careening toward the latter — at least on the surface.
Having disavowed his country’s armistice with South Korea and threatened to fire his increasingly capable missiles toward the United States, Kim has put the Korean Peninsula and Washington on a war footing. His behavior follows the playbook of his predecessors, with one notable and potentially dangerous departure that appears to have him backed into a corner.
“His father and his grandfather always figured into their provocation cycle an off-ramp of how to get out of it,” Adm. Samuel Locklear III, the commander of U.S. troops in the Pacific, told Congress last week. “It’s not clear to me that he has thought through how to get out of it. This is what makes this scenario, I think, particularly challenging.”
A cadre of North Korea scholars has spent decades piecing together a portrait of the eccentric, secretive Kim family by poring through mounds of propaganda, defector accounts and the limited, sporadic contact the regime has had with the West.
By declaring war on South Korea, he seems to be channeling his firebrand grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, the iconic founder of North Korea who plunged the region into a war that killed as many as 5 million people, including 35,500 American troops, in the 1950s. U.S. officials are on alert for a new provocative act tied to the elder Kim’s birthday, which is widely celebrated in North Korea, on Monday.
As Kim Jong-Un eases into the top job of a nation whose elite has long been presumed to be rife with intrigue and rivalries, he appears determined to assert a tight grip on the levers of power.
“He has an inferiority complex,” said Kongdan Oh Hassig, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Va. “He is trying to show that he has a strategic mind, that the military stands behind him and that no one stands against him.”
Steely resolve
As a child, Kim was impetuous and competitive to a fault, according to a 2003 memoir by the family’s former sushi chef, writing under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto. Kim Jong-Il adored his tempestuous son, according to Fujimoto, perhaps seeing in him the steely resolve that has kept the family firmly in control of the pariah state since its creation in 1948.
Using a fake name and pretending to be the son of a North Korean diplomat, Kim Jong-Un in 1998 was enrolled in a private school in a sleepy Swiss town, where he spent at least two years. Classmates have been quoted describing him as a good pupil who exhibited an ardent fascination with American basketball — one that extends into adulthood, as evidenced by his hosting of former NBA star Dennis Rodman earlier this year. In 2000, he vanished from the school without saying goodbye, and little is known about his later teenage years.
Kim Jong-Il had been carefully groomed for the role he assumed in 1994. After he suffered a stroke in 2008, succession plans became an urgent priority, North Korean analysts say, and Kim Jong-Un emerged as the front-runner.
“Kim Jong-Un showed a type of leadership and toughness that his older brothers didn’t have,” said Ken Gause, a senior researcher at Alexandria, Va.-based CNA Strategic Studies who has cultivated an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kims. “That leadership and toughness is required for leadership in North Korea, where, unless you have the personality to play the game, the politics can eat you up really quickly.”
During his first months in power, Kim Jong-Un took on a highly visible role, a stark change compared with his reclusive father.
The gregarious statesman was shown touring improbably modern venues in Pyongyang, including a fitness center and a lavish floating restaurant.
“Kim Jong-Un is a much better politician than his father,” said former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who has been invited to North Korea on official visits but who has not met Kim. “He gives better speeches and seems more naturally at ease with people in his greetings and his physical movements.”
Calculated gamble
If factions of the military are uneasy, experts said, Kim has given them more reasons to be unsettled than simply his youth. Last April, he startled observers by acknowledging the failure of a satellite launch. Such admissions are unheard of in a country where citizens display nothing but adulation for the military.
Later that month, he said North Koreans should no longer have to “tighten their belts” and could look forward to enjoying “the wealth and prosperity of socialism as much as they like.”
If Kim is in fact interested in reforms, he might be taking a calculated gamble by raising the specter of bloodshed.
“Kim Jong-Un is making an effort to have a better negotiating position with the U.S. and South Korea,” said Park Hyeong-jung, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute of National Unification in Seoul.
The deepest insight into the young leader’s thinking, North Korea experts reluctantly note, may come from the account of the only American he is known to have met: Rodman, the colorful former basketball star who traveled to Pyongyang this year.
“He wants (President) Obama to do one thing: call him,” Rodman said in an interview with ABC News about his late-February trip. “He told me, ‘If you can, Dennis — I don’t want to do war. I don’t want to do war.’ “
