The “Respected Supreme Leader” has been the center of attention — just as he likes it.
SEOUL — As 2017 opened, Kim Jong Un delivered a New Year’s address in which he declared that North Korea had “entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of intercontinental ballistic missile.”
As 2017 draws to a close, Kim can reflect on a year in which he’s not only kept his resolutions, he’s exceeded them: A missile that can fly 8,000 miles to reach Washington, D. C.? Check. A hydrogen bomb 17 times the size of the one the United States dropped on Hiroshima? Check. The whole world paying attention to him and taking him seriously? Double check.
For good measure, Kim had his half brother and potential rival murdered in a gruesome chemical weapons attack, and dispensed with a bunch of top apparatchiks who might have had different ideas about how to run the country.
And he’s done it all while facing a new and unconventional adversary in Donald Trump, a president who has mocked Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and has repeatedly threatened military action.
It’s been a good year for Kim.
“Kim has now consolidated power internally, is 90-95 percent done with the nuclear program and there are no signs of serious dissent within the regime,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former Korea analyst at the CIA who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “That’s cause for cheer in the dictator’s household.”
Six years ago this month, when the 27-year-old Kim succeeded his father, there was widespread skepticism that the inexperienced youngster would be able to maintain the world’s most totalitarian state. He was viewed as something of a cartoon villain.
But he’s proven just as ruthless and controlling as his father and grandfather before him — perhaps even more so. And he has consolidated his leadership of the regime, most recently by promoting himself to “Third General,” replacing his grandmother in the North Korean holy trinity of revolutionary leaders.
Far from struggling with the job, he appears more confident and bolder than ever. On a trip this month to Mount Paektu, the spiritual home of the Korean people but one that has been co-opted by the Kim regime, the third generation leader appeared to put himself on equal footing with his grandfather, “Eternal President” Kim Il Sung.
The Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the Workers’ Party, ran 60 photos of the visit. Fifty of them showed Kim, including ones of him standing in a wool coat and dress shoes after — according to the paper — climbing the 9,000-foot snow-covered mountain.
