Kim is again defying expectations, but this time by trying to appear reasonable.
TOKYO — North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was all broad smiles and hearty handshakes during an unprecedented meeting with South Korean envoys this week, one in which he agreed to talk to his archenemy in Washington and stop missile and nuclear tests while talking.
Were they the smiles of an authoritarian leader under pressure, a man desperately trying to smooth-talk his way out of sanctions that threaten the stability of his regime? A man increasingly alarmed that the unpredictable American president might be serious about military strikes?
Or were they the smiles of an authoritarian leader who feels supremely confident in his position? A man who declared at the end of last year that he’d “completed” his missile program and is now ready to deal with the United States — on an equal footing?
As with many things about the world’s most impenetrable country, there is plenty of speculation but little in the way of fact.
“What is Kim Jong Un trying to get out of this?” asked Gordon Flake, a longtime Korea expert in Washington who is now at the University of Western Australia’s U. S. Asia Center. “I don’t know and I don’t think he knows.”
In the six years that he’s been in power, Kim has defied all expectations. Despite taking over the family business at the age of 27 and having no military or political experience, he’s secured control of a regime founded by his grandfather when Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.
Last year he oversaw an astonishing series of missile launches that disproved skepticism that North Korea would never be able to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching all of the United States. And his nuclear scientists detonated a hydrogen bomb exponentially bigger than the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945.
But the international sanctions imposed by the United Nations as punishments for those developments — sanctions which attacked core parts of the economy, including coal, seafood and garment exports — are now thought to be affecting the North Korean regime.
The United States is leading an international “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea. China, North Korea’s biggest trading partner, appears to be joining in, perhaps convinced that the alternative is war.
“Now China faces three bad options, not two,” said Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul who studied at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang. “The bad option is a stable nuclear North Korea. The worse option is North Korea in a state of political crisis. And the worst option is war.”
Concerned that Trump is serious with his threats to “totally destroy” North Korea, the government in Beijing seems to be have updated its previously halfhearted approach to sanctions to something more serious — even if this risks destabilizing the regime in Pyongyang and sending floods of refugees into China.
“A war is worse than instability,” Lankov said. “So for the time being China is on board.”
Is this what caused Kim’s sudden interest in rapprochement with South Korea and, potentially, the United States? Kim is due to meet the South’s president, Moon Jae-in, next month for a summit just over the southern side of the line that divides the Koreas.
