In February 2018, Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s only sister, stepped off Kim Jong Un’s personal plane at Incheon Airport, outside Seoul. She had come to South Korea to participate in the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, held in Pyeongchang. Yo Jong was the first member of the Kim family to set foot in Seoul in sixty-eight years, since the outbreak of the Korean War. Her visit lasted only two days, but Korean and foreign media recorded every moment of her public appearances, including her handshake with President Moon Jae-in. The visit was a masterly display of public diplomacy, North Korean style, as will be explored at greater length in Chapter Three. Yet not even such a vivid, well-choreographed exhibition can hide the existence of the intense political-military struggle going on between the two Koreas.
South and North Korea have been locked in a deadly standoff since the end of the Korean War. For sixty-six years, armed forces have been deployed along the 38th parallel, which cuts across the peninsula. When Kim Il Sung—the founding dictator of North Korea and Kim Jong Un’s grandfather—failed to unify the peninsula by force, he resorted to guerrilla attacks, assassinations, and sabotage. His son Kim Jong Il masterminded the bombing of the Korean Air Lines jet in November 1987 that killed 115 passengers and crew members, as well as the bombing of President Chun Doo-hwan’s entourage in Rangoon, Burma, that killed eighteen South Korean officials in 1983.
With more than 1.2 million troops, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) is one of the most heavily armed militaries in the world. Because of the backwardness of the North Korean economy, the KPA is not as modernized as South Korea’s 625,000-strong forces. Moreover, 28,000 American troops—the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK)—continue to be deployed in South Korea as a symbol of America’s commitment to the South’s defense. Still, since Seoul’s ten million inhabitants live only 50 kilometers from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas, North Korea has a geographic advantage if it wants to start another war.
In the fall of 2017, North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, and U.S. president Donald Trump were exchanging increasingly harsh rhetoric. Kim had tested a thermonuclear bomb in September of that year and threatened to blast the United States if pressured. Trump retorted that his nuclear button was much larger than Kim’s.
“This is what I have for Kim,” Trump apparently said about Kim at the height of tensions between the United States and North Korea in October 2017, pointing to the “nuclear football”—the briefcase with the nuclear codes that always follows the president.1 Given his tendency toward bravado and knee-jerk remarks, Trump was probably just venting his frustrations at Kim. But this episode illustrates the powder-keg nature of tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim Yo Jong’s visit to the South in February 2018 was designed to buy breathing room for Kim Jong Un, since he was in no position to begin a suicidal war. After ratcheting up tensions throughout 2017, Kim realized that if he played his cards right, he just might be able to get relief from international sanctions, which, while first imposed in 2006, had been crippling his country in earnest since 2016. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who catapulted into office in May 2017 after the impeachment of former president Park Geun-hye, was more than willing to accommodate Kim’s peace overtures. And Yo Jong was the perfect choice to make that first trip to the South. She and Kim Jong Un are portrayed as the young and dynamic brother-sister duo determined to modernize their backward country.
Prior to her meeting with President Moon in the Blue House (the president’s office), Yo Jong wrote in the visitors’ book, “I hope that in their hearts our people in Pyongyang and Seoul will become closer and that a prosperous future of unification can be expedited.” It was signed, “Kim Yo Jong, High Level Delegation, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
When Kim Jong Un made an unprecedented visit to Panmunjom, on the South Korean side, on April 27, 2018, Yo Jong was at his side. During his first meeting with U.S. president Donald Trump in Singapore on June 18, 2018, she was with him. She also joined her brother during his second meeting with Trump, in Hanoi on February 27–28, 2019. Although the South Korean press focused on her elegant demeanor, they were totally missing the point. Kim Yo Jong isn’t merely a pretty face supporting her brother. She is an indispensable enforcer deeply integrated into the North Korean power structure.
More than anyone else in North Korea, Kim Yo Jong understands that serving the Supreme Leader comes with huge responsibilities and potential dangers. Her father’s younger sister, Kim Kyong Hui, married her college sweetheart, Jang Song Thaek. Kim Jong Il, the Great Leader, who was groomed as Kim Il Sung’s successor beginning in the early 1970s, formally assumed power in 1994. Even though Jang was sent to reeducation camps intermittently to keep him in his place, he was one of Kim Jong Il’s most trusted aides. Especially after Kim Jong Il suffered a debilitating stroke in 2008, Jang served as the gatekeeper. Most importantly, he was instrumental in ensuring Kim Jong Un’s rise to power in 2011.
On December 12, 2013, however, Jang was accused of high treason and every other imaginable crime against Kim Jong Un and North Korea. Handcuffed and held by two armed guards, Jang was sentenced by a military tribunal and executed immediately by antiaircraft guns. The de facto number two under Kim Jong Il’s reign was killed as soon as Kim Jong Un felt comfortable with his grip on power.
Four years later, on February 13, 2017, Kim Jong Un’s older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, was poisoned at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The once heir-apparent Number One Son, who had lived in exile since 2001, died minutes after drops of the deadly nerve agent VX were applied to his face by two women trained by North Korean agents.
As gruesome as such killings are, they’re not all that uncommon in dictatorships. What is important, however, is that Kim Jong Un is highly unlikely to have made such a momentous decision without involving his sister. Kim Yo Jong understands that even bloodlines are no guarantee of survival in North Korea’s Game of Thrones.
This fact lies at the very heart of understanding North Korea under Kim Jong Un. High officials in the Moon administration believe that Kim is fundamentally different from his father and grandfather. Educated partially in Switzerland, Kim is more urbane, comfortable in his own skin, and supremely confident. He knows more about the outside world than the previous Great Leaders—he apparently is fond of Swiss cheese, foie gras, and very expensive wines, and he is a basketball fan, as the South Korean and some foreign press like to emphasize. But that’s not why Kim is holding on to power.
Kim Jong Un is a product not only of the Kim family dictatorship but also of a brutal political system. He was determined never to let his older half-brother become the next ruler, and fought mercilessly to become his father’s successor. Kim’s most important goal is to guarantee his hold on power and perpetuate the Kim dynasty; all else remains secondary. He knows that to do this he has to feed his lieutenants with hard currency and incentives; he must ensure that each accrues just enough power to balance, and if necessary destroy, other power brokers.
One of the errors many analysts make is mirror imaging—the belief that whomever you’re trying to understand must share some traits with you. Many North Korea observers believe that because Kim Jong Un desperately wants to make North Korea into a modern economy and join the twenty-first century, he has no choice but to implement reforms. They think that because Kim invests so much money in defense—about 20 to 25 percent of GDP—he will reallocate scarce resources from the military into the economic sector.
There is every indication that Kim wants to modernize North Korea. The state economy collapsed in the mid-1990s during the great famine that killed as many as 1.5 million North Koreans. The jangmadang, or free markets, that have sprung up across North Korea are the de facto economy. Kim has legalized them because there is no viable alternative. Visitors to Pyongyang have noticed growing traffic jams, greater attention to fashion, people talking on cell phones, and taxis picking up customers. There are fast-food restaurants that serve North Korean versions of pizza and hamburgers. The city’s apartment buildings have gotten fresh paint jobs. But the moment he crosses the Rubicon and allows structural economic reforms, as China and Vietnam have done, Kim enters a no-man’s-land. The primordial dilemma for Kim is that in order to save the North Korean state, he has to reform the system, but the moment he reforms the system, the regime runs the risk of collapsing.
“We should properly plan and thoroughly implement the national operations aimed at maintaining, reinforcing, and reengineering the national economy as a whole,” said Kim during his New Year’s speech in January 2019.2 If China did it, why not North Korea? Why can’t North Korea emulate Vietnam? These are fundamental questions.
When China embarked on economic reforms in 1978, Deng Xiaoping was able to do so because of the abject failure of Mao’s social, political, and economic policies. The disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) not only bankrupted China economically but set it back two generations. Deng embarked on reforms because China had no choice, but also because he wasn’t tied to Mao Zedong’s gargantuan failures. Kim Jong Un doesn’t have that luxury, since the hand that he was dealt came from his father and grandfather.
Vietnamese analyst Huong Le Thu, based at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, remarked that there are major differences between North Korea and Vietnam, including the power structure, despite the fact that they’re characterized as communist regimes. “While North Korea is run in a dynastic manner, the VCP [Vietnamese Communist Party] has been faithful to the institutionalized collective leadership. There has never been a dynastic succession of power in Vietnam, and in fact, even the most charismatic leader of the party and its founder—Ho Chi Minh—revered as the founding father of independent Vietnam, never enjoyed such absolute power within the party as fellow communist leaders: the Kim family, Mao Zedong, or Josef Stalin in their respected parties.”3
Since early 2018, Kim has entered the world at a furious pace. He met with South Korean president Moon Jae-in for three summits, in April, May, and September 2018. For the first time, Kim sat with a U.S. president, in Singapore in June 2018. Regardless of Donald Trump’s clumsy diplomacy and his penchant for the limelight, he did what no other U.S. leader had done: He met face-to-face with a North Korean leader.
Trump pushed the envelope when he shook Kim’s hand for the third time on June 29, 2019, at the 38th parallel. Both Kim and Trump are reality TV stars who share a yearning for the limelight and constant reaffirmation of their “genius” leadership skills. After the failed second U.S.–North Korea summit in Hanoi in February 2019, Trump and Kim needed fresh momentum to keep their reality TV show running. No one knows what a final agreement will entail, but all Kim and Trump need to do is to push denuclearization under the carpet in the guise of a nuclear weapons freeze agreement.
Chinese president Xi Jinping didn’t allow Kim to visit Beijing until March 2018. Xi was upset that Kim continued to test nuclear weapons, including detonating a thermonuclear bomb in September 2017. It was essential for Kim Jong Un’s legitimacy, however, to be officially blessed by President Xi. For the second summit with Trump in Hanoi in February 2019, Kim traveled sixty hours by train from Pyongyang through China and finally to Vietnam. Although he left empty-handed, that meeting also shifted Kim’s international status, moving him away from being considered a pariah and toward being thought of as a young leader in a hurry. Kim had his first meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok on April 25, 2019.
The major stumbling block to normalized relations between the United States and North Korea is Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. Estimates vary, but North Korea is thought to have between thirty and sixty nuclear warheads, with the ability to build three to five additional warheads annually. Ever since the first North Korean nuclear crisis erupted in 1993 when North Korea threatened to remove itself from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—which it subsequently did—all diplomatic efforts have failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.
As important as nuclear weapons are, however, other threats remain. North Korea has more than a thousand ballistic missiles, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. It has chemical and biological weapons, and it is increasingly adroit at launching cyberattacks.
Can Kim Jong Un afford to give up nuclear weapons? The short answer is no. There are many, including those in the South Korean government today, who believe that Kim is committed to denuclearization. As Trump found out in Hanoi, however, North Korea’s definition of denuclearization doesn’t coincide with America’s. Washington wants the total dismantling and destruction of all nuclear weapons. Pyongyang wants a phased reduction, and only after the U.S. nuclear umbrella over South Korea is removed—in other words, it really doesn’t want to denuclearize at all.
The North Korean imbroglio is going to continue. There will continue to be high-level talks between the two Koreas and between the United States and North Korea. Given Kim’s affection for showmanship, one can’t rule out a trip to Seoul, but he will only do so when he is sure of getting major compromises and incentives from South Korea. And Kim’s ultimate diplomatic prize would be an invitation to Washington, D.C., to ink a nuclear freeze accord.
The second U.S.–North Korea summit in Hanoi ended abruptly. Trump said that he had no choice but to walk away rather than sign a bad deal. The U.S. president was deeply disappointed because he thought he could charm Kim into giving up his nuclear weapons, and he badly needs a major foreign policy victory going into the 2020 presidential election. Kim isn’t a seasoned leader, but he knows that without nuclear weapons, North Korea would not pose an existential threat to South Korea, Japan, or the United States.
Ultimately, “Mission: Impossible” best characterizes what Kim Jong Un wants to achieve: modernizing North Korea, without damaging his family-run dictatorship; luring South Korean investment and hard-currency earnings on the promise of greater inter-Korean exchange, without undertaking fundamental economic reforms; emulating his only patron, China, without making North Korea totally dependent on China; drawing South Korea much more closely into its orbit, without offering reciprocal measures; and normalizing relations with the United States, even while retaining his weapons of mass destruction.
He has, for now, a willing partner in President Moon, who also wants to ensure that the peace train remains on schedule. Kim is betting that despite Trump’s rhetoric of never giving in to North Korea’s nuclear blackmail, Trump will ultimately be tempted to go down in history as the president who brought lasting peace to the Korean Peninsula. Still, despite the seeming convergence of political interests between Kim, Moon, and Trump, a fundamental remaking of the Korean Peninsula can happen only if Kim Jong Un makes a strategic decision to save North Korea by dismantling the Kim dynasty. So long as he remains in power, however, Kim will never make that choice.