The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 143
Tensions with the US spiraled throughout 2017 when President Donald Trump pursued the so-called maximum pressure policy and threatened to totally destroy North Korea in a rain of “fire and fury.” There was even talk by the Trump administration of launching a preemptive strike to give Kim Jong Un “a bloody nose.” Kim, in turn, called Trump a “rogue” and a “dotard” and released videos with simulated explosions of the US Capitol.27 But as 2017 turned into 2018, Kim Jong Un abruptly turned from his own maximum pressure policy to maximum engagement with the United States and South Korea.
From Kim Jong Un’s perspective, he had consolidated his rule. He had purged and assassinated all would-be rivals and threats to his power, real or imagined. During the first six years of his rule, he had relentlessly accelerated the North’s nuclear and missile program and obtained a credible nuclear deterrent. Now it was time for an image makeover to go from being seen by the world as a cruel, unpredictable, nuclear-armed tyrant to metamorphosizing into a warm, gracious, approachable statesman. He would now seek to shore up his rule by improving relations with the outside world with the eventual goal of securing international acceptance of the North as a legitimate nuclear weapons power.
Kim set the tone with the New Year’s address in January 2018, which hinted at improving ties with South Korea. Then he dispatched his trusted and attractive younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, to South Korea to participate in the Winter Olympics, marking the first time since the Korean War that a member of the ruling Kim family had visited the South. The thaw at the Pyongchang Olympics soon led to Kim’s first summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. At their first meeting, at the DMZ in April 2018, Kim even stepped into South Korean territory, the first time ever for a North Korean leader.
These meetings laid the groundwork for Kim to achieve one achievement that had eluded both his father and grandfather—a summit with a US president and all the prestige that such a meeting confers. Kim Jong Un met with Trump in June 2018 in Singapore. Two more meetings followed—in Hanoi in February 2019 and at the Demilitarized Zone in June 2019, where Trump became the first American president to set foot in North Korea. Trump was giddy. He declared that he and Kim “fell in love.”28 While these summits did not produce any tangible step toward denuclearization, they did serve to legitimize the hereditary ruler of North Korea as a world leader—and to strengthen his relationship with Beijing.
China has consistently supported the Kim dynasty in the hope of preserving a friendly nation on its northeastern border that would provide a buffer between China and the democratic, pro-American South Korea, where 28,500 American troops are stationed. But Xi Jinping had been unhappy with Kim Jong Un. The young ruler’s nuclear and missile tests had fomented regional instability, his unwillingness to undertake market reforms were an implicit rebuke to China’s more liberal economic policies, and his assassinations of Jang Song Taek (the North’s main liaison to the Chinese regime) and Kim Jong Nam (who was living in Macau under Chinese protection) were seen as affronts to Beijing. Xi expressed his displeasure by cutting off oil shipments periodically, including, on one occasion, for three consecutive months. Beijing also signed onto tougher UN sanctions with each nuclear test. By late 2017, Beijing had agreed to nine major United Nations Security Council resolutions that banned some ninety percent of North Korea’s most lucrative exports, including coal, iron ore, seafood, and textiles. Beijing, perhaps spooked by Trump’s fire and fury rhetoric, was finally doing its part to implement sanctions after years of dragging its feet.
But Kim and Trump’s decision to hold summits changed all that. Xi Jinping didn’t want to be sidelined. Xi would meet with Kim Jong Un four times, including visiting Pyongyang. Beijing returned to relaxing pressure on North Korea. (Kim’s decision to close the border with China in January 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, however, did more to exacerbate the economic situation in the North than sanctions ever managed to do.)
Kim furiously picked up the pace for the North’s nuclear and missile modernization programs after the failure of the Hanoi summit—when he felt betrayed that Trump had not been willing to lift the majority of sanctions in return for a promise to stop work at one of the North’s nuclear facilities (at Yongbyon). In an October 2020 parade marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party, Kim showed off a variety of North Korean technology including a new submarine-launched ballistic missile (the Pukusong 4) and a new ICBM dubbed the Hwasong 16—the largest, liquid-fueled, road-mobile ICBM in the world. By 2021, North Korea had missiles capable of hitting any point in the United States. It had also amassed up to sixty nuclear warheads and enough fissile material to build at least six additional bombs every year.29 The available evidence suggested that Kim was moving onto the next step: placing multiple warheads on a single missile, which would frustrate US missile defenses.
In addition to improving the North’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, Kim continued to prioritize asymmetric technologies, particularly in cyber warfare. According to Kim, “Cyberwarfare [sic], along with nuclear weapons and missiles, is an ‘all-purpose sword’ that guarantees our military’s capability to strike relentlessly.”30 South Korean press reports claimed that the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), North Korea’s agency for both traditional clandestine operations as well as cyber operations, had more than 6,000 cyber warriors. Its cyber unit 121, comprised of both an intelligence component and an attack component, was headquartered in Pyongyang but also had a bureau that conduct operations from within China. Unit 121 disrupted US and South Korean systems by infiltrating their computer networks, hacking to obtain intelligence, and planting viruses. North Korean hackers repeatedly penetrated US and South Korean computer networks. North Korea was suspected, for example, of staging a cyberattack in 2014 on Sony Pictures before the planned release of The Interview, a satirical movie about the assassination of Kim Jong Un. Cyberattacks were particularly attractive because of the low cost of entry and high yields, and they had the added benefit of difficulties and delay in attribution, creating plausible deniability.
Cyberattacks and other illicit activities were yet another way for Kim to stay in power. The regime was able to circumvent sanctions with the income generated by its criminality. It has a long record of illicit activities including smuggling cigarettes, counterfeiting currency, making and distributing narcotics like methamphetamines, and proliferating ballistic missiles to countries like Iran and Syria. Now add cybercrimes to the list. The UN Panel of Experts estimated in 2019 that the Kim regime had been able to generate $2 billion through cybercrime by stealing from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges. These funds were then funneled back into the nuclear program.31
IV
The North Korean state has repeatedly defied predictions of imminent demise. It didn’t collapse after the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994 or the death of Kim Jong Il in 2011. More than a decade after Kim Jong Il’s demise, Kim Jong Un remains entrenched in power.
The three Kims have built a system without equal. The world’s sole Communist-Confucian hereditary dynasty rules the most militarized and tyrannized society on the globe. The crimes against humanity occurring in North Korea are unparalleled in the contemporary world—it is a repressive, totalitarian system that confines hundreds of thousands of its citizens in slave-labor camps while all others are kept in constant terror. It also a country that spends billions of dollars on armaments while at the same time many people literally starve. Living standards among the North Korean citizens are among the lowest in the world. (North Korea’s GDP per capita, based on 2015 figures, is estimated by the Central Intelligence Agency as 216th in the world.)32
Yet, in spite of its failures to feed its own people, North Korea has shown an uncanny ability to survive. It has long outlived most other Communist regimes in the world—and it remains far more tightly regimented than the four other surviving Communist states: Cuba, China, Vietnam, and Laos. Other dictators, from Ceausescu to Qaddafi to Saddam Hussein, have been toppled and killed. Kim Jong Un remains alive and in power. The North’s rulers have shown scant regard for the survival of their own people—but they have been supremely successful at ensuring their own survival.
The North Korean regime’s strategy for survival has remained remarkably unchanged over more than seventy years. It is predicated on terror, repression, propaganda, ideological indoctrination, and information blockade. By maintaining an iron grip on North Korea’s population, with a level of totalitarianism unseen since Stalin’s heyday, three generations of Kims have been able to channel their country’s scarce resources into expanding the military and the police state without fear of popular unrest. Meanwhile they have bought off the elites with luxury goods and privileges unavailable to the general population.
North Korea has not just survived but has been able to wield influence far beyond what its puny economy would suggest. North Korea’s total GDP is comparable to Burkina Faso or Albania, yet it has become a nuclear-armed state and a player on the world stage. Its rulers have shown tremendous skill in managing relationships with far more powerful countries such as China, Russia, and the United States. Pyongyang’s dealings with Washington and Seoul have been remarkably successful in keeping the regime’s principal foes off balance. Although sorely provoked, neither South Korea nor the United States has been willing to risk another Korean war—even in the days before North Korea became a formidable nuclear power. From the US perspective, North Korea has always been a second-tier threat and never an existential one that would have justified running the immense risks needed to achieve total victory. US and South Korean leaders understandably have preferred to manage the threat rather than to eliminate it. North Korean leaders, in turn, have skillfully leveraged the fear they inspired in Washington and Seoul.
The question for the long term is whether the Kim regime can continue to survive using the same strategies. The regime is hardly in imminent danger of collapse, but some cracks are starting to appear.
First, while all of Kim’s purges and executions helped to strengthen his rule in the short term by terrorizing potential rivals, they may corrode long-term elite support of the regime. The elites know that if Kim can turn on his uncle and his brother, any of them could be the next to be killed. Second, Kim is hardly in the best of health. He is a heavy drinker and smoker with a family history of health problems from diabetes, high cholesterol, and heart ailments. If he were to drop dead suddenly, it is not clear who would succeed him since his own children are too young to take over. That could trigger turmoil and a power struggle that might destabilize the regime. Third, while Kim Jong Un was able to preserve the police state he inherited, high levels of corruption are eroding the strength of the security services. Fourth, while Kim maintained an information blockade, the regime had been unable to completely block the flow of outside information increasingly seeping into the North through borders with China and even South Korea; this is chipping away at regime myths and undermining the solidarity of the North Korean people. Fifth, and finally, North Korea remains burdened by a failing economy notwithstanding the relative success of private-sector markets. Economic reforms have been half-hearted and insufficient to reverse the economy’s continuing decline.
While the popular uprisings that have toppled dictators in countries such as East Germany, Poland, Romania, the Philippines, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia are unlikely in North Korea, they are still a reminder that sudden change is always possible. At some point, the North Korean control system could fail—but it is very difficult to determine when that might be. North Korea has proved to be a wily survivor. But it is unlikely that a regime that lacks the consent of the governed and that cannot deliver essential services or even provide food to all its citizens will last forever. Sooner or later the odds are that the North Korean regime will join other failed dictatorships on the dustbin of history—whether that happens in 10 years or 100.
1. Han S. Park, North Korea: Politics of Unconventional Wisdom (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 47.
2. David R. Hawk, Thank You, Father Kim Il Sung: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea (Washington, DC: US Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2005), v, available at https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/resources/stories/pdf/nkwitnesses_wgraphics.pdf.
3. Human Rights Council, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” United Nations, February 7, 2014, available at https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/108/66/PDF/G1410866.pdf?OpenElement.
4. Robert Collins, “Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System,” Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, June 6, 2012, 7, available at https://www.hrnk.org/uploads/pdfs/HRNK_Songbun_Web.pdf.
5. Gavan McCormack, “Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea,” New Left Review 198 (1993): 35.
6. Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1999), 31.
7. National Foreign Assessment Center, Korea: The Economic Race between the North and the South (Langley, VA: Central Intelligence Agency, 1978), 8.
8. Eberstadt, The End of North Korea, 35.
9. Eberstadt, The End of North Korea, 134.
10. R. Jeffrey Smith, “Perry Sharply Warns North Korea,” Washington Post, May 31, 1994.
11. Sue Mi Terry, “North Korea’s Nuclear Family,” Foreign Affairs 100:5 (2021), available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2021-08-24/north-koreas-nuclear-family.
12. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, “Famine in North Korea Redux?,” Working Paper Series, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2008, 2.
13. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, “Aid to North Korea,” Peterson Institute of International Economics, August 1, 2007, available at https://www.piie.com/commentary/op-eds/aid-north-korea.
14. Evan Ramstad, “Studies Ponder Reunification … Some Day,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2010.
15. Namgung Min, “$800,000 Spent Preserving Kim Il Sung’s Body,” Daily NK, April 16, 2008, available at https://www.dailynk.com/english/800000-spent-preserving-kim-il-sun/.
16. Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001), 395.
17. Kim Hakjoon, Dynasty: The Hereditary Succession Politics of North Korea (Stanford, CA: Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2015), 153.
18. Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 2019,” US Department of State, https://2017-2021.state.gov/world-military-expenditures-and-arms-transfers/index.html, accessed December 4, 2021.
19. “Khan ‘Gave N Korea Centrifuges,’ ” BBC, August 24, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4180286.stm.
20. US Department of State, “Joint Statement of the Fourth Round of the Six-Party Talks Beijing,” September 19, 2005, available at https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2005/53490.htm.
21. David Lague and Donald Greenless, “Squeeze on Banco Delta Asia Hit North Korea Where It Hurt—Asia-Pacific—International Herald Tribune,” New York Times, January 18, 2007.
22. Jonathan Watts and Tania Branigan, “North Korea’s Leader Will Not Last Long, Says Kim Jong-un’s Brother,” The Guardian, January 17, 2012, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/17/north-korea-leader-not-long. See Tom Parry, “My Brother the Dictator Is a Big Joke—Book,” The Daily Mirror, January 18, 2012.
23. Victor Cha and Lisa Collins, “The Markets: Private Economy and Capitalism in North Korea?” Beyond Parallel/CSIS, August 26, 2018, available at https://beyondparallel.csis.org/markets-private-economy-capitalism-north-korea/.
24. Cha and Collins, “The Markets.”
25. “North Korea Requires Students to Take 81-Hour Course on Kim Jong-un,” KBS World, November 25, 2014, available at http://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_view.htm?lang=e&Seq_Code=106892.
26. Josh Smith, “ ‘Treasured Sword:’ North Korea Seen as Reliant as Ever on Nuclear Arsenal as Talks Stall,” Reuters, November 13, 2018, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-nuclear-analysis/treasured-sword-north-korea-seen-as-reliant-as-ever-on-nuclear-arsenal-as-talks-stall-idUSKCN1NI132.
27. See, for instance, Erica Pardney, “The Trump Admin’s ‘Bloody Nose’ Strategy to Strike North Korea,” Axios, January 8, 2018.
28. Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey, “ ‘We Fell in Love:’ Trump and Kim Shower Praise, Stroke Egos on Path to Nuclear Negotiations,” Washington Post, February 25, 2019.
29. Congressional Research Service, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missile Programs,” December 13, 2021, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/IF10472.pdf.
30. David Sanger, David Kirkpatrick, and Nicole Perlroth, “The World Once Laughed at North Korea as a Cyberpower. No More,” New York Times, October 15, 2017.
