Kim Jong Un is “reckless,” “dangerous, unpredictable, prone to violence and … delusions of grandeur,” and nuked up. Is that all?
North Korea, which was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, has showered Baekryeong Island, a disputed South Korean-held Island in the Yellow Sea, and the site of the 2010 ROKS Cheonan attack, with leaflets threatening to turn the island into “a huge tomb.”
[Screen grab from MBC, via the Chosun Ilbo]
The leaflets did not explain why Kim Jong Un is not content to keep killing off his unwanted relatives, but a China-based, quasi-official North Korean-affiliated website, Uriminzokkiri, called South Korea’s response to Jang Song-Thaek’s purge “a political provocation.”
If you’re willing to make that link, it would be the first affirmation of President Park’s warning just yesterday that “Seoul should be fully prepared for possible North Korean hostilities” and “more ‘reckless provocations’” from the North, presumably to reunite Pyongyang’s factions against a common enemy. The Defense Minister was more specific:
“North Korea is likely to make a provocation between late January and March,” South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin said in a video conference with high-ranking military officials yesterday. “The execution of Jang Song-thaek could become a significant turning point in the entire 68-year history of North Korea.”
Consistent with the implications of this, the U.S. and South Korea have agreed to step up their preparations for “all possible scenarios.” Another “possible scenario” they’re no doubt discussing would involve a North Korean strike, with the South Koreans forewarning the U.S., “Don’t even try to stop us.”
There are also fresh rumors, sourced to a member of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, that North Korea is fixing to test a nuke and launch a missile (the government later clarified that it sees no imminent signs). South Korea’s spies have been on a hot streak lately, but if I may say so, I was just a bit ahead of them. Not that you can ever be far off in predicting that North Korea is about to do something stupid. It’s like predicting Tuesday. It’s less impressive than, say, calling Roh Moo Hyun “a ledge case” five years before he jumped off a ledge (OK, a cliff, but still), or predicting here and now that Kim Jong Un’s cause of death will be a gunshot wound administered by a close associate. You don’t need an intelligence agency at your disposal to know everything.
The question on everyone’s lips these days is, “Can he really be that stupid?” I’m on record describing Kim Jong Un as “,” “a complete doofus,” and “a volatile man-child with … no adult supervision,” so put me down for “yes.” I think this qualifies me as a pioneer in the industry, because I was saying things like this when a lot of people were trying to brand him as the next Gorby (but more on that later). But why just listen to me when you can hear it two years later from someone who did have an intelligence agency at his disposal?
The U.S. government reached alarming conclusions about the personal character of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un based on interviews with people who knew him when he was a student in Switzerland, former U.S. Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell revealed on CNN over the weekend. [….]
“We went to great pains to interview almost everyone – classmates, others – to try to get a sense of what his character was like,” Campbell said. “The general recounting of those experiences led us to believe that he was dangerous, unpredictable, prone to violence and with delusions of grandeur.” [CNN, via Max Fisher, Washington Post]
We live in such interesting times.
South Korean reports tell us that the elites are very afraid, and that ordinary people are terrified of not showing enough enthusiasm when applauding for “The Marshal.” At least outside North Korea, there are some signs that regime cohesion is breaking down. The Joongang Ilbo estimates that Kim has already replaced 44% of his senior cadres, and that Jang had between 20,000 and 30,000 followers, enough to fill a large prison camp.
Most analysts, regardless of their ideology, are now calling the purge a miscalculation and suggesting that it will eventually fracture the regime. Nicholas Eberstadt, writing at The Washington Post, predicts that the purge will likely cull many more of Jang’s associates, thinks it will scare the bejeebers (my word) out of those who were close to Jang, and questions Kim Jong Un’s judgment for making such a risky move so soon.
Prof. Sung-Yoon Lee, appearing on the PBS News Hour the other night, argued that Kim is showing his confidence, but recklessly. (That word again.) Lee also adds cred to the view I expressed here, that by admitting that Jang was secretly plotting against Kim, the regime has forfeited its illusion of omnipotence and unanimity. He predicts more purges, violence, and repression; argues that the purge reaffirms Kim’s impetuous and brash nature; and calls it “inconceivable” that Kim will live a long and healthy life.
Scott Snyder writes that the purge “has exposed deep divisions within the Kim family leadership,” “has shocked North Koreans and outsiders alike with its suddenness and its brutality,” and has “likely bred fear and shock at every level of North Korean society.” He ends with that word again: “reckless.”
The AP’s Foster Klug writes that the purge destroyed “the myth of a serene, all-powerful ruling dynasty that enjoyed universal love and support at home” and “acknowledges dissension and a dangerous instability.” He quotes Brian Myers, who says, “The Kim dynasty legend is the main capital he has, and he’s squandering it like there’s no tomorrow.” The piece’s most astonishing passage isn’t notable for what it says, but for who says it.
Kim Jong Un “has managed to tarnish his own image, look like a modern Caligula and give the lie to 90 percent of the bombast emanating from Pyongyang,” said Bruce Cumings, a Korea specialist and history professor at the University of Chicago, adding that the move indicates high-level and deep divisions. “Whatever one thinks of this regime, from the standpoint of the top leadership this was a politically stupid, self-defeating move,” he said.
To Korea watchers, a Bruce Cumings criticism of a North Korean leader is the equivalent of Jim Nabors’s gay wedding. Even if the affirmation itself is hardly controversial anymore, you’re still entitled to be gobsmacked upon hearing who offered it.
Even John Kerry called the purge “an ominous sign” of instability and danger, called Kim himself “reckless” (that word again) and “insecure,” and compared him to Saddam Hussein. Video here.
We’ve come a long way since 2012, when Ri Sol Ju, who is not dead, symbolized everything we wanted to believe about North Korea. While starvation and cannibalism were reported just a few miles south of Pyongyang, correspondents in the capital saw significant national policy implications in Ri’s fashions, her physical appearance, and court entertainers in mini-dresses and knockoff Mickey Mouse costumes. One, dazzled by the “jumbotrons, the multicolor lights of the newly built residential complex on Changjon Street, and the spectacular 2013 new year fireworks,” saw “hope in the air, and new positive expectations about the future.” To support his case, he even cited the closure of Camp 22, though he didn’t bother to mention the disappearance of its 30,000 prisoners.
No one crawled out further on this slender limb than John DeLury, who argued that Kim Jong Un was bringing glasnost to North Korea. Reread this piece by DeLury in Yale Global, just to see how poorly the analysis has held up:
[A]lready Kim’s leadership style, political inclinations and attitude toward the world are starting to come into focus – and a big surprise is that Kim appears to be heading in what he describes as a “new, creative and enterprising” direction, nudging the national compass away from a fixation on his father’s “military-first politics” toward a Deng-like pragmatic emphasis on economic development.
I’m sure DeLury is a nice enough fellow, but somewhere, he must be wishing he hadn’t written this. It’s easy, of course, to criticize a necessarily speculative view in hindsight, but even then, it was common knowledge that Uday Hussein, Hannibal Khaddafy, and Nicu Ceausescu also enjoyed Europe’s casinos, resorts, and fleshpots. Even then, we could see the evidence that the regime’s brutality was actually intensifying.
I guess it’s like they say. One man’s Gorby is another man’s Caligula.
The purge gets overwhelmingly written up as a sign of division and an omen of “interesting” times to come but doesn’t the historical evidence on purges point rather in the direction of solidification of the regime? Whether it was Hitler purging Roehm in 1934 or Stalin purging Trotsky (and Zinoviev and Bukharin) or Khrushchev purging Beria or even the Suryeong purging both the Russian faction and the Yanan faction in his heyday – they all led to the dictators’ FIRMER hold on power, not weaker. The purge was – I think – always a sign that “I have the power to kill you just because I can”, it contains a message of power consolidation. My list of purges is, of course, far from exhaustive and I am not immune to confirmation bias in selecting my evidence but how many instances of purges leading to regime instability and demise could we actually find in history? I mean I too am rooting for the demise of the Kim regime but I just cannot see the evidence for optimism on this score.
Tomas
Tomas C, I share your sense of uncertainty. A thorough purge can just as well solidify Kim’s grasp on power and make him an uncontested ruler over his starving penal colony, I mean, country.
But what we all know for certain, is that purge is a very risky strategy. It can go both ways and DPRK in its current state does not give an impression of resilience or stability.
Tomas makes an interesting, thoughtful, and not implausible comment, but to me, the Hitler and Stalin analogies do not hold up well on close comparison. Hitler in 1934 and Stalin in 1937 were both entrenched and credible leaders in the eyes of their subordinates. Hitler was extremely popular — a war hero, extremely charismatic, the man who transformed the Nazi party from a reactionary fringe into a radical social movement. Stalin was also extremely popular in 1937. His personality cult was well established. He was an old revolutionary, and nearly everyone in the regime owed him loyalty, including those he would soon kill. Both men were considered serious thinkers, intelligent, and devoted to affairs of the state.
The instruments of power were exclusively loyal to Hitler and Stalin, respectively. The NKVD would never countermand an order by Stalin in favor of Yagoda, Yezhov, or Beria, in part because no one in that position lasted long enough to build a following. The idea that the SS would countermand an order by Hitler in favor of Himmler is equally unthinkable, because of Himmler’s own extreme loyalty and lack of personal charisma.
Of course, this did not prevent the emergence of dissent against both. We know about the 1944 plot against Hitler, and others, and there are suspicions that in the end, Stalin’s own people (Beria?) poisoned him with warfarin.
Jong Un, by contrast, has no experience, personal history, qualifications, or apparent interest in affairs of the state. He seems to possess some charisma, but nothing terribly captivating. To him, power is an end, not a vehicle.
So, I think the last bit about KJU’s lack of personal history or charisma is the most important piece of the counter-argument – it highlights the fact that unlike all the other dictatorships I mentioned – which were all entirely dependent on the irreplaceable persona of the dictator – the Kims of NK are the only known case of a modern charismatic power (to use Weber’s term) successfully making the transition to dynastic rule (Mt Baekdu bloodline and all that). I am not sure how popular Hitler really was in 1934 (he still had to rig the Spring 1933 Reichstag elections, mind you) and I am even more skeptical about the popularity of Stalin in 1937 (memory of Ukrainian Holodomor still fresh, plus we have absolutely no reliable data on actual public sentiment, as is the usual case in brutal dictatorships) but at least it’s undisputed that the respective regimes were really all about them, personally. Kim Jong-un is clearly in a different position: his best claim to power is that he is DESCENDED from someone who had or aspired to have that kind of legitimacy, KIS.
Now, is this difference enough to carry the argument that purges will play out differently here than they had in those strictly personalist dictatorships? I don’t know. My first instinct is to argue that the “physics” of political power abides by the same laws in all times and places but I am happy to be proven wrong.
BTW, to answer my own question from my previous post, on deeper reflection, I may have found at least one case where a purge could have led to further destabilization and that case is Hungary in 1956. The then chief honcho Matyas Rakosi was replaced by his second-in-command, Erno Gero, in July 1956 and by October there was an open revolt against the Commies (it was crushed a week later by the Russians, as is well known). Rakosi was not executed but apparently was exiled to Kirgizstan for the rest of his life which is almost as bad. So there you are. Maybe it does happen.
Anyway, let me end by expressing the hope that the Kim regime will collapse at Masikryeong speed, thereby allowing the North Koreans to finally become a strong and prosperous nation.
Tomas
Our concept of political “popularity” translates imperfectly into totalitarian systems. I think “awe” may be a better term — an emotion colored with hues of love, fear, security, and hatred. Think of the awe that Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung must have inspired. Plenty of people who survived the Holodomor were probably still in awe of Stalin, but few of those deserving of the term “survivor” had much capacity to oppose him. Hitler and Stalin must have seemed more than human to their own subordinates.
Do you suppose Kim Jong Un inspires anything approximating that among those close to him? We really don’t know, because the only American who has ever met him is a complete imbecile and a very poor judge of character. But by the regime’s own admission, at least one of Kim Jong Un’s closest and most wizened henchmen was not awed by him.
Another aspect – one that Joshua touched in the main post – is that the North Korean leadership, for all the brutality for the regime, used to enjoy a considerably softer image than Hitler or Stalin ever had. Hence, such a brutal and public purge is probably even more damaging.
Still, give a young ruthless bastard some loyal men with guns and he just might purge his way out of this. By now, I watch it a bit like natural selection, tyrant edition.
Would KJU have conceived of this purge himself, or was there an adviser whispering in his ear that this might be a good idea? If so, who is that person, because he (doubt it would be a she) is now the power behind the throne.
KJU has not left much evidence to date that he is a deep thinker. Not that the idea of a purge is a very abstruse concept, as ubiquitous as these have been in totalitarian regimes. And, the consensus seems to be that, far from deep thinking, the purge is a very grave blunder on KJU’s part.
I think he does inspire fear. He’s worked hard to inspire it: public executions, crackdown on the border, a purge, some sabre rattling in Spring. In fact, it is possible that Kim Jong Un inspires more fear among those close to him than his dad did precisely because the kid has now shown willingness to go the whole nine yards with opponents (real or imagined).
Whether Jang Song Thaek was or was not awed by him depends on whether you choose to believe that he was in fact conspiring against the young ruler. To me, the fact that he was also accused of – among other things – applauding half-heartedly, something so ridiculously childishly petulant, throws the whole indictment into doubt as to its correlation with any actual activities of JST. Maybe he was in awe but wasn’t fawning loud enough, who knows, people have been executed for less. The Witness to Transformation blog mentions that the list of accusations reads very much like an indictment of the whole NK system, i.e. they blamed almost everything that’s wrong with the country and its economy, on Jang. That’s another way of saying that he was scapegoated (not that he hadn’t had a had in formulating NK policy in the past, he did, but not in the criminal, treasonous sense of the indictment, he was just doing what everybody else was doing). Whatever they needed to pin on him, they pinned on him. They made him the Emanuel Goldstein to KJU’s Big Brother and so these days every inminban gets to have daily Two Minutes of Hatred, as befits an orwellian country.
I think that there are very few real, hard, truly reliable facts about Kim Jong Un’s rule. I think they are these:
1. The choice of Dennis Rodman over Eric Schmidt tells you about the young ruler’s preferences as well as about his ability to have his way in this. He is a manchild in charge and so no one can overrule him when he decides to do something silly.
2. The number of refugees arriving in South Korea in 2012 and 2013 is less than half what it was in 2011, meaning he’s cracked down on the border.
3. The whole business with redefection theatrics tells you that the regime feels the need to counter the seeping information about what life looks like elsewhere. The fact that they had to admit failure of one of their rocket launches tells you that they cannot as easily lie about points of obvious fact (though they still can and do lie about the unverifiables).
To me, all this adds up to a picture of a manchild in charge and ready to go hardline.
But there are lots of things which I cannot quite square with any obvious interpretation. Like:
1. The Kaesong closure: did they want to extort more money from South Korea and miscalculated about Park’s reaction or did they actually want to close it (and be rid of impure “capitalist winds”) and miscalculated about their ability/willingness to stay afloat without the little hard currency it generates?
2. The JST purge: is this a sign of emerging instability (as many commentators are keen to argue) or a sign of instability giving way to consolidation?
3. The amusement parks/water parks/skiing resorts: is this the clueless manchild building more toys for himself or is he trying/hoping more hard currency will come from tourism/civilian economy?
4. Did you hear about those tenfold increases in industrial wages recently? What was that? Or why did they arrest Newman for two months? That also looks completely random to me.
The list goes on…
All these things just do not add up to anything that makes sense to me.
Enough of my ranting.
Seriously though, Rodman is a complete imbecile.
I don’t understand one thing. When word first broke that Baby Kim was going to be the next capo di tuti the word from those who had known him at boarding school in Switzerland was that he was a quiet normal kid…loved video games and basketball. Now the word is that even back then he had a lot of people worried…he had a cruel streak, no empathy, possibly sociopathic, etc. Was the first news just artfully planted disinformation? This does not add up.
Very interesting discussion. I’m in the camp where the purge will likely lead to consolidation and security, not fracturing and division, except if it is taken too far, too quickly, where the elite feel they are going to die anyway if they do nothing. So far, I don’t think we’ve seen that.
I’d like to add that how KJU is seen in this depends on how JST is viewed. If JST is viewed positively, KJU tarnished his image by killing him. If JST is viewed negatively (e.g., greedy, selling out to China, collaborator, power hungry, unpatriotic, etc., etc.) then KJU burnished his image by eliminating him.
kushibo wrote, “I’m in the camp where the purge will likely lead …” How many times has Joshua warned us, stay the fork out of North Korea?
What a depressing point this thread makes, and how true. In the 20th century, I can think of many Asian rulers who killed their main supporters, and went on to greater strength –Mao and Lin Piao is perhaps the best example: and then many people who overthrew their rivals by force, and went on to great strength –Suharto and Soekarno with the Chinese-Indonesian genocide; and then people who governed by unrivalled violence, for which Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are the poster killers, and then dictators killed by their supposed friends, Diem by the CIA for instance. But I cannot readily think of a ruler who, by killing his number two, destabilizes himself.
One can hope that this brutality, combined with the UN Human Rights commission, a new provocation, and a Congress who wants to accomplish something with banking sanctions will change the calculus or physics in Pyongyang. That or a satellite falling from orbit.
Joshua, how do you pack so much information into one blog post so quickly? My head is spinning. Great use of sarcasm by the way- you have great voice in your writing.
Well, almost everything you read here from Monday through Wednesday was written on Sunday afternoon, and everything from Thursday was written since Tuesday during my commutes.