From 1948 to 1994, the leader of North Korea was Kim Il-sung. Upon his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il became the leader. In 2011, Kim Jong-il died, and his son, Kim Jong-un, became the country’s leader.
North Korea is now suffering under its third hereditary totalitarian absolutist dictator.
Having been born in the mid-1980s, Kim Jong-un has been treated as a near-deity his entire life. This may explain why other nations have difficulty conducting any diplomacy with his government.
For the neighboring countries of Japan and South Korea, the nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea constitute an existential threat. North Korea obtained nuclear capability during the reign of Kim Jong-il. It is typical of the Kim dynasty that observers characterize its behavior by comparing it to a toddler who tosses his dinner during a temper tantrum. President George W. Bush recalls:
On the Fourth of July 2006, Kim Jong-il threw his food on the floor. He fired a barrage of missiles into the Sea of Japan. The test was a military failure, but the provocation was real. My theory was that Kim saw the world focused on Iran and was craving attention. He also wanted to test the coalition to see how much he could get away with.
I called President Hu Jintao of China, told him that Kim Jong-il had insulted China, and urged him to condemn the launch publicly. He released a statement reiterating his commitment to “peace and stability” and opposing “any actions that might intensify the situation.” His words were mild, but they were a step in the right direction.
North Korea defied the world again by carrying out its first full-fledged nuclear test. President Hu’s reaction was firmer this time. “The Chinese government strongly opposes this,” he said. “We engaged in conversations to appeal to the North Koreans for restraint. However, our neighbor turned a deaf ear to our advice.”
The world had to accept the suboptimal reality that a third-generation hereditary dictator now had nuclear weapons at his disposal. This was a nightmare scenario for South Korea and for Japan. It was horrifying for the rest of the world.
North Korea had proven that it was willing to deceive. It had agreed to stop its efforts to build an atomic bomb, and yet continued to do precisely that. North Korea proved unrepentant when, four years prior to its first successful nuclear weapon test, the U.S. intelligence community presented evidence that the weapons program was well under way. At that time, the U.S. Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld, who later wrote:
By July 2006, well over a decade of U.S. negotiations with North Korea and its erratic leadership had yielded little benefit to the United States. North Korea continued to test and launch ballistic missiles, bluster about attacking South Korea, and develop nuclear weapons, detonating what intelligence professionals believed was a low-yield bomb in October 2006. We had confronted North Korean officials in 2002 with the fact that we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment effort, in violation of the Clinton Administration’s “Agreed Framework.”
Ever willing to present deceptive images to the world, North Korea, after having demonstrated its capabilities both in terms of building bombs and in terms of building delivery systems, proceeded to claim that it was going to disassemble its own nuclear production facilities.
In a visible and publicized action, the North Koreans demolished a nuclear facility. This action was, however, meaningless, as Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney writes:
On June 27, 2008, the North Koreans called in the television cameras and blew up the cooling tower of the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. It was 1950s technology, a device they could easily afford to give up. By that point they had produced enough plutonium for a store of weapons, and, besides, as President Obama’s director of national intelligence would later confirm, they had a robust ongoing uranium enrichment operation that could also produce material for nuclear weapons.
In yet another about-face, North Korea again wanted to boast by displaying its advanced nuclear weapons technology. Two years after claiming to have destroyed their own nuclear capability, they bragged about a multi-year effort coming to fruition.
Around this time, the world grew both wise and weary, and learned that words and statements from the North Korean government were meaningless, and that the North Korean leaders were incorrigible and could never be trusted, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reports:
In 2010, nuclear physicist Siegfried Hacker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, would be invited to North Korea and shown an industrial-scale facility capable of producing enriched uranium. According to Hecker, the state of the facility demonstrated “without a doubt” that Pyongyang had pursued uranium enrichment for many years. We’d been right about uranium enrichment but unable to use diplomacy to confirm our suspicions or do anything about it.
By 2013, North Korea was clearly and unapologetically presenting itself as a nuclear power. Missile tests were performed, not to test the technology of the rockets, but as timely signals to the international community.
By that year, also, Kim Jong-un had become the national leader, following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. The new leader demonstrates “increasing ruthlessness” against anything except immediate enthusiastic affirmation of his own ideas, according to a 2013 article in The Telegraph.
The ambiguous, sometimes friendly, and sometimes hostile relationship between the United States and China was and is pivotal in forming a global response to North Korea’s bellicose behavior. While North Korea has good relationships with no other nation on earth, its connection with China is as close as North Korea can come to working diplomatic relationship.
The U.S. has often requested Chinese assistance in dealing with North Korea. While China certainly doesn’t like or trust the Kim regime, it also is not willing to do or be anything which might make China seem like it is in any way helpful to the U.S.
Yet China has, at times, been willing to be strict with North Korea, as Robert Wampler wrote in 2013:
One key issue is how China might convince Pyongyang to dial back its provocations lest they escalate into military conflict. Although current consultations between Washington and Beijing are taking place behind closed doors, we do have a window into how the United States assessed China’s options during a similar crisis nearly two decades ago — options that included Chinese troops crossing the Yalu to secure its borders.
Also in 2013, analyst Edward Luttwak raised this question: could South Korea be enabling North Korea? As counterintuitive as such a question might at first seem, it makes a certain amount of economic sense.
South Korea has given, at various times, substantial chunks of hard foreign currency to North Korea — sometimes as a way to buy some peace in a sort of mafioso protection racket, sometimes in response to sheer bullying. Serious currency is one thing which North Korea both desperately needs and can hardly obtain.
The North Korean economy is so weak that it’s constantly on the verge of collapse — even as a few elite members of Communist Party live in luxury. South Korea seems oddly to be throwing a lifeline to the very nation which is bent on destroying it, as Luttwak writes:
All of North Korea’s varied and extreme economic dysfunctions converge in its crippling shortage of foreign currency. Once the bulk of it is used to import military components, supplies, and subsystems from China (including the erector launcher vehicles for its ballistic missiles), very little foreign exchange is left.
While the world’s diplomats focus on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, ordinary citizens around the world are perhaps more horrified by the human rights abuses which constitute domestic policy in the country. Frank Jannuzi argues that perhaps the diplomats should take a cue from people:
The best way to resolve the ongoing nuclear crisis is to stop talking about nukes — and instead focus on advancing North Korean human rights, reorienting global attention from the North’s plutonium to its people.
The question of atomic weapons and the question of human rights in North Korea intersect when one examines the ideology and psychology of the Kim regime. The world has seen any number of communist totalitarian dictators, but the Kims are another category altogether.
The Kim family takes — and expects other people to take — its deity seriously. The Kims expect to be worshipped, praised, and given credit for every good thing. North Korean citizens are expected to thank the Kims for good weather and for any recovery after a time of illness, as Doug Bandow reports:
In North Korea, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are demigod the father and demigod son; Juche is the political gospel. Writings of the Kims are treated as scripture. Which helps explain the North’s position as the world's worst religious persecutor.
It is difficult to understand, and difficult to believe, the mindset which pervades North Korea. If one can understand this mindset, and if one can believe that it is in fact firmly rooted both in the collective North Korean psyche as well as in the North Korean diplomatic corps, then one faces the question: Is it possible to negotiate with this nation? If so, how?
For this reason, many of the world’s diplomats — from a diverse range of countries — had and have more or less given up on any attempt at serious diplomacy with this country.
And that is why so many were shocked at President Trump’s greatly increased efforts at achieving diplomatic progress with this nation.
What will be the ultimate outcome of Trump’s efforts? What will be the fruit of his administration’s diplomatic overtures to North Korea? Time alone will reveal what Trump will or will not achieve: either a great accomplishment or a disappointing fizzle.
In any case, North Korea will remain an object of world attention for some time to come.
North Korea is characterized by a determined and incorrigible drive toward building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal; by a persistent and consistent violation of many human rights; and by a culture which has absolutized and deified the Kim dynasty.
The role of the Kim family in North Korean society exceeds, e.g., the role of the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, the role of Louis XIV in 17th-century and 18th-century France, or the role of Stalin and Mao in the 20th-century communist dictatorships.
Diplomats from nations all around the globe, who can otherwise interface with the most monstrous regimes and with the most horrific tyrants, find it difficult to interact with North Korea’s unpredictability, irrationality, and incomprehensibility.
For this reason, among others, President Trump’s attempts to reach a working relationship with North Korea are fascinating.
