the regime have continued to hew to a similar line. In his 2018 New Year’s address, Kim said that North Korea “as a peace-loving nuclear power…will not use a nuclear weapon as long as the aggressive hostile forces do not infringe upon our country’s sovereignty and interests, and will not threaten any country or region with nuclear [weapons]. However, we will resolutely respond to any act of destroying peace and security on the Korean Peninsula.” Kim has been punctuating this message while carefully constructing his image as a statesman, an identity that has certainly been enhanced by his repeated summits with regional leaders and the U.S. president. His 2019 New Year’s address seemed designed to advance his standing as a responsible head of state. He addressed his country on television wearing a suit and tie, as he had since 2017, instead of a dark Mao jacket as in previous years, but now comfortably seated in an overstuffed leather chair. His appearance reinforced the speech’s softer tone and message: Kim is a modern leader, relatable, powerful, and a responsible steward of a nuclear state. Evans Revere, a former top Asia expert in the State Department, presciently wrote in 2017, “The new goal, as Pyongyang sees it, is to discuss the terms under which the United States will accept and live with a nuclear-armed North Korea and agree to end ‘hostility.’ ”
Given Kim’s purported completion of his nuclear program, he is more unlikely than his father to give up something he owns that bolsters his own legitimacy and legacy. And in a way, Kim Jong Un’s position in the world today vindicates Kim Jong Il, who labored through the hardest years so that he could bequeath to his son the gift of security and stature.
EXAMINING ASSUMPTIONS
Having been inured to expect belligerence from Kim Jong Un, analysts’ mindsets were challenged by his abrupt turn toward diplomacy in early 2018. “Once an observer has formed an image…a mind-set or expectation,” cautioned Richards Heuer, “this conditions future perceptions.” In 2017, U.S. experts were calling Kim “crazy” and “irrational”; the next year the pendulum swung in the other direction, as many Korea watchers advocated measures that would assuage Kim’s security concerns and integrate him into the international community. Visions of a North Korean “madman” wielding nuclear weapons against the United States alternated with glimpses of a North Korean statesman whose comments about a “new era” of peace and foreign relations aroused optimism about the potential for genuine improvements in U.S.–North Korean relations. The debates within and among the security communities in the region and in the United States still reflect these widely differing opinions about North Korea’s intentions.
Some Korea experts, intrigued by the possibilities of diplomacy, have placed a higher priority on inducements rather than pressure. North Korean outreach can look like a gambit for peace, especially when amplified by the U.S. president’s friendly tweets, social media postings of a smiling Kim Jong Un and his lovely, stylish wife, and televised summits that show him acting like a global leader who is an old hand at conducting foreign negotiations.
The thought of peace on the Korean Peninsula and an economically integrated North Korea is tantalizing. In the minds of well-meaning peace activists and academics encouraged by Kim’s turn to diplomacy, North Korea has always wanted a security guarantee from the United States, and its development of nuclear weapons is a logical reaction to the perceived threat that Washington poses to Pyongyang, which fears a second war if it does not have the armaments to deter a military strike. For some of these peace advocates, the United States bears responsibility for the division of the Korean Peninsula because the nature of its alliance with South Korea, especially the mutual defense treaty and overwhelming U.S. military might, created and perpetuated the emergence of a paranoid and repressive state in North Korea. They and others have argued the logic of North Korea’s resistance to denuclearization without a peace treaty and sanctions removal, given that the two sides are technically in a state of war. Using the pain of sanctions as leverage, the Moon and Trump administrations hoped to turn Kim’s focus toward economic development, in an attempt to lure North Korea into denuclearizing if it received enough economic incentives. Some academics insist that Kim wants to be a great economic reformer; according to one Asia scholar, Kim wants “North Korea to become a normal East Asian economy, catch up with and integrate into the region.”