long process of dethronement, as His Majesty the Child confronts the ever more obvious and humbling truth. Not so for Kim. His world at age 5 has turned out to be his world at age 30….Everyone does exist to serve him.”
Yet confidence and genetics alone cannot make up for experience, and Kim Jong Il almost certainly was concerned about how his son would fare. Compared with Jong Il, who had nearly three decades of experience working his way through the regime infrastructure, manipulating and mastering the art of repression, accompanying his father on international trips to woo, cajole, and bolster ties to other leaders, Jong Un had had an extremely compressed grooming period of less than a handful of years. Kim Jong Il’s stroke in 2008 must have made him realize that he needed to speed up his son’s succession because soon after, Jong Un began to accompany his father on publicized inspections of military units, had his birthplace designated a historical site, and collected a slew of leadership titles and roles in the military, party, and security apparatus.
Though Jong Un had about three years as the designated successor to learn from his father, his most formative experiences were in the early 2000s, when he returned to North Korea from Switzerland and entered college at Kim Il Sung Military University, where he was in a position to see his father in action. It is unclear quite when Kim Jong Il started to choose his successor in a definitive way or when he privately decided on his youngest son to be his heir. Perhaps it was when he turned sixty in 2002—an important birthday for Koreans, who believe it signifies the next chapter in a person’s life. Or he could have started thinking about it as early as 1971, when his first son was born. Or he might have become aware of Ko Yong Hui’s ambition to place one of her sons in power. In any case, the first decade of the twenty-first century was a good laboratory for educating his sons in the ways of statecraft and nuclear diplomacy.
PAVING THE NUCLEAR PATH
To survive as his revered father’s successor, Jong Il had to hustle, carefully nurturing and building the cult of the Kim family dynasty while managing an economy that was precipitously declining, coping with abandonment by the Soviet Union, charting the unfaltering rise of South Korea as an economic powerhouse, and steeling the nation against the West’s embrace of Seoul’s liberal democracy. South Korea’s growing wealth was also making even more distant North Korea’s dreams of unification on Pyongyang’s terms. The vibrant South offered a stark contrast to the famine-hobbled North, with its decaying infrastructure, human rights violations, and nuclear program that was under increasing international scrutiny while the post–Cold War world was moving in the opposite direction.
While confronting these threatening circumstances as the leader of North Korea, Jong Il was also a father who was thinking about the future of his family. And possession of nuclear weapons seemed to be precisely the wild card that could ensure that his country’s relative decline did not necessarily mean irrelevance and eventual absorption by South Korea. Kim Il Sung had started the nuclear program as a guarantee for regime survival amid a hostile neighborhood, but Kim Jong Il improved, expanded, and showed off North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, a legacy that he bestowed on Jong Un.
For Kim Jong Un, the arc of his education regarding the nuclear weapons program began in 2002, when he was eighteen and a student at Kim Il Sung Military University. In January of that year, his country’s fraught relationship with the United States over nuclear weapons was encapsulated in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, in which he spoke of “an axis of evil,” comprising North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, and the drumbeat of war that eventually led to the invasion of Iraq, Washington was in no mood for Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Bush described North Korea as “a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens,” and warned, “America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security.”
Ties between Washington and Pyongyang were tense, as the Bush administration in 2001 sought ways to squeeze North Korea. At the time, the two countries were parties to the 1994 Agreed Framework, which emerged after a nuclear crisis