had landed. It eased sanctions and removed North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list as it negotiated another nuclear agreement in February 2007 and resumed food aid. From Kim Jong Il’s perspective, it seemed that the United States could be managed if North Korea remained steadfast in its commitment to nuclear weapons development.
For Kim Jong Un, possession of nuclear weapons was more than just national strategy. That brazen nuclear test, along with the ideological and existential justification wrapped up in the concepts of juche and suryong, provided him with multiple layers of protection. It steeped the nation in the Kim family mythology of supreme power and further warped the coddled young Jong Un’s sense of reality and expectations. But that October 2006 test, and his grandfather’s and father’s decisions to commit to advancing nuclear weapons, would also narrow his choices once Jong Un took power, boxing him into the conviction that the fate of his nation and its twenty-five million people rested on the survival of this nuclear legacy. Kim and his classmates at the military university—the future military elite—no doubt celebrated that nuclear milestone, which probably also fortified their optimism about their country’s future and reinforced their belief in their role as defenders and heroes.
TRAINING A MILLENNIAL GUERRILLA
In the two years after Kim Jong Il’s stroke, North Korea undertook a series of actions driven by a combination of a desire to look strong for both domestic and international audiences, despite the leader’s obvious health problems, and to provide some opportunities for Kim Jong Un to learn the art of North Korea’s coercive diplomacy. The regime also undoubtedly intended to assert its position vis-à-vis the incoming Obama administration to be able to better dictate the terms on which it would engage—or not—with the United States. In a statement released immediately before Obama’s inauguration, the North Korean Foreign Ministry proclaimed that the country’s “status as a nuclear weapons state will remain unchanged,” signaling its resistance to negotiating away its nuclear weapons. In April 2009, Pyongyang conducted a satellite launch, claiming its right to the peaceful use of space, but in reality it was most likely a test of the technology for its intercontinental ballistic missile systems. Using the ensuing sanctions and international condemnation of its space launch as justification, the regime withdrew from the Six-Party Talks, said it would not follow through on its obligations under the agreements reached in that framework, and conducted a nuclear test in May, claiming, “The results of the test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons and steadily developing nuclear technology.”
Meanwhile, the regime continued to manufacture crises and take opportunistic advantage in other ways, events that served as important training moments for the rising Kim Jong Un. Just two months after President Obama was inaugurated, North Korea apprehended two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were covering a story about North Korean defectors near the Chinese border in March 2009. Three months later, the regime sentenced them to twelve years of hard labor for intending to produce a documentary to “slander” North Korea. Tensions were high as reports indicated that they were beaten and dragged across the border to North Korea by zealous border security guards. The two journalists were released only when former president Bill Clinton went to Pyongyang to retrieve them, and the photos of Kim Jong Il beaming as he sat across the table from Clinton dominated the headlines. The regime did not waste the opportunity for a propaganda moment, stating, “Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists…[and] courteously conveyed to Kim Jong Il an earnest request of the U.S. government to leniently pardon them.” The Clinton visit succeeded in its obvious intention of optimizing the perception of North Korea’s status among equals, while also conveying that Kim, despite his stroke, was lucid and firmly in charge.
When the conservative politician Lee Myung-bak assumed the South Korean presidency in 2008, a decade of the previous government’s engagement-focused Sunshine Policy, which had poured an estimated $3 billion into the North’s coffers, came to an end. He took a new hard line, eliciting harsh responses and name-calling from Pyongyang. Tensions continued in March 2010 with North Korea’s sinking of the South Korean navy ship Cheonan and, later that year, the shelling of an island near the disputed maritime border, under the pretext of responding to