South Korean military drills nearby. One resident described the result: “Houses and mountains are on fire and people are evacuating.” The South Korean air force scrambled their F-16 fighter jets and fired artillery; the prospect of a military conflict on the Korean Peninsula seemed inevitable. The United Nations and alarmed leaders from Washington and Beijing cautioned restraint on both sides. Yet at nearly the same time as the island-shelling incident, North Korea revealed a large uranium enrichment plant to visiting U.S. former officials and academics, who were amazed by the modern, advanced facility, which triggered suspicion about the regime’s intention to make highly enriched uranium bomb fuel.
As an insurance policy against regime-ending retaliatory acts by the United States or South Korea, and to be better positioned to extract political and economic concessions, Kim Jong Il engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity with North Korea’s biggest patron, Beijing. He visited China multiple times after his stroke, sent and received high-level delegations, and pledged undying friendship and cooperation. His effort paid off, as Chinese leaders publicly welcomed the transfer of power to young Jong Un.
In the meantime, the Obama administration, working in concert with the conservative Lee government in South Korea, adopted and maintained a policy often derogatorily called “strategic patience.” This meant a refusal to engage without a sincere effort by Kim Jong Il to move toward denuclearization and improve inter-Korean relations, while tightening sanctions, expanding missile defense systems in the region, bolstering U.S. alliances, and prodding Beijing to alter its strategic approach to North Korea. Strategic patience led to charges that President Obama was simply responding to North Korea’s provocative actions and providing space for the continued advancement of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. But North Korea’s commitment to bolstering Kim Jong Un’s bona fides, its unwillingness to negotiate, and the regime’s apparent desire to complete its strategic weapons program regardless of the consequences constrained U.S. and South Korean options. At the same time, Kim’s belligerence provided an opportunity for the Obama administration to deepen alliance coordination and motivate Beijing to take a tougher stance to rein in Pyongyang’s recklessness.
These were the first major lessons Kim senior tried to convey to his son. Jong Un almost certainly began to appreciate the mechanics and the art of coercive diplomacy—maintain the initiative, manufacture tension, sow fear, freeze out and then mend fences with China, the United States, and South Korea, all the while steadily making progress on the nuclear weapons program.
Two generations removed from the devastation of the Korean War, distanced physically and psychologically from the horrors of the famine, and inheriting an advanced nuclear weapons program that put North Korea in the center of the region’s geopolitics, Jong Un had reason to be optimistic about his country’s future. There was much to learn still, but no one, perhaps not even Kim Jong Il himself, could have predicted that his son would be such an apt student.
It may have been the final gift for Kim Jong Un from his cinephile father. On January 8, 2012, on the younger Kim’s twenty-eighth birthday and just a couple of weeks after the elder Kim’s death, North Korea released a documentary chronicling the successor’s military exploits. It was part of a frenzied effort to build Jong Un’s leadership credentials and martial excellence in order to bulk up his thin résumé. In the first scene, Jong Un is shown galloping on a black-and-white dappled horse, a hero leading his country forward. He is then seen driving a tank, observing firing exercises, speaking with pilots, and smiling and shaking the hands of grateful soldiers and commanders. Then he is pictured as a decisive leader at a satellite control center after the April 2009 launch, boldly declaring, “I had decided to wage a real war if the enemies shot down” the rocket, indicating that the regime sought to tie Jong Un’s bona fides to the burgeoning ballistic missile program. The documentary quotes Kim Jong Il saying that his son, “our general, resembles me” and that he has “outstanding [military] strategies and is well versed in military tactics….He is a man of many abilities and the genius among geniuses.”
Just a week earlier, on January 1, 2012, in a joint New Year’s editorial, North Korea’s three main state newspapers asserted Jong Un’s legitimacy, stating, “Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of our Party and our people, is the banner of victory and glory of Songun…Korea and eternal center of its unity.” And it exhorted “the whole Party, the entire army