But the summitry of 2018 has led to passionate debates about Kim’s intentions. His international debut has buoyed those with more dovish tendencies who have argued that Washington needs to alter its policy and provide security guarantees and economic benefits to slowly wean Pyongyang away from its nuclear weapons. Voices across the political spectrum have applauded the improvements in inter-Korean ties, celebrating the two Korean leaders’ roles as primary drivers of the region’s trajectory without Washington’s interference. Longtime Korea watchers have maintained that Kim’s engagement tactics are nothing more than sleight of hand to divert attention from North Korea’s possession and ongoing development of ballistic missiles and production of fissile material, and to weaken the international appetite for sanctions implementation. Most former government officials and seasoned veterans of negotiations with North Korea agree that Kim is highly unlikely to give up his arsenal unless and until he believes that his commitment to nuclear weapons will risk his own survival.
What is clear from Kim’s gambit is that he controls which puzzle pieces we get to fit together and which dots appear and then disappear. Kim’s new visibility has forced me and many others—including, I suspect, my former colleagues in the intelligence community—to check our key assumptions. Are we too burdened by the history of failed negotiations and North Korean prevarication to have a clear perspective on current developments? Is Kim Jong Un as a leader fundamentally different from his grandfather and his father, both of whom tried to keep North Korea sealed off? Are those who tout engagement with North Korea and giving Kim the benefit of the doubt—including President Trump, who called him “honorable”—falling prey to what Richards Heuer called “vividness bias,” in which direct interaction with Kim is given greater value than the other types of evidence to the contrary about Kim’s intentions?
The stakes are high. Whether Kim is an overgrown baby or an aspiring international statesman hungry for regional peace has tremendous implications for our national and global security. We simultaneously underestimate and overestimate Kim’s capabilities, conflate his capabilities with his intentions, and question his rationality, while assuming that he possesses a strategic purpose and the means to achieve his goals. It is precisely because of North Korea’s ambiguity and Kim’s manipulation of it that we continue to work on the puzzle that is his regime. Unless we understand the real Kim, the roots of the dynasty that shaped his outlook, and his personality and ambitions, we risk making policy decisions that could undermine our goal of a denuclearized North Korea.
Kim Jong Un was ten when his grandfather Kim Il Sung died from a heart attack on a sultry day in July 1994. For nearly fifty of his eighty-two years, the senior Kim had presided over North Korea as the father of the country. The personality cult of Kim Il Sung was deeply entrenched, and his son Kim Jong Il was recognized as the only legitimate heir to the revolution. “To North Koreans, Kim Il-sung was more than just a leader,” wrote Bradley Martin, one of Kim’s biographers. “He showered his people with fatherly love.” It was clear that Kim had become a religion. The North Korean people genuinely believed in his greatness, and as the CIA’s top North Korea analyst Helen-Louise Hunter described it in her 1999 book, Kim Il-song’s North Korea, “like many religious believers, they may have their doubts, but they hold fast to the faith in spite of these doubts.”
The spirit of Kim Il Sung seeped into every aspect of a North Korean’s life. It touched all of the senses. His portrait was in every home, office, store, classroom, and building. Operas, musicals, and television shows proclaimed his genius; thousands of monuments and museums ensured that North Korean citizens were in constant touch with his spirit and totally surrounded by it. He was in their food and the air they breathed—and, they believed, it was his agrarian experiments that had resulted in bounty (never mind the generous amounts of aid that flowed from the Soviet Union, China, and the socialist bloc, especially East Germany). Of course, it was his martial prowess and brilliance that had liberated the Korean Peninsula from the Japanese imperialists and returned the land to the peasants and proletariat. He was the suryong, the Supreme Leader, and North Korea’s “heart and the only center.” His birthday, April 15, was declared a national holiday in the 1960s, taking on a Christmas-like atmosphere with festivals, fireworks, and gifts distributed by the