and Park after a yearlong series of peaceful protests and impeachment. For all the speculation about how Kim wouldn’t last after he took the reins upon his father’s death in 2011, it was Kim who could relish his endurance and longevity.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Kim, like everyone else, was surely trying to figure out this unconventional leader. He had reason to be suspicious of Trump and anticipate a hard-line policy approach on North Korea, based on what candidate Trump had said about the regime. In September 2015, during a Republican presidential debate, Trump called Kim a “maniac” who has nuclear weapons. In a February 2016 television interview, he blustered that if he were president, he would get China to make Kim “disappear in one form or another very quickly.” There was a hint of respect for Kim, however: “I mean this guy’s a bad dude—and don’t underestimate him….Any young guy that can take over from his father with all those generals and everybody else that probably wants the position, this is not somebody to be underestimated.” Despite the harsh talk, Trump also said in May 2016 that he would have no problem speaking to Kim.
Amid uncertainties about altered regional dynamics, resulting from the new leadership in the United States, Kim wasn’t about to sit around. As the new government in Washington sought to get its footing in the aftermath of an unexpected win, Kim went about laying out the facts on the ground. In his New Year’s speech, he set forth his successes and his intentions, fueling concerns and sparking speculation about how he might approach the era of Trump. Kim touted North Korea’s purported first hydrogen bomb test in September 2016, its fifth and most powerful test, which the regime at the time alleged had been of a “nuclear warhead that has been standardised to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets.” Ominously, Kim also declared that his country had “entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of intercontinental ballistic missile[s]” that could potentially hit the continental United States. And he promised to “continue to build up our self-defence capability, the pivot of which is the nuclear forces, and the capability for preemptive strike as long as the United States and its vassal forces keep on nuclear threat and blackmail.” A day later, President-elect Trump dismissively tweeted, “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”
So began a year of tweets, taunts, and threats between Trump and Kim; many Korea watchers and national security analysts were alarmed about how the new president’s penchant for using social media to confront Kim might lead to a miscalculation toward a military conflict. Not one to cower in the face of threatening tweets, Kim continued to test Trump, lobbing new types of ballistic missiles most likely intended to provoke and show his mettle for domestic and external audiences and to demonstrate who was driving events on the Korean Peninsula. Less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, and during a summit meeting at Mar-a-Lago with the Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, Kim tested a new ballistic missile, a solid-fuel medium-range system that experts said could aid in the North’s development of an ICBM. Kim, who was almost always front and center in the coverage of subsequent tests, would lob several others, ignoring Trump’s tweets and threats, and then capped off the year with two tests of ICBMs in July and a third in November, and his sixth nuclear test in September.
If Kim felt apprehensive about the new president, he didn’t show it. After all, didn’t he have more political leadership and regional experience than Trump, who had been a businessman and a reality star? And hadn’t Kim already gotten away with so much in the previous six years?
Kim was not backing down and neither was Trump.
PERSONALITY MATTERS
Although separated by almost forty years in age—Kim was in his early thirties and Trump into his eighth decade—Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un share many similar personal qualities. They were both in their twenties when they inherited wealth and an empire: Trump’s was in real estate; Kim’s was in nuclear weapons and a country of twenty-five million people. When Trump was growing up in Queens, New York, his family had worldly possessions that others could only dream about or aspire to obtain, though the Kim family’s wealth—with their control