When Kim Jong Un first appeared in Pyongyang’s carefully stage-managed public spotlight in the fall of 2010, North Korea watchers began scouring for clues to learn whether the pudgy heir apparent would be a reformist or simply the newest face of a despotic regime.
Nearly 16 months after taking the reins of the hermit state following the death of his stoic father, North Korea’s 30-year-old leader appears to be careening toward the latter — at least on the surface.
Having disavowed his country’s armistice with South Korea and threatened to fire his increasingly capable missiles toward the United States, Kim has put the Korean Peninsula and Washington on a war footing. His behavior follows the playbook of his predecessors, with one notable and potentially dangerous departure that appears to have him backed into a corner.
“His father and his grandfather always figured into their provocation cycle an off-ramp of how to get out of it,” Adm. Samuel Locklear III, the commander of U.S. troops in the Pacific, told Congress this past week. “It’s not clear to me that he has thought through how to get out of it. This is what makes this scenario, I think, particularly challenging.”
Making sense of the Kims has been more of an art than a science. A cadre of North Korea scholars has spent decades piecing together a portrait of the eccentric, secretive family by poring through mounds of propaganda, defector accounts and the limited, sporadic contact the regime has had with the West. While acknowledging that Kim Jong Un remains an enigma, experts in the intricacies of Pyongyang say a careful study suggests his recent bout of bellicose rhetoric probably represents a desperate cry for legitimacy rather than a genuine appetite for combat.
By declaring war on South Korea, he seems to be channeling his firebrand grandfather, Kim Il Sung, the iconic founder of North Korea who plunged the region into a war that killed as many as 5 million people, including 35,500 American troops, in the 1950s. U.S. officials are on alert for a new provocative act tied to the elder Kim’s birthday, which is widely celebrated in North Korea, on Monday.
As Kim Jong Un eases into the top job of a nation whose elite has long been presumed to be rife with intrigue and rivalries, he appears determined to assert a tight grip on the levers of power.
“He has an inferiority complex,” said Kongdan Oh Hassig, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria. “He is trying to show that he has a strategic mind, that the military stands behind him and that no one stands against him.”
There are major gaps in the public biography of the new leader, the third son ofKim Jong Il. But as he has assumed an increasingly public role, Kim Jong Un’s portrait has become a bit sharper, revealing a study in contrasts that has captured the world’s undivided attention.
Why Kim Jong Un?
As a child, Kim was impetuous and competitive to a fault, according to a 2003 memoir by the family’s former sushi chef, writing under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto. The book offered a rare peek into one of the world’s most secretive and consequential families. Kim Jong Il adored his tempestuous son, according to Fujimoto, perhaps seeing in him the steely resolve that has kept the family firmly in control of the pariah state since its creation in 1948.
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