Becoming Kim Jong Un: What It Takes to Become a Dictator | EXCERPT

In Becoming Kim Jong Un, former CIA analyst and North Korea expert Jung H. Pak reveals the explosive story of Kim Jong Il’s third son: the spoilt and impetuous child, the mediocre student, the ruthless murderer, the shrewd grand strategist. Read an excerpt:

There were more tantalizing signs that Kim Jong Un yearned to integrate North Korea into the international community and free his country from the isolation that the regime had deepened over sixty-five years. Unlike his grandfather and his father, Kim had been educated for a few years in Switzerland. North Korean media released a video that showed him at a concert in Pyongyang in which Disney characters romped around the stage while video clips of Dumbo and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were projected onto massive screens, and a group of skimpily clad women played the violin. He also appeared in public with his wife, Ri Sol Ju, a first for a North Korean leader; Kim’s father and grandfather avoided being seen in public with their wives or revealing too much about their personal lives. Each of these gestures was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Kim wanted to take North Korea in a new direction. His engagement with China, South Korea, and the United States since January 2018 has revived this line of thinking, even amid fresh reports about North Korea’s progress in its ballistic missile and nuclear programs. Observers find the cognitive dissonance of Kim’s actions both disconcerting and promising.

But pitted against this hope is the sense that we are certainly heading toward catastrophe. When one considers the frighteningly rapid advancement of North Korea’s cyber, nuclear, and conventional capabilities, the countless rows of soldiers marching in impossible unity at military parades, and the belligerent threats, Kim is suddenly no longer the crazy fat kid but a ten-foot-tall giant with untold and unlimited power: unstoppable, unpredictable, undeterrable, omnipotent. His intercontinental ballistic missiles can reach Los Angeles. He threatened to turn the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence, into a “sea of fire.” He has a million-man army ready to march south to force reunification. He has dozens of nuclear weapons at his disposal. He called the U.S. president “mentally deranged” and threatened nuclear war.

KIM THE ENIGMA

Just as the drumbeat of a potential second war on the Korean Peninsula reached a crescendo in late 2017, following North Korea’s brazen testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles, its largest ever nuclear test, and the ensuing war of words with President Trump, Kim decided to pivot toward diplomacy in 2018. Even as he vowed to mass-produce nuclear weapons in his annual New Year’s address, he also expressed an interest in attending the Winter Olympics. For the first time since the division of the peninsula in 1945, a Kim family member set foot in South Korea—his sister, Kim Yo Jong. That breakthrough quickly set in motion a series of high-level summits with President Xi Jinping of China, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, and President Donald Trump of the United States—the first between a North Korean leader and a sitting U.S. president.

In his pivot to engagement—and under intense media scrutiny of his every move—Kim transformed himself from a ten-foot-tall baby to a real, live human being, who walks, talks, and goes to meetings like everyone else. As we glean new insights from observing him without the soft, propagandistic filter of North Korea’s media, the Kim puzzle pieces multiply. There he is sipping tea with President Moon, listening intently to President Xi, and delivering remarks to reporters in Singapore while sitting next to President Trump, as if he had been doing it all for years. He has a sense of humor. He dines with his wife like any other husband. He goes sightseeing in Singapore and takes selfies. He talks about wanting peace and prosperity for his people and the Korean Peninsula.

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.