Artillery pieces are seen being fired during a military drill at an unknown location, in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on March 25, 2016. REUTERS/KCNA/File Photo
In terms of defending the homeland from Kim Jong-un, President Trump’s risk calculus is spot-on.
Michael McLaughlin
October 24, 2017
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The portrayals of both North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. president Donald Trump as bombastic egoists reacting emotionally seem to have become hackneyed as tensions continue to rise on the Korean Peninsula. But reducing the sophomoric rhetoric between the two men to mere chauvinistic posturing fails to reveal the genius underlying the Trump administration’s pressure campaign.
President Trump’s tweets, while drawing the ire of both sides of the aisle, shatter the North Korean image of Kim Jong-un and force him to react from a position of weakness on terms dictated by the United States. To understand why Trump’s rhetoric is so effective, one must consider the president’s target audience.
Kim Jong-un spent his early life in Switzerland, and was thrust into the spotlight prematurely due both to his father’s death and to the various inadequacies and indiscretions rendering his two elder brothers unfit to lead. To compensate for the twentysomething’s inexperience and lack of notoriety, North Korean officials began a relentless campaign to create the supreme myth of their new supreme leader. In an effort to reverse the growing resentment towards senior leaders brought on by his father’s reclusiveness and the memory of the terrible famine of the 1990s, through which the current generation came of age, Kim Jong-un was modeled as the reincarnation of his grandfather, Kim Il-sung.
Prior to taking power, the younger Kim attended the Kim Il-sung Military Academy to establish his military bona fides before being commissioned a four-star general and named vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. The myth exaggerated Kim Jong-un’s military prowess through the Pyongyang propaganda machine, which has been a continuous font of photos appearing to show him planning military movements, videos in which he is instructing his generals, and fiery statements defending the Korean people against the acrimonious Americans and their South Korean puppet. There are even intimations that the shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of the Republic of Korea Navy vessel Cheonan in 2010 were attributed to Kim as a means of increasing his credibility.
Much like his grandfather, this overweight, jolly and ever-smiling leader frequently appears in public for engagements and meetings with the Korean people, and to personally deliver orders to his military forces in the field—something his father, Kim Jong-il, who is said to have suffered from a severe stutter, rarely did. To further distance himself from the anathema of his father’s legacy, the young leader embarked on a savage campaign of over three hundred executions to rid his regime of Kim Jong-il’s inner circle. His eradication of senior leaders, while seen from the outside as a sign of paranoia, may have served the greater purpose of separating him from the taciturn and corrupt regime of his father in the minds of the rising generation of North Koreans.
Having been educated in Switzerland, traveled extensively abroad and studied China’s rise to prosperity, Kim Jong-un is keenly aware of the precarious summit on which he sits. The North Korean black market consists of a capitalistic network of illicit goods smuggled in from China and other neighboring countries. While smuggling in North Korea is punishable by death, it has been largely ignored by Kim Jong-un’s regime. One likely reason for this is Kim’s understanding of the necessity to control the transformation of North Korea from a socialist state with a command market to a dictatorial capitalist economy that trades on the global market.
“The success of a transition from a command economy seems to depend on the extent to which individuals in the socialist economy remember the institutional background of its early capitalism,” wrote Charles Kindleberger in reference to Poland’s transition in his seminal work Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. “Such memory is more important to transitional success than the speed of decontrols and of privatization of state monopolies.”
In order for Kim to remain in power, he needs both to foster an underground economy so as to establish a memory of capitalism and to reinforce his command of the military to thwart any would-be mutineers. By conducting more than twenty ballistic-missile launches and two nuclear detonations this year while keeping his military constantly on a wartime footing, Kim sustains his tyrannical control throughout the ranks while appearing to be much the same hawkish defender of the fatherland his grandfather was. By allowing capitalism to survive in the shadows, he maintains control over the gradual ascendance of a centrally managed market economy in the same vein as the pioneer of China’s economic awakening, Deng Xiaoping.
What Kim Jong-un needs is time and money.
Revamping North Korea’s society and economy while maintaining control over international influence inside the hermit kingdom is a delicate task. Opening China to the global market took Deng Xiaoping eleven years of adroit political maneuvering and significant foreign direct investment by Western corporations to achieve his “Four Modernizations” in the agricultural, industrial, science-and-technology and military sectors.
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