Being Kim Jong-Il
You aim to die peacefully in your bed, just like your father. On present course, you’ll get your wish.
Imagine yourself as Kim Jong-Il: bon vivant, cineaste, tyrant.
Fifteen years ago your ailing father provoked an international crisis by expelling U.N. nuclear inspectors. He then resolved it by inviting a notoriously pliant former U.S. president to Pyongyang to patch things up. The deal solved nothing as far as the rest of the world was concerned. But it allowed your father to bequeath his kingdom to you intact and gain time to develop weapons with which to blackmail the world again.
Now you’re the one who’s ailing. So why not run the exact same play all over again, merely substituting one legacy-seeking American president with another?
A few years ago, a Western magazine ran a picture of you on its cover under the headline, “Greetings, Earthlings.” Was that supposed to be funny? It wasn’t very perceptive. Tyranny is a demanding and quintessentially human art, requiring, among its better practitioners, a discriminating nose for the weaknesses of others and a keen mind for how to exploit them to the fullest. The weaknesses of your own people—the sublimated terror of the masses; the petty ambitions of the cadres; the cravenness of your inner circle—you know only too well.
But a tyrant’s training is no less useful for the manipulation of free men. What keeps an abused and subjugated people in line is the constant fear that things could suddenly get dramatically worse, along with the sporadic hope that things might also get marginally better. So long as most people feel they have much to lose and something to gain, you will have them in your power.
Ditto for your dealings with the outside world: The key is to keep them on the back foot, to furnish continuous evidence of what “dramatically worse” and “marginally better” look like, and to oscillate between the two in a way that always leaves a margin of doubt about your real intentions.
Just look how you’ve done it these past 15 years. Your father died shortly after Jimmy Carter (who found the old man “vigorous”) negotiated the outlines of the so-called Agreed Framework to freeze your nuclear programs. The aid that came with that deal nursed you through the loss of your Soviet patron and the catastrophic famine of the mid-1990s.
Kim Jong-Il
Yet as soon as the famine was over, you upped the ante by lobbing a missile over Japan. Response? More food aid from the U.S., followed by South Korea’s see-no-evil, speak-no-evil “sunshine policy,” followed by a visit from then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who arrived with a basketball signed by Michael Jordan. Neat. But the Clinton team was too eager to settle accounts and normalize relations—the last thing you’d ever want. So you let the clock run out on their term.
With the Bush team you offered the same mix of belligerence and conciliation, only here your triumph was all the more impressive given a president so tediously in earnest about ridding the world of evil. In the end he allowed you to get away with everything—proliferating nuclear technology; testing a bomb; counterfeiting U.S. currency—proving only that even the nastiest American dog’s bark is worse than his bite.
And now there is Barack Obama, who betrays his American provincialism by supposing there isn’t a trouble in the world that can’t be resolved with copious goodwill. Seeing no reason to immediately disabuse the young president, you’ve opted to generate a series of crises that the providential capture of the two female journalists allows you to resolve entirely on your own terms.
Now the journalists are back in America, and it’s payback time. Getting Bill Clinton to show up as a supplicant at your dinner table is only the appetizer. You’ve also taken the scissors to the already frayed concept of six-party talks, prospectively cutting Japan and South Korea out of what you hope will be a very long bilateral negotiation with the U.S. For South Korea’s hawkish President Lee Myung-bak, who has staked his government on revitalizing the six-party framework, this will be an especially bitter pill. Dividing your enemies is, of course, the essence of any competent foreign policy. (As for China, they will support you so long as you continue to bedevil the U.S. and stand in the way of Korean unification.)
Best of all, the mouthpiece of the U.S. administration—a.k.a. the New York Times—is writing that Mr. Obama has abandoned the goal of a denuclearized Korea in favor of “containment,” which in effect means renewed engagement. Like the last time, this “engagement” will be vital to see your son installed on your throne once you are gone.
And your goal? You once confessed to a visiting official that you had a recurring dream of being torn limb from limb by your own people. No competent tyrant mistakes public adulation for love. But unlike Saddam Hussein or Nicolae Ceausescu, you aim to die peacefully in your bed, just like your father. On present course, you’ll get your wish.
