The rhetoric has also extended to threats against those who create negative portrayals of North Korea in popular culture.
North Korean hackers destroyed the data of Sony Pictures Entertainment, the company responsible for producing the film, and dumped confidential information, including salary lists, nearly 50, Social Security numbers, and five unreleased films onto public file-sharing sites.
Yet, despite all the chest-thumping and bad behavior, Kim is not looking for a military confrontation with the United States. We have to learn how to incorporate new information about what is driving Kim Jong-un and how we might counter this profound—and ever evolving—national security threat.
However, Kim has carefully stopped short of actions that might lead to U. It is clear that he sees the program as vital to the security of his regime and his legitimacy as the leader of North Korea. He may well be haunted by a very real fear of the consequences of unilateral disarmament.
The North Korean regime has often made reference to the fate of Iraq and Libya—the invasion and overthrow of its leaders—as key examples of what happens to states that give up their nuclear weapons. If we unpack this comparison, we can envision how deeply Kim Jong-un might have been affected by the death of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
Graphic images of the bloodied Qaddafi ricocheted around the world. Contemporary reports described how Qaddafi was captured, hacked and beaten by a mob, shirtless and bloody, his body then stored in a freezer.
The overthrow of regimes hitherto believed to be invincible probably highlighted for Jong-un the potential consequences of showing any signs of weakness, and reinforced the brutal suppression of dissent practiced by the Kim dynasty. Even without all these warning signs, however, it is unlikely that Kim would have given serious consideration to denuclearizing his country.
He has relied on military demonstrations and provocative actions to get his way, and has no experience in the arts of negotiation, compromise, and diplomacy. General Assembly in September—it would take a very brave North Korean official to counsel dialogue and efforts to mollify Washington and Beijing. But he may be reaching a critical point where he has to make a strategic choice. At the same time, international pressure on North Korea has never been greater.
The combined weight of all these pressures, internal and external, on North Korea, coming precisely at a time of rising expectations within the country, may overwhelm the regime—unless Kim learns to dial back his aggression.
That, of course, is a big if. I still agree with the U. He and his country do not exist in an ahistorical space that is unchanging and static.
Our analysis and policy responses must also change and evolve and be prepared for all potential scenarios. We, too, must avoid edging toward hubris. The U. We can do so through strengthening regional alliances—especially with South Korea and Japan—that are demonstrably in lockstep on the North Korea issue.
Jung H. Prior to her work in national security, Pak taught U. Now more than ever, facts and research matter. Sign up to get our best ideas of the day in your inbox. And it helps explain why Kim is suddenly trying to play nice with both President Donald Trump and the world. From its inception, juche has meant more or less whatever the North Korean government needed it to mean.
In the s, North Korea was in a tough situation both politically and economically. It also was a young country, with a dubious claim to legitimacy — it was one half of the formerly united Korea — and its new leader actually grew up in the Soviet Union. Juche, as developed by Kim Il Sung and his cronies, was designed to solve both of these problems. By elevating autonomy as an ideal over all things, North Korea could claim to be fully aligned with neither the Soviets nor the Chinese.
Domestically, juche served to connect Kim Il Sung and the nascent North Korean state to ideas that would resonate with ordinary Koreans. It also developed a doctrine of Korean racial purity , drawing on historically Korean beliefs and language used by Japanese imperialists, to argue against opening up to the global economy.
Paektu, simply by visiting it. Juche ideology demands total fealty to the leader. But to convince people they also owe fealty to the state required something even more profound than a cult of personality around the Kims: a set of rituals and beliefs that amounted to a form of religion.
There is no such thing as an independent media in North Korea, aside from what people can glean from secretly consuming foreign media. The vagueness of juche as a political philosophy — self-reliance can mean practically anything — combined with media control and the elevation of the suryong to near-divine status serves to give the Kims incredible policy flexibility. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the s, North Korea lost its primary source of food aid, which led to a massive and devastating famine.
Songun held that to be self-reliant and independent, North Korea needed a strong military first and foremost. It is easier, perhaps, to forgive a mortal politician who has failed his people, than to keep the faith when God betrays his children.
The fact the DPRK still exists at all is, in no small part, testimony to the genius of the hagiographies of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, and the men and women who wrote them.
They are the foundation upon which the edifice of North Korean cultural orthodoxy has been raised. It may be too late. If so, as it was in the beginning with Tangun and with Kim Il-sung, Korean time will begin again, with new stories waiting to be told. A longer version of this article first appeared on Sino NK. North Korea's Kim dynasty: the making of a personality cult. A fresco of Kim Jong-il in the arms of his father, Kim Il-sung.
Photograph: Alain Nogues. North Korea celebrates Kim Jong-il's birthday — in pictures. Read more. Pyongyang has always denied its involvement. Two soldiers and two civilians were killed. There has been much debate over who gave the order for that attack.
Mr Kim said he was "not directly involved in the operations on the Cheonan or Yeonpyeong Island", but they "were not a secret to RGB officers, it was treated with pride, something to boast about". And those operations would not have happened without orders from the top, he says. The sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island are not a thing that could be carried out by subordinates. It's an achievement. Mr Kim says one of his responsibilities in the North was developing strategies to deal with South Korea.
The aim was "political subordination". Many cases", he claims. He doesn't elaborate, but he does give us one intriguing example. That was in the early s. I have met several convicted North Korean spies in South Korea, and, as NK News founder Chad O'Carroll notes in a recent article, South Korean prisons were once filled with dozens of North Korean spies arrested over the decades for various types of espionage work.
A handful of incidents have continued to occur and at least one involved a spy sent directly from the North. But NK News data suggests that far fewer people have been arrested in South Korea for spy-related offences since , as the North turns to new technologies, rather than old fashioned spies, for intelligence gathering.
North Korea may be one of the world's poorest and most isolated countries, but previous high-profile defectors have warned that Pyongyang has created an army of 6, skilled hackers. According to Mr Kim, the previous North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, ordered the training of new personnel in the s "to prepare for cyberwarfare".
British security officials believe that a North Korean unit known as the Lazarus Group was behind a cyber-attack that crippled parts of the NHS and other organisations around the world in The same group is believed to have targeted Sony Pictures in a high-profile hack in Mr Kim says the office was known as the Liaison Office. He claims it had a direct telephone line to the North Korean leader. The office also safeguards communication between North Korean spy agents.
Kim Jong-un has recently announced the country is once again facing a "crisis" and in April he called on his people to prepare for another "arduous march" - a phrase that has come to describe a disastrous famine in the s, under Kim Jong-il.
Back then, Mr Kim was in the Operations Department and was ordered to raise "revolutionary funds" for the Supreme Leader. That, he says, meant dealing in illegal drugs. Then we could cash it to dollars to present to Kim Jong-il. His account of drug dealing at this time is plausible. North Korea has a long history of drug production - mostly heroin and opium.
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