Donald Trump says the North Korean leader ‘misses’ him. But Kim Jong Un has a new ally in Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and that’s emboldening him like never before.

November 15, 2024

SEOUL — After closing off his country at the start of 2020, as covid-19 erupted in neighboring China, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is storming back onto the world stage with a series of audacious moves.

He has abandoned North Korea’s seven-decade goal of reuniting with the South. He has dramatically ramped up idol-worship propaganda around himself. And he has sent thousands of North Korean troops to Russia — demonstrating his commitment to an alternative world order aligned against the West.

Heading into 2025, Kim is presenting himself as more confident than ever — with more-advanced nuclear capabilities and a newfound alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That means President-elect Donald Trump, who courted Kim during a first term that included two chummy summits and says the North Korean leader “misses” him, will find a much more brazen counterpart in Pyongyang in his second term.

“We’re seeing an emboldened Kim Jong Un,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an expert on North Korean state media who has noticed a clear shift in the way Pyongyang portrays its role in the world. “I think it views itself as a bigger player than it used to.”

The shift comes after four years in which Kim not only survived the pandemic-induced border closures that should have sunk his broken economy, but used the opportunity to impose even-more-draconian measures to keep the populace under control, restricting the movement of his citizens inside the country and making it virtually impossible to escape it.

It’s a stark change for the totalitarian leader, who took power in 2011 at only 27 years old and quickly set about emulating his grandfather, the state’s revered founder — down to his haircut and his raspy voice — to legitimize his own rise.

Today, the North Korean leader is no longer the young man piggybacking on his grandfather’s legacy to justify his own. He is now a seasoned authoritarian poised to exploit his sudden relevance in a conflict that has the world’s democracies on edge.

“All that propaganda that was tying him to his grandfather, he doesn’t need that,” said Ken Gause, a longtime North Korea leadership expert. “He is now his own man.”

During his first term, Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on Kim if he endangered the United States, then pivoted and forged a friendly relationship that he compared to a “love” affair as the pair held two high-profile and unprecedented summits. Those talks fell apart in 2019, and Kim has refused to engage with Washington since Trump left office.

Trump may try to rekindle that relationship in his second term. But the North Korean leader may not be so quick to engage as he was six years ago, especially given his fundamental foreign policy shift away from Washington, some experts say.

The “love” between Trump and Kim was not reflective of any special relationship the two had, said Sydney Seiler, a former top U.S. intelligence officer on North Korea now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It had more to do with Trump’s negotiating tactics and North Korea’s propaganda, he said.

Now, Kim has Putin. “Why should he turn to Trump?” Seiler said.

Surviving the covid lockdown

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on inside the world’s most reclusive country at the best of times. It’s been even more of a black box during four years of self-isolation.

But one thing is certain: Kim remains in power. Whether he’s bluffing — projecting confidence to mask his desperation and insecurity over the future of his regime, as some analysts think — or genuinely pleased with his own performance, the result is the same. The world’s youngest nuclear-armed leader is acting more boldly than ever before.

For one, he survived the biggest crisis he had faced as head of state: the eruption of covid-19 in China in 2020.

It was a potentially existential threat for a country that relied on trade with its neighbor and had no health-care system to speak of. So he slammed shut the borders to keep out the virus — risking economic collapse.He also rejected offers of aid workers and coronavirus vaccines.

North Korea leaned into “self-reliance,” its long-held ideology that claims it can be a self-sustaining state, despite its reliance on aid from China and the Soviet Union.

“We should regard the ideological and moral strength of the popular masses as the foremost weapon as ever and stir it up in every way,” Kim said in March 2022, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The lockdown gave Kim a chance to exert more control over his population of 26 million, while stoking paranoia about the virus. State media warned that covid could spread via birds and other wildlife — and Kim enacted a “shoot to kill” order at the border that deterred people from escaping the country, according to a copy of the order obtained by monitoring groups.

He banned citizens from traveling between cities and provinces, and cracked down on the use of smuggled Chinese cellphones that allowed people to stay in touch with the outside world, according to human rights advocates. He also imposed the death penalty on those distributing foreign movies and television shows that exposed his people to a life of freedom outside North Korea, as detailed in a copy of the 2020 law published by monitoring site Daily NK.

“Covid provided Kim with an excellent opportunity to exercise strong, authoritarian power,” said Seiler.

Meanwhile, Kim centralized power in the ruling Workers’ Party and weakened the military and other departments that could challenge his authority, said Gause, the leadership expert.

“We’re at the stage now where he is unassailable in terms of his power within the regime. Nobody can really touch him,” Gause said.

Still, the border closures had devastating economic consequences. In 2020, the country saw the most dramatic decline in more than two decades, according to South Korea’s central bank, and the economy continued to shrink for two more years. The crackdown exacerbated the nation’s humanitarian crisis, and in 2021, Kim acknowledged that his country’s food situation was “tense.”

But even as the cross-border trade that enabled ordinary North Koreans to feed themselves dried up and reports of death from starvation emerged, Kim remained flush.

His collection of imported luxury cars grew, despite U.N. bans, with state media showing him pulling up to an event at the end of last year in a new bulletproof Mercedes-Maybach limo.

He kept money flowing to sustain his regime through cybercrimes and illicit activities, according to U.N. sanctions monitors. He financed hundreds of millions of dollars in ballistic missile tests partly with stolen crypto funds, the United Nations said.

North Korea is now accepting limited numbers of tourists from Russia and China. Cross-border trade with China resumed last year, giving the economy a much-needed boost, although it has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the South’s Korea Institute for International Economic Policy.

Kim’s actions suggest he did not fear for his regime’s survival, said Lee, the propaganda expert and former U.S. intelligence analyst on North Korea now at the Washington-based Stimson Center.

“He kept the borders shut,” Lee said. “That tells you something — that the situation was bad, but it was not unmanageable. I think all of that gave Kim Jong Un a lot of confidence.”

Writing his own playbook

North Korea began slowly cracking open its doors in late 2023. Soon thereafter, Kim began making it clear that he was now writing his own playbook, experts say.

For one, he has positioned his tween daughter as the regime’s potential first female heir, an unparalleled move in a society that prizes age and masculinity.

Then on Jan. 1, Kim formally abandoned the idea of peacefully reunifying the Korean Peninsula — renouncing a fundamental policy position set by his grandfather and reinforced by his father. It marked the most dramatic break yet from his predecessors.

To underscore his pivot, Kim began removing and blowing up symbolic references to reunification, including monuments and the roads connecting the two Koreas. In Pyongyang’s subway system, Reunification Station has been renamed, according to a Russian tourist photo posted online in August.

To be sure, reunification was not realistically going to happen any time soon, and it’s unclear whether this is a true policy shift or just bluster.

But then came a new phase in the country’s cult of personality, as state propaganda systematically elevated Kim to the level of his father and grandfather for the first time.

In April, when Pyongyang marked the Day of the Sun — previously the most important day on the North Korean calendar, commemorating its founder’s birthday — state media simply called it “the April holiday.”

North Korea soon after released a propaganda video titled “Friendly Father,” using a term for Kim previously reserved for his grandfather. (In a strange turn of events, the catchy tune went viral on TikTok.)

And in May, Kim’s portrait was seen, for the first time, displayed at a party building alongside those of his grandfather and father — placing him at their level, literally. Portraits of the first two Kims are displayed in every building, home and even subway car, but their successor had previously shied away from having his likeness elevated in this way.

These are examples of how the regime is attempting to “rebalance the narrative” in favor of Kim, said Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul: “He knows the intense focus on his grandfather’s legacy diminishes his own.”

That legacy was necessary to highlight during Kim’s first few years as the third-generation leader in a totalitarian dynasty. He defied all expectations when he took over the family business after his father died in 2011. His grandfather was an illustrious Korean War hero. His father spent decades building political power for eventual succession. But the young Kim had none of that.

He led by fear, purging senior officials and even executing his own uncle. Meanwhile, he called himself the “warrior of the supreme leader,” portraying himself as his grandfather’s lieutenant.

In those early years, party officials suggested that the new leader create lapel pins bearing his likeness. Since the 1970s, every North Korean has been required to wear over their hearts a pin of one, or both, of the first two Kims.

But the youngest Kim quashed the idea, said Ri Il-gyu, a North Korean diplomat who fled his post in Cubalast year to defect to South Korea. Ri recalled warnings against creating such pins.

Then in July of this year, pins with Kim’s face appeared on the lapels of party officials for the first time, as seen in state media photos, marking a new era of the dictator charting his own path.

“This shows he no longer sees himself as merely the supreme leader’s warrior,” Ri said. “He has decided that he himself has ascended as the nation’s supreme leader.”

Kim aligns with Russia

Unlike the debate among North Korea-watchers over whether the covid closure was a boon to Kim’s legacy, there is broad consensus that the flourishing cooperation with Putin has taken Kim’s audacity to a whole new level.

In March 2022, a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kim made it clear he was standing by Putin by becoming one of just five countries to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning Russia.

The decision would be a fruitful one that would make Kim and his aging Soviet-era weapons suddenly important in a war that had upended global politics. It made him unusually relevant.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union helped usher in a communist regime on the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and supported its invasion of the pro-American South in 1950. The Chinese also fought alongside North Koreans in the war, ultimately helping save them from defeat.

For decades, Pyongyang played the two countries off each other to get what it wanted: economic and military support. After the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty,North Korea held on to Soviet-era munitions in case conflict resumed.

As the conflict in Ukraine dragged on, Russia began turning to North Korea for those old shells and weapons, according to the Biden administration, despite their high failure rate. Later, Moscow even began to use North Korean soldiers on the ground, a highly surprising move for Pyongyang, which has no history of sending troops into foreign wars.

This could be earning enormous sums of money for Kim’s cash-strapped regime. South Korea’s spy agency estimated that Russia is paying about $2,000 a month for each North Korean soldier, a total of $20 million a month for 10,000 soldiers. That’s in addition to unknown millions changing hands for North Korea’s munitions.

Furthermore, U.S. officials say that in return, North Korea may be receiving critical technologies to expand its weapons program.

Last year, Kim traveled to Russia, his first international trip since the pandemic began. There, he pledged full support for the Russian leader’s war, and Putin agreed to help Kim with space technology, a priority for Pyongyang. The two pariah leaders needed each other more than ever.

The two leaders met again this year, this time in Pyongyang. They signed a mutual defense pact, vowing to come to each other’s assistance in case of a military attack — the most significant bilateral agreement since the Cold War. Both countries ratified the treaty this month.

Their deepening relationship “means everything to North Korea” because it allows Kim to lessen his dependence on Beijing, said Scott Snyder, president of the Korea Economic Institute of America, a Washington-based think tank.

All the while, Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has shielded Kim from international punishment for expanding his nuclear and weapons programs, joining with China to repeatedly vote down new sanctions.

Kim has pursued a five-year weapons development plan, unveiled in 2021, with impunity, overseeing ballistic missile launches one after another despite U.N. prohibitions — although the North hasn’t conducted a nuclear test since 2017. Last month, it test-fired a new and powerful long-range missile that could strike anywhere in the mainland United States.

Yet Kim probably knows that his new alliance with Putin is purely self-serving, experts say.

“He’s read the history books. His father probably coached him, ‘Don’t trust anybody … they’re all out for themselves,’” said Seiler, the former intelligence officer. “But for now, it does appear that he believes things are going his way.”

Ri, the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat to escape to the South since 2016, is skeptical about Kim’s future and believes that whatever the leader has gained from his handling of covid and relations with Russia will not last.

Ultimately, Kim’s main interest is in protecting himself and his family, and he rules by fear, Ri said — recalling a time when he witnessed Kim retaliate against high-ranking officials for small mistakes.

“The Kim Jong Un I met was a man with omnipotent, absolute power,” Ri said. “But dictatorships don’t last forever. They always end, and the end is often violent. I hope he realizes this someday.”

About this story

Story by Michelle Ye Hee Lee. Story editing by Anna Fifield. Photo editing by Jennifer Samuel. Copy editing by Martha Murdock.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/15/north-korea-jong-un-confident