Over the past decade, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has evolved from an inexperienced “Young General” to a powerful “Supreme Leader,” harnessing the power of his country’s nuclear arsenal and cementing his grip on power.
Now, as the international community marks 70 years since the signing of the Korean War armistice, examining important shifts in Kim’s approach to foreign policy may provide clues to Pyongyang's future behavior.
While Kim once appeared willing to at least take steps toward dismantling his nuclear weapons program in exchange for political and economic concessions, the 39-year-old may now be aiming for a relationship with the U.S. and its allies that is not contingent upon North Korea’s denuclearization.
“A review of North Korea’s high-level official statements on the U.S. and denuclearization, as well as on China and Russia, suggest Pyongyang’s thinking on Washington may be undergoing some fundamental changes,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a nonresident fellow with the 38 North Program at the Stimson Center.
North Korea sees that the U.S. is not as powerful as it once was, and it is possible that Pyongyang may view alignment with Beijing as more beneficial in the short- to long-term, and with Moscow in the short term, she said.
Contrary to common perception, Kim is anything but a madman bent on nuclear war.
He's steeled himself over the years, playing a calculated, long-term strategy aimed at securing his rule and building up his country’s military in response to what he views as threats to his regime by the U.S. and its allies, namely South Korea and Japan.
However, things started off quite differently.
A decade ago, the Kaesong Industrial Complex — jointly run by the two Koreas — was still operating and Kim's regime was still engaging diplomatically with the outside world, including with Japan, creating a sense of hope that the young leader would open his country to the world.
Fast forward to 2023. Kaesong has been blown up — literally — and Kim has doubled down on advancing his nuclear and missile programs, further isolating his country as he ramps up sharp-tongued rhetoric against the U.S. and its Asian allies.
Not only has he been building up North Korea’s defense industry in recent years — developing a vast array of nuclear-capable missile systems — he has also overseen an unprecedented number of weapon tests, all the while revising his strategic calculus to forge closer ties with China and Russia.
This evolution has made it highly unlikely that North Korea will return to the bargaining table anytime soon.
So what has happened over the past decade?
Ten years ago, relatively little was known about Kim’s life, both at home and abroad. He was young, energetic and educated abroad, and when he first took power in late 2011, this raised hopes both in North Korea and its neighbors that he would take his country in a different direction than his late father, Kim Jong Il, said Jean H. Lee, who opened the Associated Press’ Pyongyang bureau in 2012.
But Kim’s decisions would soon be greatly influenced by the multiple domestic challenges he faced early on. Finding himself absent a patron, he was surrounded by people he did not really know, unsure of who he could trust and how he could lead a country of 25 million people.
It was a precarious situation for the young leader, who maintained an inward focus on shoring up his power base inside the regime to make it one that owed its loyalty directly to him, not his father.
An example of the brutal reality he faced was seen in his decision to denounce his powerful uncle, who had many supporters inside the regime, as a traitor. In late 2013, just two years after taking power, Kim had him dragged away from a Politburo meeting and executed, erasing any doubts as to who was in charge of the country.
At the same time, Kim had to deal with a key part of his father’s legacy: his “military-first” policy.
In short, this meant that the government Kim was inheriting consisted of an abnormally large and powerful military, with the ruling party — which should have been at the center of all decision-making — pushed to the side, said Rachel Minyoung Lee.
These factors, coupled with Kim’s own awareness that he was perceived at home and abroad as a relatively inexperienced leader, drove him to tough defense and foreign policies that would help him strengthen his leadership within his military, she added.
The results were North Korea’s failed satellite launch in April 2012, which led to the collapse of the “Leap Day Deal” with the U.S.; another satellite launch that December; a February 2013 nuclear test; and Kim’s announcement a month later of the country’s byungjin line — a focus on the parallel development of his nuclear forces and the economy.
Over the next several years, Kim’s personal confidants would start to emerge, including his close aide Jo Yong Won and his sister Kim Yo Jong, who rose through the ranks of the ruling party.
Concurrently, the rate of North Korean missile tests began to skyrocket. Although many ended in failure, hindsight shows that Kim was demonstrating a willingness to fail in the short-term to achieve his long-term goals.
Less than two months ahead of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election that would send Donald Trump to the White House, Kim greenlighted a sixth nuclear test.
In the months that followed, he would test North Korea's most powerful nuclear weapon to date and unleash 17 weapon tests, including of missiles that put the U.S. within striking distance. The moves prompted a U.S.-led “maximum pressure” campaign of onerous sanctions, with fiery rhetoric between Kim and Trump stoking fears of nuclear catastrophe.
By 2018, Kim may have thought he had done enough to build up his nuclear program to finally step out onto the world stage, with the North Korean strongman venturing outside his country for the first time as leader for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and then-South Korean leader Moon Jae-in.
But Kim’s time to shine came in Singapore later that year, when he met Trump for the first-ever summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader. That meeting, as well as one with Russia’s president and another with Trump in Hanoi in 2019, capped Kim’s transformation.
“He was no longer the young son who had inherited power, but the leader of a nation with a fearsome nuclear arsenal who was able to meet shoulder-to-shoulder with the leaders of Russia, China, South Korea and the United States,” Jean H. Lee said.
However, experts say the collapse of talks with the U.S. at the Hanoi summit appears to have had a profound impact on his thinking about the prospects of fundamentally improving relations with Washington.
Rachel Minyoung Lee argues that following the summit’s collapse, Kim brought back to the fore a policy of “self-reliance” — a term that has traditionally been equated with closing the door to diplomacy, mainly with South Korea and the West.
This, she wrote in a scholarly article published in May, was made easier by the COVID-19-related border lockdown instituted in 2020. The Kim regime has since exploited this extreme isolation to restructure the economy and tighten control of the population. At the same time, the country’s foreign policy has shifted to a harder line as Kim has sought to revise the country’s longer-term strategic goals.
He rebooted missile launches in the months after the Hanoi failure, and also focused on strengthening his country’s defense industry, laying out a five-year defense development plan unveiled in early 2021.
But one of the biggest signals of yet another transformation were Kim's decisions to lift a self-imposed moratorium and resume intercontinental ballistic missile launches, while also enshrining into law his country’s "irreversible" nuclear status — barring any denuclearization talks — and outlining the right to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes to protect itself.
Now, after nearly two years of firing off missiles at an unprecedented pace, what will Kim’s next 10 years — and beyond — look like?
One change could be a new approach to measures intended to limit North Korea's fast-growing nuclear and missile arsenal.
"Given its emphasis on a balance of military power in the region, Pyongyang will likely seek arms control talks where each side takes corresponding measures to scale down on arms buildups," said Rachel Minyoung Lee.
Still, much like North Korea itself, Kim's intentions remain an enigma, but re-examining the past could hold the keys to the future.
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