Amid health concerns, Kim Jong Un’s role is important

New rumors about Kim Jong Un arrive daily. The North Korean leader is dead. Or you are very sick. Or maybe you’re just recovering in your luxury community.

As speculation about his health grows, an underlying question arises for professional spies, outside politicians, academics, and curious news consumers alike.

What do we really know about the man who leads North Korea?

The answer is crucial because Kim’s intentions, and the still unknown state of his health, play a huge role in running Northeast Asia, an awkward collection of cautious neighbors at best and home to two of the three. bigger. economies in the world and a huge accumulation of American military machinery and labor.

Sandwiched in the midst of the Goliaths, North Korea is a small, impoverished and extraordinarily proud nation that, by sheer willpower and a relentless cult of personality built around a single family, has been the center of a headache for half a century security for its neighbors.

No matter how successful China, South Korea, and Japan are, and their collective transformation from war, poverty, and internal strife into political and economic power has been spectacular, North Korea, and its determined pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles intended for Protecting the Kim family has made it impossible to ignore, holding the region and Washington hostage to their narrow ambitions.

MISSING

There is not much to do here despite the media coverage of the building.

Some unconfirmed, lightly, or unsupported news reports say that she is in a fragile condition or even in a vegetative state after cardiac surgery.

However, the South Korean government maintains that Kim still appears to be in power and that there have been no signs that anything big has happened in the North.

What is not disputed is that Kim has not appeared in public since an April 11 meeting focused on the coronavirus. This type of disappearance has happened before, but what has fueled rumors now is that for the first time as a leader, he missed the most important holiday of the North Korean year, the April 15 celebration of the birth of his grandfather.

There have been no photos or videos of the leader in nearly three weeks, only state media reports that he sent written greetings to world leaders or worthy citizens.

THE MAN

Those seeking to understand Kim face a problem. Much of what the outside world sees is filtered through relentless North Korean propaganda aimed at making it an infallible model of leadership.

Add to that the vague or misleading external media reports and the extreme difficulty of deciphering the North’s top secret around anything to do with the leader, and the image that emerges from Kim is often more mosaic than profile.

In South Korea, he is seen as a demon and a statesman. He has repeatedly threatened to burn Seoul to the ground. He also rolled out the red carpet for a visit to Pyongyang by the President of South Korea and sent his own sister south for the 2018 Olympics.

In the West, Kim’s depictions often turn into cartoons. His friendship breaks up with Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star who he reportedly idolized as a school boy; rumors about his extreme love for cheese and his supposedly creative ways of getting rid of officials who dislike him.

Then there is the impressive series of summits over the past two years with the leaders of Russia, China, the United States and South Korea.

Kim was probably born in 1984 and attended a boarding school for several years in Switzerland. At first, some observers argued that his time in the West would lead him to adopt Chinese-style reforms.

That hasn’t happened so far, though he has taken a remarkably different leadership approach than his father, the shy publicist, Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011.

Governments and outside experts initially questioned the ability of a man in his 20s to lead, but Kim Jong Un quickly consolidated power. He ordered the execution in 2013 of his uncle and mentor, Jang Song Thaek, who was charged with treason. Kim is also suspected of ordering the murder of his half-brother and potential rival at a Malaysian airport in 2017.

Kim has shown growing confidence on the world stage, most clearly with the high-risk diplomacy that followed a series of nuclear and missile tests in 2017 that had many fears of war.

The view of a meeting of North Korean leaders with rivals in South Korea and the United States was extraordinary, although it remains unclear whether diplomacy will resolve an awkward region.

Kim entered 2020 promising to strengthen his nuclear deterrence against “gangster-like” US sanctions, and oversaw a series of weapons launches and military exercises in March.

Much of what happens now will depend on Kim’s health.

North Korea, despite its poverty, has long attracted worldwide attention because of its sustained and belligerent pursuit of what it calls self-defense measures against U.S. hostility, and what critics call an illegal accumulation of nuclear bomb.

There is debate over whether North Korea ever intended to give up its nuclear weapons during the summits with Washington and Seoul. But diplomacy seems inconceivable without Kim.

That raises fears, in a time of massive political instability, to a return to threats and to increasingly powerful weapons tests aimed at perfecting nuclear weapons seen as the only real guarantee of the Kim family’s power.

– AP