Chung Min Lee - The Hermit King: The Dangerous Game of Kim Jong Un

Through The Hermit King I want the American public to understand that the North Korean story isnt just about nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that could potentially target the United States. Its about 25 million people incarcerated in the worlds biggest jail: the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK). The Hermit King is about the wrenching dilemma facing Kim Jong Un: he badly wants to transform North Korea, but he cant, because the very system that created hima communist state/family dictatorship hybrid that resembles an enormous Mafia enterprisewill die if he tries to reform it. At its heart, Kims Catch-22 is simple: if he really wants to save the North Korean state, he has no choice but to enact wide-ranging economic and political reforms. Yet the moment he does so, the Kim dynasty is likely to collapse.

North Koreans from all walks of life are struggling to an extent not paralleled anywhere else, although the Kim Jong Un regime insists that its citizens are living in Earths paradise. The worlds last totalitarian state continues to be ruled by the Kim dynasty; a peoples power uprising isnt around the corner. But seeds of change have been planted, and one day those seeds will grow into trees throughout the country that North Koreans can lean on as free men and women.

The Korean Peninsula is a land of stark contrasts. A famous picture taken from space shows the southern half ablaze in light while the northern half lies in pitch darkness. One day, many in both South and North Korea hope, the entire peninsula will be free from tyranny.

I was born in South Korea, but I have lived in ten countries since the age of four and have devoted my professional life to studying international affairs. As a political scientist, Ive been privileged to observe Korea from Asian, American, and European perspectives, varied and wide-ranging as they are. Having worked at think tanks and universities in the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore for thirty-four years, Ive analyzed North Korea from multiple angles. My governmental experiences as South Koreas ambassador for national security affairs and as a foreign policy advisor to two South Korean presidents have also given me key insights.

Theres no single school of thought on North Korea, and my perspective is one of many. Understanding North Korea depends on which lens you choose: a small nation standing up to giants, immensely powerful ethnocentrism, seven decades of socialism and mind-numbing political indoctrination, an intense love-hate relationship with China, or deeply rooted mistrust of the outside world mixed with the realization of the countrys stark backwardness. The net result is an extremely impoverished country that has successfully developed nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). And its leader isnt deranged: Kim Jong Un is ruthless and sharp.

Ive studied Korean security for more than thirty years, and my interactions with government officials, intelligence experts, and political analysts with direct experience in North Korean affairs stretch back to the late 1980s; many have of them shared their views in confidence with me as I was writing this book. North Korea is a hard target, as intelligence experts like to say, but its not a total black box. While the regime remains firmly in control, more and more information is seeping out.

North Korea tries to exude a sense of mystery and plays its limited cards deftly. However, North Korea is breaking down in slow motion, choking on the fumes coming from its vast war machine. Kim Jong Un instinctively knows this, but he cant dismantle that machine, because that would also demolish the very mechanism that props up the Kim family.

Many North Korea watchers argue that Kim is going to follow Chinas path of structural economic reform; they see him as having no choice, since the economy continues to contract. They insist that since at present roughly 20 percent of GDP is allocated to defense, the only way Kim can dream of building a modern North Korea is by cutting military spending. The North Korean reformist school in South Korea and elsewhere believes that Kim Jong Un will be compelled to open up North Korea, much as Mikhail Gorbachev did with the Soviet Union beginning in 1985.

Only time will tell. But North Korea is nothing like the former Soviet Union, or any other prior or surviving communist state. It is, first and foremost, a family-run criminal cartel based on myopic delusions of grandeur and a belief in ethnic supremacy; that cartel helms a country with a massive army and nuclear weapons. Over time, however, a system characterized by multiple contradictions, massive corruption, corrosion in all institutions, fear and repression, and above all a ruling family and a super-elite who live like millionaires while the masses must fend for themselves cant last.

My ninety-two-year-old soldier-turned-diplomat father originally hailed from Anju, North Korea, and all of the events described in this book occurred during his lifetime. He lived through some of the more harrowing moments: the Soviet occupation of northern Korea, the division of the peninsula into the two Koreas, the outbreak of the Korean War, and diplomatic struggles between Seoul and Pyongyang during the Cold War. It is fitting that I continue the journey he began on foot in 1949 when he crossed the 38th parallel into the Republic of Korea as a penniless twenty-two-year-old.