Dr Edward Howell does not like to mince his words when describing the policies of North Korea. Perhaps this is for the best in his elucidation of what drives a state which he sees as ‘strategically delinquent’. Howell, whose regular television appearances have brought him an audience far wider than his politics pupils at New College and Christ Church in Oxford, is quite happy to shelve any ambiguity in his portrait of the current state of world affairs.
‘The fundamental shift is that ever since the ‘no–deal’ of the Hanoi summit in 2019, as Kim Jong Un himself said, he had lost the will to negotiate.’ Howell thinks the world’s most totalitarian state has undergone a true change in outlook since Donald Trump took office in 2016. Having tried to achieve something of a deal with the United States – its most derided enemy on the world stage – the failure of that reconciliation has brought them further away from any ‘opening–up’, and closer to the orbit of China and Russia. ‘North Korea is not even pretending to talk to South Korea, and this is going to make things very difficult for the next [American] administration.’ Contrary to some expectations, this has not diminished Kim’s geopolitical leverage, but has only increased it. The North’s military involvement in Russia’s Ukraine War is only one example.
What does Kim want? Howell is clear: he wants to be treated internationally as an important nuclear power on the world stage. Although the country takes itself to be a nuclear–armed power, it has yet to gain such recognition. Kim also wants to increase even further the controls over his own twenty–six million people, and for the country to ‘intentionally isolate itself from the outside world.’ It has increasingly retreated into its own cultural, economic, and political isolationism, a central part of the Juche ideology on which the Kim dynasty has been based.
Who has been wielding power behind the scenes? Kim Yo Jong, his sister, is a ‘rising member of the North Korean elite’, the de facto head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. She has been marked out as a fierce supporter of her husband’s military–first policy and anti–Western rhetoric. But in North Korea, ‘no one is safe.’ The murder of the leader’s half–brother, Kim Jong Nam, through VX nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur Airport in 2017, and the execution by firing squad of his uncle in 2013, offer only two examples. Those who fall too closely to China, to models of economic development and approaches to foreign neighbours, are immediately in suspicion.
How big, therefore, is Kim’s inner circle? Howell looks around our small room in New College. ‘There are six chairs around this table, and his inner circle might be only a little bit bigger than that.’ They are the voices deciding what happens to the country’s inhabitants; happenings increasingly sinister to Western eyes. ‘There are portraits of Kim Jong Un being put up around the country – in military academies, for example – which have not been displayed before’, Howell explains. Kim is carving out his political identity in the same way as did his father and grandfather. There are two central ideas which he has made his own.
The first is the turn away from negotiation. The second is more recent: Kim’s former policy of unification of the two Koreas under one communist banner has been essentially dropped. The second is a move away from China. Vladimir Putin is now North Korea’s ‘number–one friend’, according to its leader. This means that North Korea will never be condemned by the United Nations Security Council, given Russia’s vote on it.
Kim might meet Trump, Howell says: the latter has offered to take him to a baseball game. Yet the relationship shows little sign of improving over the next decades. Pyongyang will continue to view the United States as a hostile power for the indefinite future.
Many Westerners like to talk of a coup from within and the possibility of North Korean resistance. Is Kim’s regime secure? Howell counters this possibility by citing Kim’s increased surveillance and dogmatic devotion to the culling of the individual freedom his subjects have never really known. ‘The number of North Koreans who have defected since Kim took power has dropped markedly. North Korea is ruled by a politics of fear, and he is stepping up domestic control.’ As it is – Howell comments – the mass of the people in North Korea are too impoverished to be able to offer resistance to their political overlords. The only challenge would come from the elites, and now they are increasingly ‘toeing the party line to a remarkable extent.’
How could Kim be summed up, then, in a few words? ‘He’s a brutal totalitarian dictator’. He repeats the characterisation. ‘All he cares about is him and his inner circle.’ The West will constantly have to shift its strategies in dealing with these central realities of North Korea. With an ever–shrinking menu of options, this challenge will only become ever more difficult.