Perhaps you thought this NK game ended a bit too cute. Well, here’s a soberer game without a reference to Britney Spears.

Kim Jong-Un will likely rise into his father’s shoes, but there will be a great deal of jockeying behind the scenes. The son doesn’t have the regime connections of his father, nor the charisma and legacy of his grandfather. So he is likely to be more ceremonial than real, yet this is valuable in itself to the regime’s most important actors: the Kim family and the military. Jong-Un provides a face to the public that maintains the Kim family aura central to DPRK legitimacy. If NK simply becomes yet another dictatorship like Syria or Burma, then what is the point of a separate NK anymore? So a Kim III is a valuable fig eaf; he will not be eliminated; the regime will neither fall nor implode.

The real consequence of Jong-Il’s death will be increasing factionalization in the NK elite. The current system is a messy balance of competing interests including party, state, industry, the police state apparatus, the military – much like the USSR in the 70s. Sitting on top of this fragile balancing act is the extended, decadent Kim family. Jong-Il had the ability to balance these subnational competitors; Jong-Un does not; he’s too inexperience and too unknown in the relevant circles. Expect post-Jong-Il Korea to look like China late in Mao’s life or the USSR in the 80s: disintegrated, erratic, badly factionalized, with frequent subnational capture of national policy, unable to forge a coherent general will because of incessant twilight infighting.

I don’t quite understand the dire consequences of factionalism. After all, Egypt’s military is divided between reformers and conservatives, and has been for awhile. It didn’t seem to affect the country’s stability until Tunisia gave protesters a clue about mobilization. Similarly, ever since I read Hwang Jang-yop’s account of the North Korean state’s factional strife as a classified document in the late 1990s, I’ve known North Koreans could disagree. What would change is, that news outlets would see the divisions more. perhaps I’m missing something – isn’t factionalization “normal”?

For all its “cuteness”, I think Patterson’s “nuclear incident” was a more realistic start for a scenario, and the consequences far more detailed, if slightly more optimistic.

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Filed under: Academia, Korea, Social Science Tagged: egypt, gamng, kim jong un, north korea, wikistrat