HE ordered his uncle executed and half brother assassinated. He spent millions developing and testing a hydrogen bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles as his people suffered severe food shortages. He exchanged threats of nuclear annihilation with President Donald Trump, calling the American leader a “mentally deranged US dotard”.
That was last year’s image.
In more recent months, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un has achieved one of the most striking transformations in modern diplomacy.
The man described by critics as a murderous dictator and nuclear lunatic has held hands and had heart-to-heart talks with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who has encouraged and abetted Jong-un’s makeover.
Jong-un has enticed South Korea and the United States into negotiations by dangling the possibility of denuclearising his country. His popularity has surged in polls in South Korea as he prepares to become the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting US president.
With a dazzle of diplomatic initiatives in the run-up to his historic summit meeting on Tuesday with Trump in Singapore, Jong-un has effectively redefined himself. Some South Koreans now see him as more reliable than Trump despite the decades long alliance between their country and the United States.
Jong-un’s enhanced standing among South Koreans was crystallised by recent images of him walking in the woods with Moon, and on a beach with President Xi Jinping of China discussing North Korea’s nuclear programme.
The optics contrasted with what many South Koreans view as Trump’s scattershot diplomacy, in which he abruptly canceled the Singapore summit meeting, then reversed himself after Jong-un authorised a calm statement offering Trump “time and opportunity” to change his mind. (On Wednesday, one of the president’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said that Jong-un “got back on his hands and knees and begged” for the summit to be rescheduled.)
Despite the image change, Jong-un is unlikely to surrender his nuclear weapons anytime soon or ease the grip of his repressive regime. But, he has proved to be a skilled — some might say beguiling — strategist, driving events on the Korean Peninsula and showing a willingness to recalibrate.
“Once Kim Jong-un decided to improve ties with South Korea and the United States, he knew he could not do so with his image as a repressive tyrant,” said Kang Dong-wan, an expert on North Korea’s “image politics” at Dong-A University in Busan, South Korea. “He is creating a new portrait of him abroad as the leader of a normal country.”
In the West, Jong-un, 34, has often been caricatured as a chubby child toying with nuclear missiles. Trump, more than twice his age, has called Jong-un “short and fat”, a “sick puppy” and a “little rocket man”.
But, when Trump meets Jong-un, the US leader will be dealing with the ruler of a totalitarian regime adept at political theatrics to bolster Jong-un’s charisma at home and advance his agenda abroad.
Whatever his true personality, Jong-un has found an avid partner in advancing his new image: Moon.
Since taking office a year ago, Moon has exhorted Trump to test the idea that Jong-un was a reasonable leader ready to bargain away his nuclear weapons for the right incentives, such as normalised ties and security assurances from the US. It seems to have worked: Trump has recently changed his public appraisals of the North Korean leader, calling him “smart and gracious” and “very honourable”.
Jong-un started his image makeover this year by reaching out to South Korea, which was eager to play intermediary between North Korea and the US after a year in which the countries appeared to be on the verge of war. In a New Year’s Day speech, he offered to send athletes, cheerleaders and political emissaries to South Korea during its Winter Olympics.
Then, he whetted Washington’s appetite for negotiations by announcing a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests, closing North Korea’s only known nuclear test site and releasing three US prisoners. He also appeared to have hedged his bets by meeting twice with Xi, mending frayed ties with an old ally whose protection he needed as he entered delicate negotiations with Washington.
The diplomatic outreach was a sharp departure from North Korea’s history of rhetorical bombast, chest-thumping theatrics, military parades and mass rallies, which have fed the country’s image as an international pariah.
Jong-un’s image reinvention was skillfully staged with the help of Moon’s government, which made sure every detail of the leaders’ April 27 summit meeting was steeped in potent symbols dear to both Koreas: respect, ethnic unity and eventual Korean reunification.
But, nothing softened Jong-un’s image like the moment when he arrived at the border to meet with Moon. At Jong-un’s suggestion, Moon stepped across the border into the North for 10 seconds. Then Jong-un and Moon walked back across to the South for their meeting, holding hands, an encounter that transfixed television viewers in South Korea.
Some expect that in his meeting with Trump, Jong-un will most likely commit to denuclearising his country completely in order to weaken the rationale for sanctions, but insist on a “phased” denuclearisation. They say Jong-un probably fears that whatever agreement he strikes with Trump may not survive, given Washington’s unpredictable politics. NYT