Kim Jong-un’s purge has touched relatively few from the either the Korean Workers’ Party or the Ministry of State Security. But bloodshed, both literal and figurative, will continue to claim generals and admirals resisting attempts to deemphasize songun policies. Further deadly disagreements between the Kim family and the country’s most powerful institution cannot be good for the DPRK, as the regime calls itself. Kim Jong-un has been able to intimidate the officer corps, but the constant turnover also means he has not been able to find a flag officer he can trust. He is, after all, searching for a four-star general willing to act against the interests of the military, a tall order. So far, Kim has had to continue executing senior officers.

 

IN SHORT, Kim Jong-un may be no more secure than the day he took over. At no time since 1949, one year after the founding of the North Korean state, has a Kim ruler had less support than Kim Jong-un does today. It is said that Kim is so fearful that he will not travel to large portions of the DPRK. And there is good reason for his insecurity. Radio Free Asia reported that explosives were placed in a ceiling at the Wonsan International Airport in late 2015 in an apparent attempt on Kim’s life.

Throughout the history of North Korea, there have been assassinations, plots, coup attempts and even insurrections. None, however, has come close to dislodging the Kim dynasty. Part of the reason is that the North Korean government—if it can be called that—derives its legitimacy from the Kim lineage, the “Paektu bloodline,” as it is known.

The charismatic Kim Il-sung, as a means of consolidating his political position, created a theology for the Korean people. Building upon the roots of Christianity and appropriating elements of emperor worship from the Japanese, Kim deified himself. In his telling, he made himself all powerful, controlling the weather, arranging bountiful harvests and possessing the power to transcend both time and space. “We were told that he crossed the river on a bridge of leaves and then he threw pine cones and they turned into grenades,” says Ahn Hyeok, a North Korean and former political prisoner. “We heard this over and over, and we really believed that. So naturally we idolized him.” Kim Il-sung retained elements of Korean feudal and Confucian society in his universe, employed Leninist and Stalinist techniques of social mobilization and control and masterfully manipulated imagery. In other words, God was Kim.

Kim Il-sung’s son and grandson have progressively lost this mystique—by now no one believes Kim Jong-un is divine, for instance—but young Kim rules because he was chosen by Kim Il-sung’s successor and direct descendant, and because he is a direct descendant himself. And military officers, although severely disadvantaged by Kim’s moves to resuscitate the Korean Workers’ Party, believe they cannot sustain their favored position in society without Kim blood at the top of the ruling group.

But there are limits to the patience of the top brass. Because of the growing divide between Kim and his general officers, the current ruler undoubtedly understands he needs to pacify the officer corps in some way. That realization, in all probability, makes it even less likely he will accommodate the international community on what it wants most from him: the dismantling of his nuclear arsenal.

Although Kim Jong-il promised in September 2005 to give up his atomic stockpile, that pledge was quickly dishonored, and it’s clear he fully backed the nuclear-weapons program as well as the military’s effort to develop long-range missiles. To remain in power, Kim Jong-un has to retain the core policies of his father.

Kim Jong-un’s inability to give up his country’s nukes and missiles puts him in what looks like an impossible position. He remains committed to his byungjin line—“progress in tandem”—policy of developing the economy and nukes at the same time. This policy, announced March 2013, looks good on paper, but it is not working in practice. Growth of the North’s gross domestic product, according to the Bank of Korea, the authoritative tracker of Kim’s economy, averaged 1.1 percent from 2011, the year he took over, to 2014, the last year for which reliable figures are available.

That is better than the two years of contraction that preceded 2011, but it is not enough to keep a restless population satisfied. Moreover, Kim is under pressure because the downturn in the “royal economy” is apparently severe. There are reports that the Kim family is not taking care of its own as it once did, and that is crucial from a regime stability point of view. “Events that used to be punctuated with gifts, for example, have given way to expressions of appreciation,” notes Ken Gause of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Joshua Stanton of the One Free Korea site reports that Kim Jong-un may be drawing down his family’s offshore cash and gold reserves. “He doesn’t have the resources to be able to consolidate his power and buy relationships,” Gause notes. As a consequence, Kim Jong-un has had to kill or otherwise discipline officials instead of showering them with gifts.

In the past, Kim rulers funded their royal economy—and the broader economy as well—with aid from China, Russia, South Korea and the United Nations, but now it appears these donors have reduced support, in some cases substantially. South Korea’s conservative government is not inclined to rescue Kim Jong-un, and the UN cannot find sufficient contributions to its food and other programs. It’s true that Russia is said to be “looking east” and that Moscow and Pyongyang declared 2015 to be a “year of friendship.” Kim, however, has little to offer the Russians, and so they are not supporting him to the great extent he needs. The most they were willing to do was write off almost $10 billion of uncollectable Soviet-era loans in 2014. Pledges of new aid look empty. Finally, Pyongyang’s relations with Beijing have plunged into deep freeze, and resulting in some reduction in Chinese assistance in the last two years.

Without sufficient aid and with the devotion of still-substantial resources to the military and senior regime elements, there is not enough left in the till to get the civilian economy going. Today’s predicament resembled the one that plagued Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. From the end of the Korean War to the middle of the 1960s, North Korea had one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. A Soviet model of forced mobilization of resources and people actually worked at first, but then it ran up against its limitations and failed, a pattern that plagued Stalinist economies elsewhere.

Kim Il-sung could have restarted growth, but ultimately did not do so because, in addition to other reasons, he continued to spend excessively on the military. Twenty-two million people, many of them poor, supported what was then the world’s fifth-largest military. Kim devoted about a quarter of his nation’s output to the Korean People’s Army, and the military’s share of the economy was probably growing in the mid-nineties. No economy, no matter how efficient or productive, could have carried such a burden. The price of a permanent war footing was destitution.

Today, the situation in broad outline is the same. Kim Jong-un does not have the resources to make good on promises of higher standards of living. Without aid, he needs a more productive economy. He has dabbled in economic liberalization with his pojon reforms—the reduction of controls on agricultural and industrial concerns is a step in the right direction—but changes have so far been too timid to make a noticeable difference.

 

NORTH KOREA needs bold change if it is to have much of a future, making the late October announcement that the Workers’ Party will hold its next congress so intriguing. The congress, scheduled for May, last met in October 1980, and the long interval has created expectations that Kim Jong-un will use the occasion to outline landmark reforms. If he doesn’t, Kim will be condemning the economy to slow or no growth for decades. This must have implications for the stability of his regime. For the military, it could mean years of hardship as generals and admirals are forced to share resources with increasingly demanding civilians, as Kim’s byungjin line contemplates. That is yet another area of potential disagreement between the flag officers and the young leader, and therefore another element of risk for his rule.

Problems in North Korea have ways of radiating out from its borders and affecting both neighbors and others. If Kim Jong-un cannot restart the economy with limited reforms, he will become even more reliant on sales of weapons—conventional and otherwise—and dangerous technologies.

Some of those sales have the potential to destabilize regions far from North Asia. For instance, North Korea supplies Iran with, among other things, nuclear-weapons technology and ballistic missiles. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, thought to be Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, was almost certainly in North Korea in February 2013 for Pyongyang’s third test of an atomic device, and it appears Iranians were also on hand for the previous two detonations as well. We should not be surprised if we learn Fakhrizadeh was there for the fourth test, in January of this year. In any event, Iranian weapons technicians are reported to be stationed in a North Korean base near the Chinese border. Iranians have, in all probability, witnessed most if not all of the North’s tests of intermediate- and long-range ballistic missiles.