How Good Will Kim Jong-Un be at Being Insane?

There has been a change of leader in North Korea.  Kim Jong-Il has died and apparently been replaced by his son Kim Jong-Un, perhaps.  The South Koreans have moved their armed forces to "It's a New Kind of Crazy" alert and the rest of the world watches with a combination of interest and bewilderment to see what happens next.  The prize for facile statement of the year goes to Hillary Clinton who said she hoped for "a stable and peaceful transition" in North Korea.

Permit me to translate that comment.  "The United States hopes that a starving, disease ridden prison camp of a nation swaps a bloated, self indulgent nutjob for God alone knows what in order to perpetuate one of the most monstrous and tyrannical regimes on the face of the Earth today in a socially acceptable fashion".  Am I the only one who hopes that the leadership of North Korea is decided by a murderous knife fight in the politburo?  Obviously hoping for peace, freedom or the possibility that the North Korean people might not have to supplement their diet with tree bark is just a little too extreme.

So what can we expect from North Korea now that Kim 3.0 is in charge?  Many people will say this is a mystery and as far as specifics go they're right but we can identify a few broad trends.  People like to say that North Korea is difficult to work out or predict but I'm not sure they're right.  What the North Korean leadership wants is simple.  It wants tenure.  It wants to ensure that none of its members wind up getting hauled out of a foxhole by either revolutionaries or US Marines and summarily shot or put on trial and then summarily shot.  To ensure this the leadership has to do two things.  It has to control its own population and it has to persuade the rest of the world not to topple their squalid and brutal regime from the outside.

A large army, secret police, incessant propaganda and murderous ruthlessness have so far managed to take care of the first issue which merely leaves the second.  Here the North Korean leadership have a problem because North Korea is weak.  I'm sure they would like North Korea to be strong but it isn't.  North Korea is a ruined cesspit of a country and will remain so while the current gang of thugs continue to be in charge, and they have no intention of going anywhere.  So what to do?  The answer is simple; if you can't be strong, be crazy.  Ensure that none of your enemies real or imagined can ever be entirely certain that you wouldn't commit suicide simply for the opportunity of inflicting pain on your opponent.  A useful analogy might be someone who periodically swallows poison because he knows it will stop cannibals eating him.  What we have yet to see is how efficiently the new leadership (assuming there is one) can do this.

North Korea isn't actually that difficult to figure out.  The behaviour of its leadership is largely logical (although tempered by unseen struggles for position within their system).  The problem is that people frequently mistake logical for rational when the two have very little in common.  To understand North Korea take as your starting point the fact that its leadership is deeply psychotic and then build a logical structure on that foundation.  If you do that their behaviour becomes a lot more comprehensible.  Whether that helps us deal with them or not is another matter.