From my blog on North East Asia: North Korea, Kim Jong Un, 10 years at the Helm.
It is important to have our own view, from the perspective that we can have. At the same time it is useful to look a bit beyond rhetoric at the real-politik of the situation, without the boundaries our usual information provides.
Now it has been ten years, a whole decade, since the fresh from Swiss International School, after a few years of getting credentials, 25 year old Kim Jong Un took on the job of being the Leader of North Korea, and he is doing quite well. He was unexpected, even by the family, to do well.
After a decade of American wise folk saying he will not last, and trying pretend- invasions every 3 months, well, he is lasting very well. I expect he will last in power another 30 years if his health assists him. The family has problems with the gut and diabetes etc. His sister has a high position, and he has quelled the unfortunate folk who opposed him very effectively to date. Sometimes by sacking them, sometimes by poison, and sometimes by execution by massive anti-aircraft bullets at 50 metres in stadiums for his colleagues to watch their total 'disappearance'.
It would be hard in that Hardest Human System (next to Saudi Arabia, our dear friends) to be sure of anything, for sure, but he has achieved far more already than ever expected by the West. He has been reliable. The history of North Korea for the whole decade has been Continuity.
He has formally, and Really, made North Korea a formidable Nuclear State, as that really remains the only way that his Family Kingdom hasn't been destroyed. He has done that better than his dad or grandad ever managed to do...and he does control the most important and lucrative piece of real estate on planet Earth.
He has an interest in a peace treaty with South Korea, as does the South, and it is really only the USA who opposes peace on the Korean peninsula. With peace, the presence of the US would be unimportant.
it is the same with taiwan, the USA cannot afford an accommodation between Taiwan and the Mainland. The USA does not like being unimportant. The US will not be Unimportant no matter how unimportant it is.
True, still brutal, much like Saudi Arabia is, and probably, with Saudi, they are the two worst human governments on the planet, and yet are both truly, profoundly, secure.
Far more secure than the various Presidents and Prime Ministers who come and go with various tricky plans etc and whose end-dates are already obvious.
Then, of course, should Fate intervene, there is always his young sister, quite the powerhouse herself, to quell the tides of change for this Hermit Kingdom.
