BECOMING KIM JONG UN

The wild, improbable rise of Kim Jong Un.

Although Kim jokes are a media staple, readers will find none in this grim but expert assessment by Pak, former CIA analyst and currently senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In the prologue, the author, who studied in South Korea as a Fulbright scholar, reveals that North Korea’s existence owes much to Cold War politics. In 1945, Stalin installed Kim’s paternal grandfather, Kim Il Sung, in the northern half of the newly divided nation. A fierce nationalist and no puppet, he yearned to unite Korea and sent his army south in 1950. He did not expect the U.S. to intervene, which it did, and the 1953 armistice saw borders largely unchanged but North Korea devastated. With Russian and Chinese aid, he rebuilt, establishing a bizarre personality cult in which adjectives such as “Orwellian” or “Stalinist” barely scratch the surface. His clunky command economy went into free fall in the 1990s after the Soviet Union and its aid vanished. However, despite widespread famine, Kim and his successor son, Jong Il, devoted enormous resources to building an arsenal of nuclear bombs and missiles. Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011. His Swiss education and love of basketball suggested a cosmopolitan outlook, but this proved illusory as he brutally demonstrated his power on the international scene and executed family members. His pugnacious actions, including bomb and missile tests, provoked Donald Trump to threaten massive retaliation, but then Trump announced a personal meeting where his deal-making savvy would supposedly persuade Jong Un to abandon his arsenal in exchange for American largesse. As the author documents, three summits produced only platitudes, but more are in the works. Pak—but not Trump—realizes that nuclear arms have promoted Jong Un, leader of a tiny, impoverished nation, to a peer of the world’s superpowers, and he loves it.

An insightful analysis of perhaps the world’s most dangerous dystopia.