North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continues to accelerate the country’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. At the same time, North Korea has been a key supplier of arms to Russia as the war in Ukraine progresses. Both of these actions are critical threats to South Korea, the United States, and Japan. But the outside world is missing an equally important development with immense implications for stability on the Korean Peninsula—the slow and irreversible breakdown of the Kim dynasty.
That said, regime collapse is not necessarily around the corner. When North Korea’s founding dictator Kim Il Sung died in July 1994, predictions were rampant about regime or state collapse. When his son and successor Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, many North Korea experts thought that then twenty-seven-year-old Kim Jong Un—Kim Jong Il’s youngest son—would not be able to stay in power. It has been thirteen years since Kim Jong Un succeeded his father, and he remains in firm control over North Korea, including the military and security apparatuses. The chances of a military coup are slim. But North Korea is still hollowing out and the Kim dynasty is in decline. This state of affairs will have major strategic consequences for the Korean Peninsula and the world.
The Biggest Threats to the Kim Dynasty
From the outside, Kim Jong Un seems to be in full control over the Korean People’s Army (KPA), the Ministry of State Security (MSS), and the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), as well as other levers of power. But Kim’s biggest threats today all come from internal forces that he and his cronies can no longer totally control. Several ingredients of the superglue that have so far sustained the world’s only communist family dynasty since 1948 are under threat or slowly coming apart. There are four main threats to the regime:
- The deepening economic malaise in North Korea, including endemic food and energy shortages; the de facto breakdown of the state rationing system that has spurred the rise of jangmadang (small local markets, which often include illicit trade); and expenditure of some 25 to 30 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, including development of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
- A sharp weakening of decades of indoctrination based on intense hatred and fear of North Korea’s archenemies: South Korea, the United States, and Japan; as well as the breakdown of loyalty not just among the masses but also within the nomenklatura of the party, armed forces, security services, and the so-called donju, or moneyed elites.
- The growing inability to sow ever-increasing dosages of fear into its citizens through concentration camps, public executions, and constant terror by the security services.
- The uncertainties associated with a fourth dynastic succession, as Kim seems to be preparing his teenage daughter, Kim Ju Ae, to be the next Great Leader of the Kim dynasty.
Economic Decline
During a two-day session of the 8th Central Committee of the KWP in January 2024, Kim acknowledged the “very pitiful state” of the North Korean economy and stressed that the government is unable “to provide even basic necessities such as basic foodstuffs, groceries, and consumer goods to the local people.” In February 2024, Kim announced a major initiative to spur an “industrial revolution” in North Korea with the planned construction of factories in at least twenty remote counties into the mid-2030s to narrow the growing urban-rural economic gaps. North Korea’s state media widely publicized Kim’s remarks that “the next 10 years is truly a great revolution with enormous epochal significance.”
In reality, because North Korea spends some 25 to 30 percent of its GDP on defense and Kim is determined to accelerate his nuclear and WMD programs, the state does not have enough energy and raw materials to maintain consumer-products-related factories in remote regions, even if Kim has ordered them to be built. Hence, the dilemma for officials for putting Kim’s plan into action is that while it is up to local governments to provide the energy and materials to run these factories, they simply do not have them and they will then be responsible for failing to follow through with Kim’s grandiose plans. Moreover, although North Korea was reported to have had a better harvest in 2023, a report published by Statistics Korea in December 2023 noted that “North Korea’s food production including rice and barley decreased by 4 percent to 4.51 million tons in 2022” and that food shipments from China also dropped from 500,000 tons of rice in 2021 to 130,383 tons in 2022.
Ironically, even as Kim chastised the government for North Korea’s economic malaise, “the regime has been unable to guarantee its people’s right to food” since “more than 80 percent of North Koreans do not consume enough protein.” The United Nations’s 2023 report on global food security and nutrition estimated that between 2020 and 2022, almost 12 million North Koreans, or about 45.5 percent of the population, were undernourished.
Weakening Indoctrination and the Breakdown of Loyalty
While the state continues to churn out propaganda on the importance of Kim Jong Un–ism, younger North Koreans go through the motions of paying homage to the Kim Dynasty but otherwise pay little attention to endless indoctrination. One example of the growing indifference to intensive propaganda, political lessons, and groupthink activities praising the party and the Kim dynasty is the fact that Pyongyang is pushing indoctrination much more intensely.
According to the Daily NK online newspaper, North Korean authorities stepped up indoctrination due to worsening “anti-socialist” and “non-socialist” behavior and quoted a North Korean education-related source who said that the KWP “issued a nationwide order to step up ideological indoctrination and punishment of teachers” because teachers were “often using puppet-state [South Korean] expressions in class without knowing it.” This source also stressed that “most elementary, middle, and high school teachers are young and want to follow the latest trends, so they watch a lot of South Korean TV shows and frequently listen to South Korean music.”
The Korean dialects used in the two Koreas are based on the same roots but have evolved in very different ways since the Korean War. North Korea has emphasized the importance of “language purity” and “ideological content” so that foreign-based words or phrases are forbidden, and language is a powerful tool for idolizing the Kim Dynasty, marshalling the masses for constant campaigns, and demonstrating the supposedly superior nature of a North Korean version of Korean nationalism. In sharp contrast, Korean in the South has evolved together with the country’s rapid economic growth and vast networks with the outside world. Many foreign words and phrases have seeped into daily use.
As South Korean drama and movies have penetrated North Korea, the government has cracked down on North Koreans who follow South Korean fashion, words, and phrases, and even body language. Watching South Korean dramas or movies and talking in South Korean accents will lead to arrest, imprisonment, banishment to labor camps, and, in some instances, public execution. In December 2021, for example, the New York Times reported that at least seven people were executed for watching or distributing K-pop videos because Kim Jong Un considers South Korean culture to be a “vicious cancer.” The harsh punishment against those who mimic South Korean phrases and fashion is seen as a direct threat against North Korean youth since the daily barrage of propaganda is no longer as effective as it was in previous generations.
The South Korean Ministry of Unification issued a report on the state of North Korea’s human rights in December 2023. The report was based on interviews with 6,300 North Korean defectors between 2013 and 2022, and it was the first time that the findings were released to the public. Although the Kim regime has cracked down harshly on those who watch South Korean movies and dramas, 23 percent of the respondents said they watched South Korean dramas or movies. Some 57 percent were interested to know more about the outside world. Interestingly, only 8.4 percent of North Korean defectors who came to South Korea before 2000 replied that they had watched foreign movies and dramas, including those from South Korea. Seventy-one percent said that social control and surveillance grew stronger under Kim Jong Un’s rule.
In a 2023 report released by Human Rights Watch on the closing of North Korea between 2018 and 2023, it noted that in January 2023 the North Korean government passed the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act with the intent of “completely eliminating the use of puppet language, referring to language with South Korean influence, denouncing abnormal language elements, and establishing a socialist language lifestyle throughout the entire society.”
The Unsustainability of Persistent Fear and Terror
All North Koreans fear the country’s secret police (MSS), and the depth of fear permeates all levels of North Korean society. However, the MSS and other security apparatuses cannot jail, torture, or kill hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. According to various testimonies from the more than 30,000 defectors from the North who have settled in South Korea, even though citizens fear the MSS their level of disgust toward the regime is equally high, so fear and hatred of the regime balance each other out.
A 2021 report published by the Transitional Justice Group entitled “Mapping Killings under Kim Jong-un” noted that prisoners were treated inhumanely before they were publicly executed and that students were systematically mobilized to attend public trials. There is little doubt that Kim will continue to use the military, secret police, and security forces to prevent, quell, and crush all known and possible sources of dissent or opposition. But the paradox that Kim faces is that the only way to significantly improve the livelihood of North Koreans is by shifting resources from the defense and domestic security control budgets to the sectors of the economy that produce consumer goods and services. Obviously, he has chosen not to do so, because militarizing North Korea is at the core of his goals for ensuring regime survival. Even elites in Pyongyang who have hoarded foreign currency are not free from the security forces’ surveillance and growing crackdowns on corruption. Ironically, Kim, his family, and his closest advisers appear in public wearing very expensive watches, clothes, and handbags that are slowly becoming more available to the North Korean elite.
Kim’s Succession Problem
Whether Kim Jong Un will continue to remain healthy is unknown. According to South Korean intelligence assessments that were partially revealed to the media, Kim is believed to weigh some 140 kilograms (more than 300 pounds), is a heavy drinker and smoker, and suffers from a “severe” sleep disorder as well as diabetes and heart conditions. Still, short of a sudden cardiac arrest, Kim’s personal health is well guarded. He and his family are able to receive the best possible medical treatment available in North Korea, including access to a special clinic that serves only the family.
In March 2022, Kim’s daughter Ju Ae first appeared with her father in the state media in front of a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile. She is between ten and eleven years old and apparently is being groomed as the heir to the regime. It is impossible to verify whether Kim Ju Ae is really the dictator-in-waiting, but the South Korean National Intelligence Service said that it was likely that she will be her father’s successor. The Daily Mail reported on February 23, 2024, that according to a retired South Korean intelligence official, Kim Jong Un also has a son, but the young man is “too pale and thin” to be shown to the public as the heir of the Kim dynasty.
Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, who is the deputy director of the powerful agitation and propaganda bureau in the KWP and is considered to be the second-most powerful leader in North Korea, also has been touted in the foreign press as a potential successor. But if history serves as a guide, Kim will not leave the dynasty to his sibling. Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, will never agree to a succession that does not include one of her children. Even though Kim Yo Jong wields significant power, her influence stems from the wishes of her brother. If Kim Jong Un feels that she is becoming too strong or forming her own clique of supporters, Ri Sol Ju will make sure to counter her sister-in-law’s influence.
Succession struggles have taken place before in North Korean history. When Kim Il Sung was thinking about grooming his successor from the late 1960s, he initially pushed his own younger brother, Kim Yong Ju, as a potential candidate. But when Kim Il Sung’s second son, Kim Jong Il, got wind of his father’s plan, he ousted his uncle in what would be his first successful power struggle. He also made sure that his younger half-brother, Kim Pyong Il—who looked much more like Kim Il Sung and had his own group of followers within the KPA—was effectively exiled from North Korea as a diplomat in several Eastern European countries for nearly thirty years.
After Kim Jong Un rose to power in 2011 following his father’s death, he secured his own power base. To make sure that no other relatives posed a threat, he first brought trumped-up charges of counterrevolutionary activity against his uncle Jang Song Thaek, who was executed in 2013. Jang had been instrumental in bolstering Kim Jong Un’s rise as a great leader after his father suffered a stroke in August 2008. Jang also had made sure to ensure the continuing control of the Kim family over North Korea and, in particular, to prepare the young Kim Jong Un to take power when his father ultimately died in December 2011. Subsequently, in February 2017, Kim Jong Un ordered the assassination of his older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The killing or banishing of half-brothers and uncles have been routine features of the Kim family’s power games. Given the intense paranoia that penetrates the entire class of elites, no one can trust anyone. And Kim certainly only really confides in his sister, wife, and daughter, although this may also change depending on the nature of future threats to his ironclad rule.
The legitimacy of the Kim dynasty is based on the family’s “Baekdu bloodline,” or the beginning of the dynasty by Kim Il Sung when he was fighting the Japanese during the colonial era (1910–1945) and led the struggle from Mount Baekdu—the most revered mountain on the Korean Peninsula. Indeed, the official biography of Kim Jong Il says he was born in Mount Baekdu on a dark, cloudy day but that a ray of light began to shine the moment he was born. The reality is that Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union and learned Russian as his first language from his Russian nanny.
Kim Jong Un’s own ties to the famed Baekdu bloodline are particularly murky and problematic. His late mother, Ko Yong Hui, was born in Japan and her parents moved to North Korea in the early 1960s. In North Korea’s stratified society, where the population is divided into three groups—known, in descending order of trust, as the core, the wavering, and hostile classes—Japanese Koreans are considered to be the lowest of the hostile class. This group also includes descendants of South Koreans, former landlords, South Korean prisoners of war who were forced to stay in North Korea, and defectors' families and relatives. The fact that Kim Jong Un’s mother was born in Japan is something that is not public knowledge in North Korea. Considering the reverence with which the Kim family bloodline is officially regarded in state propaganda, it is nearly impossible to adulate Ko Yong Hui without revealing her connections to this most reviled of social classes.
Kim Cannot Start a War, Reform North Korea, or Give Up Nuclear Weapons
Since the fall of 2023, Kim has been rattling his saber loudly and announced a major U-turn in North Korea’s policy toward South Korea. In January 2024, he told the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly that the North Korean constitution will be revised to rule out any possibility of peaceful unification with South Korea. As one analyst noted, “declaring the South as a permanent adversary, not as a potential partner for reconciliation, could also be aimed at improving the credibility of Kim’s escalatory nuclear doctrine, which authorizes the military to launch preemptive nuclear attacks against adversaries if the leadership is under threat.” In the same month, Kim also proclaimed that not only was South Korea a sworn enemy, but that North Korea also had absolutely no interest in reunifying with the South peacefully. Kim stated, “We can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annexing it as a part of the territory of our republic in case a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.”
Many North Korea observers have argued that tensions are now the highest between the two Koreas in recent memory and that prospects for conflict are growing, but the reality is that Kim’s North Korea is hollowing out economically and diplomatically. Most importantly, loyalty among the North’s masses and the elites is weakening. If Kim opts for major conflict or even war, South Korean and U.S. forces will face enormous casualties. North Korea has become a bigger threat owing to its rapidly advancing nuclear weapons programs, and it has carried out more than 200 missile tests, well over triple the amount performed under his father and grandfather. But as explained above, Kim is ruling over a North Korea that is a failed state by almost all measures, save for its 1.1-million-strong armed forces and its nuclear weapons.
Even with the North Korean economy in dire straits—Kim admitted as much at a January 2024 KWP meeting, saying that the economic crisis was a “serious political issue” since the government was unable to “provide even basic necessities”—Kim’s most important political goal is to lay the groundwork for Kim Ju Ae or any of his other children to succeed him when the time comes. Tinkering with economic reforms that could unleash a torrent of social upheavals and power imbalances would be detrimental to making sure that a fourth dictator from the Kim family continues to rule over the North Korean mafia state.
So long as Kim is determined to continue to build up North Korea’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and other WMD—estimated between 40 and 60 nuclear warheads—in addition to maintaining a conventional force of more than a million across the country’s armed services, he does not have the money to pursue his original policy of the so-called byungjin noseon, or “parallel line,” of economic development and a strengthened military. According to the U.S. State Department’s 2021 “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers” report, in 2019 North Korea’s defense spending was around $4 billion, or 26 percent of its GDP, the highest portion out of 170 countries. Figures from Statista indicate that, North Korea is estimated to have spent 33 percent of its GDP on defense in 2022.
North Korean men serve at least ten years in the armed forces. Women are also conscripted for three to five years and are a key source of free labor for construction, factories, and farms. If Kim pares down the military, he would have to find civilian jobs for all of these demobilized forces, which would be impossible. And given the supreme need for militarizing the state, the KPA is not just a symbol of military might: it is also the conduit for ensuring that all able North Korean citizens are perpetually on a war footing.
Hoping for Trump’s Return and Cementing Ties With Putin
The hope that die-hard South Korean revolutionaries will heed the calls of their northern comrades and rise up to topple a succession of “puppet regimes,” including Yoon Suk Yeol’s government in the South, remains stronger in the minds of extreme leftists in South Korea than of any party leader in North Korea today. Kim’s remaining option to buy time is to enter into some type of negotiations with the United States and Japan to remove a plethora of sanctions. In his talks with former U.S. president Donald Trump in 2018 and 2019, Kim came close to a deal to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. But Trump was unwilling to agree to these terms.
During those negotiations, Trump pressured allies and sought a diplomatic victory by reaching some type of a nuclear-freeze deal with North Korea in exchange for either drastically curtailing U.S.-South Korea military exercises, withdrawing some elements of the 28,000 members of U.S. Forces Korea currently stationed in the South, or announcing that the United States will no longer provide a nuclear umbrella for South Korea. In April 2023, John Bolton, former National Security Advisor during the Trump administration stated in an interview with the Chosun Daily that “Trump lacks an understanding of the concept of ‘alliance,’ whether it’s with South Korea, Japan, or NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Many works will be necessary to preempt any potential issues in the South Korea-U.S. relationship once he is re-elected.” Bolton stressed that Seoul and Tokyo should prepare for all contingencies and that it was important for South Korea to consider longer-term security interests such as working with the U.S. across party lines on buttressing U.S. and allied security in the Indo-Pacific.
On February 14, 2024, South Korea established full diplomatic ties with Cuba—one of North Korea’s oldest and closest supporters. Seoul began discussions with Havana in the mid-2000s, but the latter demurred owing to its traditional ties with Pyongyang. However, Cuba and South Korea’s tourist and commercial connections have been growing. Before the pandemic, some 14,000 South Koreans visited Cuba, and new Korean investments in the country include those of Hyundai Heavy Industries, which built a series of power stations for Cuba. Havana has realized the value of cementing these ties with Seoul. Losing Cuba in the diplomatic war will not make a serious dent in Kim’s pockets, but it will add to the growing diplomatic isolation of his impoverished nation. In December 2023, North Korea closed an additional seven embassies, leaving it with only forty-six missions. All of North Korea’s foreign embassies and missions are only given the barest of funds and the vast majority of diplomats engage in illicit trade in drugs, alcohol, and counterfeit currencies to pay rent, buy food, and cover their children’s school tuition.
In a windfall that Kim didn’t expect, the Ukrainian war pushed Russia to import crucial munitions and missiles from North Korea. According to South Korean Minister of Defense Shin Won-sik, North Korea has supplied Russia with some 6,700 containers of munitions since 2023 or about 3 million rounds of various artillery shells. In February 2024, Ukrainian sources said that Russia also fired twenty-four North Korean ballistic missiles of the KN-23/24 series, although their accuracy remains a point of contention.
By sending much needed munitions and missiles to Russia, Kim has gained Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gratitude, stronger possibility of receiving advanced fighters, space-related technologies, food, and fuel from Russia. At the same time, forging closer ties with Russia enables North Korea to counterbalance, even slightly, North Korea’s overwhelming economic and political dependence on China. Like China, however, Russia is opposed to imposing additional sanctions on North Korea.
When Kim visited Putin in Vladivostok in September 2023, Putin said that Russia will be willing to help North Korea build satellites although Moscow has not yet clarified the extent to which Russian military technology or weapons systems could be transferred to North Korea. If North Korea continues to provide arms to Russia, however, South Korea may opt to export arms directly to Ukraine that would go against Russian interests. Owing to a domestic law that prohibits South Korean arms exports to conflict zones, Seoul has only sent nonlethal defense items to Ukraine. However, South Korea has supported Ukraine indirectly by shipping tanks, munitions, and small fighter jets to Poland and other NATO members who have sent significant amounts of weapons and munitions to Ukraine.
While Putin’s and Kim’s strategic interests have converged because of the Ukrainian war, once the war ends, it remains unclear whether Moscow will opt to significantly upgrade military cooperation with Pyongyang. Since North Korea doesn’t have cash to buy Russian weapons such as more modern combat aircraft or significantly upgrading existing fighters such as the MiG-29s, Russia can opt to provide them as part of a military assistance package, but given Russia’s own financial constraints and falling arms exports, Russia is unlikely to furnish North Korea with high-tech weapons for free.
Conclusion
Kim has failed as a leader of North Korea. At the same time, progressives in South Korea continue to attack President Yoon Suk Yeol for his “hardline” postures toward North Korea, such as his choice to stress human rights abuses in North Korea and affirming that South Korea will retaliate with massive counterstrikes if the North were to attack the South, with or without nuclear weapons. It is important to recall that Kim himself discontinued the September 18, 2018, military agreement that he signed with former South Korean president Moon Jae-in. Indeed, Moon had hailed the accord as a measure that would have prevented future conflicts on the Korean Peninsula and continues to argue that Seoul should not respond with harsh measures against Pyongyang.
In the end, Kim has nothing to show for his thirteen years of stewardship other than more hardships for his people, an economy that continues to tank, and a regime set on making more nuclear weapons and missiles. Kim’s lasting legacy will be the hollowing out of North Korea and a people who are poorer than when he assumed power in 2011. Nuclear weapons will not feed North Koreans, but the money poured into their development will lead in the long run to the downfall of the Kim Dynasty and the beginning of the end of the status quo on the Korean Peninsula.
While policymakers and analysts in the United States continue to search for restarting talks with North Korea and coming up with a viable road map that may lead to denuclearization, unless Kim goes back on his own words that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are never going be negotiated with the United States, the chances of a political solution to a growing North Korean nuclear threat are virtually non-existent. On April 3, 2024, North Korea announced that it successfully tested a new solid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) tipped with a hypersonic warhead. If North Korea begins to deploy the Hwasongpho-16B IRBMs, it would significantly cut back warning time for South Korean and U.S. forces. As North Korea’s nuclear and WMD capabilities continue to grow, South Korea and the United States have to substantially upgrade extended deterrence assets and strategies, but the two allies have to also prepare for domestic instability in North Korea owing to the irreversible hollowing out of North Korea.
Correction: The section about factories in remote regions has been adjusted to make clear how Kim puts the industrial onus on local governments.