For nearly a quarter-century, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the North Korean regime's continued survival has baffled observers. When North Korea’s founding leader Kim Il Sung died, North Korea entered a period of famine that lasted three years and killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of North Korean citizens. Yet the regime carried on under his son, Kim Jong Il, and his grandson, Kim Jong Un, currently leads the country, making it the only communist regime to practice hereditary leadership succession—not once, but twice. So how has the North Korean regime remained in power for more than 60 years under the unbroken leadership of three generations of the Kim family? To evaluate the future prospects of North Korea—be it gradual evolution, sudden transformation or collapse—it is critical to understand how the hereditary leadership system has developed historically, its current state and its future prospects.
Part of the reason for the Kim regime’s continued survival is that, although often miscast as a “hermit kingdom,” North Korea has been anything but that when it comes to diplomacy and trade. That has allowed it to endure dramatic changes in international politics, to the astonishment of those who have long expected its collapse. While preaching its gospel of self-reliance, the Kim dynasty has depended on others for its survival without ever quite yielding to their embrace.
In addition, Kim Jong Un has taken baby steps toward shoring up the North’s economy over the last few years. The mid-2015 rollout of Chinese-style economic reforms, combined with reports of tentative discussions with U.S. officials about the possibility of jumpstarting nuclear talks, suggested that significant shifts could be in the cards in Pyongyang. But the launch in 2015 of five short-range missiles from North Korea’s east coast threw icy water on prospects for diplomatic engagement with Kim Jong Un’s regime. The missile launch highlighted the ways in which North Korea’s room for maneuver, especially on the economic front, would continue to be constrained by its inability to improve relations with old foes.
Nevertheless, by 2016 Kim Jong Un showed no indication that sanctions or military pressure had convinced him to abandon Pyongyang’s nuclear program. On the contrary, Kim praised North Korea’s nuclear “deterrent” and reiterated Pyongyang’s determination that it be internationally recognized as a nuclear-armed state. Yet there were already subtle signals that North Korea was prepared to tone down its belligerence and enter into dialogue with the United States not only over its nuclear program, but also over diplomatic normalization and a peace agreement to supersede the 1953 Korean War armistice.
Over the subsequent two years, further successful nuclear and missile tests, overseen by Kim, heightened tensions and raised fears of an impending conflict between North Korea and the U.S. Those dissipated following Kim's summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in June 2018. As 2018 drew to a close, U.S. President Donald Trump and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, were sounding remarkably optimistic about the future of the Korean Peninsula, a marked contrast to the hostile rhetoric of potential “fire and fury” from just the year before. Most experts and analysts, however, are skeptical that the current approach will yield the positive outcomes the two leaders predict, noting that no concrete actions toward denuclearization, much less the process by which they might be taken, have been discussed with North Korea. Moreover, the chasm that separates Washington’s and Seoul’s respective approaches to engaging Pyongyang is a reflection of fundamentally different national strategic interests. For South Korea, North Korea is and always will be its first local, domestic, national, regional and global priority. For the United States, North Korea is merely one global priority among many.