Kim Jong Un: The Nuclear Millennial Dictator and His Threat to East Asia

On the 3rd of September 2017, the North Korean military detonated a nuclear weapon underground, one that was approximately ten times stronger than any previous North Korean nuclear weapon. The bomb was so strong the detonation of it caused a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. The nuclear test was one of several incendiary actions taken by the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, in 2017 and 2018 to demonstrate his power at home and abroad. Who is this North Korean dictator and how much of a threat does he pose to the safety of East Asia? This is the story of Kim Jong Un, the third ruler of North Korea.

The man known to history as Kim Jong Un is officially said to have been born on the 8th of January 1982, presumably in the city of Pyongyang in North Korea. There is no certainty about this though. International intelligence services argue that it is more likely that he was born in January 1983 or January 1984. For instance, when he studied abroad in Switzerland as a young man, his passport gave his birthdate as 1984. It is believed that the year 1982 was symbolically chosen because it correlated closely with the seventieth anniversary of his grandfather's birth.

Kim's father was Kim Jong ll. He was the son of Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Il Sung became the Supreme Leader of communist North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists, directly after the end of the Second World War. He would rule North Korea as its absolute dictator down to his death in 1994, when he was succeeded by Kim's father, Kim Jong Il. Hence, over three dynasties the Kim family have ruled North Korea with an iron grip since the end of the

Second World War. However, the nature of the state and its foreign relations have changed over time. Kim's father had overlapping wives between the late 1970s and early 2000s. Song Hye-rim was his eldest wife. Ko Yong Hui was his second wife, a former dancer who later became the de-facto first lady of North Korea. Kim Jong Un was born from this second marriage. He is known to have two full biological siblings, an older brother who plays no role in the country's politics, and a younger sister, Kim Yo Jong who plays a considerable role in the regime. Then there are many half-siblings,

one of whom Kim Jong Un has famously clashed with. There may be other illegitimate siblings. Given the secretive nature of North Korean society, it is difficult to be sure. Kim was born into a relatively new country with a paradoxically very ancient history. North Korea, for instance, had only been established as a separate country following the end of the Second World War in the autumn of 1945. However, the Korean peninsula is home to an ancient culture that has made great contributions to world history. For instance, some of the

most important innovations in paper production and block printing were made in Korea in the first millennium before being transmitted across Eurasia to Europe in medieval times. Later, under the Joseon Dynasty that ruled Korea between 1392 and 1910, Korea's culture flourished, but it also turned inwards as it became fearful of western influences, especially the spread of Christianity. Westerners began to refer to it as 'The Hermit Kingdom' in the late nineteenth century. It was conquered by Japan early in the twentieth century and remained a core part of the Empire of Japan

until the end of the Second World War. Following this it was divided along the 38th Parallel between a Soviet-backed, communist North Korea and a US-backed, pro-western South Korea. In a way, North Korea continued to carry the torch as a Hermit Kingdom after the war. Kim's grandfather had tried initially to unite Korea under communist rule through the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. Once that failed, North Korea turned inwards, becoming a secretive and authoritarian state. Where South Korea flourished to become a modern and emerging technological

economy, albeit under its own dictators and strongmen down to the 1980s, North Korea remained backwards economically and cut off from much of the world. Still, until the end of the Cold War, North Korea had many allies and its economy benefited from them. The situation would change in the 1990s and 2000s as recent history cast a considerable shadow over North Korea. Although Kim was born in Pyongyang and was part of the ruling family there, his earliest years, and much of his life ever since, was cut off from the day-to-day realities of ordinary North Koreans.

The family live in over a dozen plush palaces and elaborate residences staffed and run by hundreds or even thousands of staff and every whim of the family was taken care of from Kim's earliest days. Unlike the people of their country, who generally live in poverty, the Kim family was surrounded by western technology and modern amenities. Kim's relationship with his mother was reportedly very close, as was that with his sister, Kim Yo Jong. The latter relationship has endured down to the present day and she is one of the people closest to her brother. Kim Yo Jong is even viewed as a

potential successor if Kim dies before his own children come of age. His only known child Kim Ju Ae has also been mooted as his potential successor although as of 2026 she is thought to be only 13 years old. As a young man, Kim's primary education took place at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun school in the capital, a school for the elite of the North Korean regime, before being sent to Switzerland. There he attended the Liebefeld-Steinhölzli Schule under an alias, Pak Un, though clearly many locals must have found the strange entourage which surrounded

this ten or eleven-year old child in the town of Bern to be peculiar. There he learned to speak some English and German, and presumably a little bit of French as well, though Kim has never been known for his gifted educational abilities. He returned to North Korea in around 2000 to complete his secondary education. It was in Switzerland where he seemingly developed a fascination with basketball, a strange development given that basketball is hardly that prestigious in a country where football, skiing and other sports are much more favoured. Back in North

Korea by the start of the twenty-first century, Kim had to adjust to the new political climate in the country. When he left for Europe years earlier the country was undergoing a political transition. His grandfather, Kim Il Sung, who had ruled for nearly half a century, died on the 8th of July 1994. Kim Il Sung had ruled over a country that was far from isolated on the world stage. He had backers in Russia and China and a host of closes allies amongst other communist rulers such as Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania and even members of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Cold War,

such as India. All of that had changed in the early 1990s as the Cold War came to an end and North Korea became isolated. This was a development compounded by China's economic market liberalisation and efforts to move towards the model of growth pursued by countries like Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong between the 1950s and 1980s. As a result, while Kim Jong Il's succession had been planned as early as 1980, it was unclear what approach he would adopt as the new country's leader. In the end, Kim opted for continuing North Korea's

isolationist approach and even deepened it, seeking economic autonomy. In the short term this was disastrous. The first five years of Kim Jong Il's time as leader were characterised by crisis and famine. As the subsidies that North Korea had relied on for years from Russia and other Cold War allies dried up, food shortages abounded. Hundreds of thousands tried to flee the country. Many more, perhaps even millions, either starved to death or experienced severe malnutrition. If Kim Il Sung was guilty of developing an authoritarian government with strong ties to the Soviet Union and China, his son quickly established himself as someone who had little

concern for the wellbeing of his own people. Kim was away in Switzerland, but he must have been aware of what was happening at home on some level. Kim was a child when his father became Supreme Leader of North Korea in 1994. He was also a child of his second marriage and was not viewed as the heir in waiting at this early point in affairs. Instead, his older half-brother from Kim Jong Il's first marriage to Song Hye-rim, Kim Jong-nam was believed to be the designated successor. Jong-nam was born in 1971 and was consequently entering his mid-twenties at the time that his father became

the new head of state. He had years to further acclimatise to the position and was viewed in some circles within North Korea as a relatively shrewd individual. However, two major developments occurred after Kim Jong Un returned to North Korea from his studies in Switzerland which rapidly changed the succession plans. Firstly, fear began to grow that Jong-nam was a reformer of sorts who was not dedicated to the Juche ideology of the country. This is a political ideology similar to Marxist-Leninist thought. It was developed extensively in the writings of Kim Il

Sung throughout his long reign and elaborated on further by his son and successor. Secondly, in the summer of 2001, Kim Jong-nam was arrested in Japan after travelling there with his family using fake passports and under assumed aliases. The purpose of the trip was to visit Disneyland in Tokyo. This did not reflect well on his suitability as a potential future leader of North Korea. Owing to the poor judgement displayed by Kim Jong-nam and the fact that Jong Un was now entering his twenties and beginning to build up his own faction of supporters at the North Korean political court, a power struggle emerged in Pyongyang during the 2000s.

Remember, Kim Jong Il was well into his fifties when he succeeded his father. As such, his reign was never going to be as long as that of Kim Il Sung. It was therefore important for the successor to position himself to take over before Jong Il died. This was especially so given that there were frequent rumours about their father's ill health, including one bizarre story that he had died from diabetes in the early 2000s and was being represented on the world stage by an impersonator. To cement his growing claim to succeed his father, despite being a

much younger son, Jong Un married in 2009 and had children. His wife was Ri Sol-ju. Little is known about her background, upbringing or political views, and perhaps that was the goal. Theirs is a seemingly traditional, stable marriage that has resulted in several children. In contrast, Kim Jong-nam had several wives and mistresses, many who have lived extensively in Macau and Beijing in China over the years. Their connections to foreign entities complicated the possibility of Jong-nam succeeding even further. Beyond his wife and family, Kim is known for being a bit of an enigma. He has been widely satirised in western media

on account of this and there are a lot of genuinely quirky elements to his personality. For instance, his love of cheese has allegedly led to a complex system of importing cheeses from around the world. He is famously scared of flying and travels across large distances by train. He has a strange fascination with western culture. In Kim Jong Un's case this manifested itself around basketball and he is a keen fan of the NBA. This is a peculiar family tendency. His father was notorious for his massive collection of western DVDs. Kim is also understood to potentially have

a large fondness for alcohol. Political meetings can involve drinking strong spirits and rice wine. What this means is that, even at a relatively young age, Kim is possibly suffering from a lot of health problems. He is clearly obese and is also potentially suffering from gout. These known particularities about him aside, there is an awful lot about Kim that remains unknown today to those outside of North Korea. From as early as his older brother's ill-fated Disneyworld trip in 2001, Kim Jong Il was beginning to groom Kim Jong Un as his new successor. Insiders within

the regime and defectors have stated that Jong Un was simply viewed as being most like his father in temperament and approach. Hence, at the end of the 2000s Kim Jong Il began bringing his son into government and giving him new responsibilities. This clearly demonstrated to the powerful North Korean military and other powerbrokers that Jong Un was the new successor designate and would follow his father as third Supreme Leader of North Korea. They did not have long to wait for this to become an eventuality. In 2009 Kim Jong Un was officially announced as the successor.

Two years later, Kim Jong Il died at 70 years of age on the 17th of December 2011. The country that Kim took over in 2011 was facing many challenges. On account of its strange history and the development of its nuclear weapons system under his father, the country was deeply isolated on the world stage. It was also already under crippling economic sanctions and there had been a failure to revive the economy for the most part. The situation had improved slightly since the famine of the 1990s, but there were continuing food shortages. It was also common for

electricity to simply be unavailable. Pyongyang functioned reasonably well, as the capital. Yet even there the power could go out for days at a time. Further away from the capital it was like living in the pre-modern world. In the cities and towns there were industries, though these were very much like early Soviet-era facilities or those found in Germany at the start of the twentieth century. The average salary was the equivalent of less than $2,000 a year, while the overall size of the economy was just $28 billion dollars. Compare this with South Korea.

Admittedly the population there was approximately twice the size of North Korea's, with some 50 million inhabitants in 2011. However, at slightly less than two trillion dollars in overall value, its economy was sixty times the size of North Korea's. Furthermore, what money North Korea had was generally being expended on its military or a highly corrupt political establishment. This would allow Kim and his family to live in luxury. to Kim Jong Un and his regime. Firstly, there is the manner in which he has relied on a small number of key nations abroad for the regime to remain buoyant economically and politically.

Today a lot of the international headlines are generated by Kim's alliance with Vladimir Putin, a topic which we'll return to shortly, but for the very most part North Korea is a de-facto province of the People's Republic of China. China accounts for about 90% of North Korea's trade and economic support and has done so since the end of the Cold War. It also has ties to other countries that are deemed to be pariah states within the global world order such as Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea. In short, under Kim, North Korea has displayed zero

interest in becoming a more acceptable member of the international community. It is under heavy sanctions and is one of the few countries worldwide which refuses to sign dozens of international treaties on human rights. Finally, because of its huge reliance on China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has no option but to go along with whatever the foreign policy prerogatives of those nations have been over time. As we will see very shortly, this has dragged North Korea into its first hot war in seventy years in Ukraine. The Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, does not like it when

North Korea acts unilaterally to fire ballistic missiles over Japanese airspace. The Chinese are, above all, merchants. They want a stable system in the Pacific that fosters trade and wealth. Kim is often seen as a liability, in much the same way Beijing is perhaps not delighted about how destabilising Russia's war in Ukraine has been for the world order and trade in general. There has been one notable effort made during Kim's 13+ years as head of North Korea to try to reach a rapprochement with the western world. This concerned negotiations between

Kim and the American President Donald Trump back during his first term as US President. Trump has many detractors and many supporters. Some of the things he has been particularly anxious to break ground around are in the realm of international affairs. This has had some success when it came to the Abraham Accords in the Middle East and his recent brokering of a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas in October 2025. When Trump first entered office in 2017, tensions were extremely high between North Korea and the west, especially owing to the launching of missiles over Japanese

and South Korean airspace. Trump's administration organised a summit in Singapore with Kim in mid-June 2018. This was the first meeting, after seventy years since the division of the Korean Peninsula, during which a US President had met with a leader of North Korea. The summit met with little tangible success. A second summit was organised in Hanoi in Vietnam for the following year, but ultimately this diplomacy had virtually no tangible impact. Under President Joe Biden and Trump's second term no further progress has been made towards rapprochement with Kim's North Korea,

in large part because of his alliance with Russia and distractions with other conflicts. A huge element of Kim's time as leader of North Korea has been centred on the country's nuclear weapons programme. The regime had begun working towards achieving nuclear power all the way back in the dark days of the Cold War in the 1960s. In the 1970s the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Centre was set up with Soviet aid. This was meant to be for the purposes of producing nuclear energy, not weapons, at a time when Moscow was trying to convince its allies to sign up to the Treaty

on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. With Soviet assistance cooling in the late 1970s and 1980s, the quest for a nuclear weapon slowed and Kim's grandfather appears to have genuinely decided that co-operation with other international parties was better than acquiring a nuclear deterrent. It was really under Kim's father that North Korea went full speed ahead on acquiring a nuclear weapon. It entered into talks with the US and western nations about freezing its programme in the post-Cold War world, while simultaneously moving ahead clandestinely with

that same programme. In 2003 it officially withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and accelerated its drive to finish making a weapon. The culmination of all this was that the regime tested its first ever plutonium-type nuclear weapon on the 9th of October 2006. The yield was small. It was less than one kiloton. To put this in perspective, the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were 15 and 21 kilotons. Regardless, North Korea had successfully tested a nuclear weapon. Kim's time as leader of North Korea has involved

major expansion of the nuclear weapons programme. The first known nuclear test during his rule, North Korea's third overall, was carried out in 2013 and was a message to the international community that he intended to continue where his father had left off. Then came a swift fourth, fifth and sixth test in quick succession in 2016 and 2017. The sixth was the most concerning. While the previous tests had been gradually increasing in strength up to roughly ten kilotons, the 2017 test was estimated to have been anywhere between 140 and 250 kilotons, roughly ten times more

powerful than the weapons dropped by the US on Japan in 1945. This was deeply concerning for the international community. A bomb this size would not completely destroy a city as large as Seoul, the capital of South Korea, but it would cause devastating damage, killing hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps even millions and creating a nuclear half-life that would make the city uninhabitable and lead to widespread death from radiation poisoning as well in its aftermath. Having tested this weapon, North Korea had proved to the world that it was now an enormous threat

to its neighbours. On top of this Kim Jong Un is the North Korean ruler who has really ramped up the country's drive towards building more and more advanced ballistic missiles, ones that can travel thousands of kilometres. In theory, weapons like the Hwasong-15 and Hwasong-17 ICBMs could reach as far as the West Coast of the US. They would be intercepted before they did, yet the main point remains: if North Korea is attacked it could quickly devastate South Korea and potentially Japan too with its weapons. It is reasonable to say that the North Koreans

are not stupid or crazy, though they might like to appear unpredictable at times for the simple reason that unpredictability is a weapon that can be deployed in international diplomacy. The reality is that Kim and his advisors have developed these weapons and continue to carry out tests because they ensure the continuation of the regime. Simply put, western powers like the United States are not attempting to try to overthrow the North Korean regime. While interception technology is getting better and better all the time in the twenty-first century, if the North

Koreans fired off an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile fitted with a nuclear warhead at Seoul, it would likely make it through and strike the city, for the simple reason that it's so close to North Korea. Therefore, as much as Kim might appear volatile, there is a strategic rationale to what North Korea has done over the last twenty years. Nobody is going to try to overthrow the dictatorship here in the way that Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003, or by the manner in which the CIA and other foreign adversaries have worked to undermine governments in many different

countries. North Korea's nuclear deterrent has therefore meant that Kim can act in ways inaccessible to countries without nuclear weapons. Take the example of the assassination of his older brother, Kim Jong-nam. After he fell out of favour and was removed from the succession in 2003, Jong-nam was exiled from North Korea. In the years that followed he moved around repeatedly. For instance, he was in Macau for a long spell of time and was said to have good relations with the Chinese government. There were also inferences that he was in contact with western governments.

It is believed that he was allowed to fly back to North Korea for an extremely brief visit to pay his respects when his father died in 2011. Even though he repeatedly stated he had no desire to return to North Korea after this to try to displace his brother in the 2010s, concerns continued surrounding his actions in Pyongyang. These were intensified by the publication of a book entitled My Father, Kim Jong Il, And Me by Jong-nam. Kim decided to act after he determined that his brother was a lingering

threat abroad. In a bizarre incident, two women approached Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia on the morning of the 13th of February 2017 and threw a substance on him. They believed they were taking part in a prank game-show. In reality they had applied a VX nerve agent on Jong-nam after being instructed to do so by North Korean agents who quickly flew out of Malaysia. He died within 20 minutes from the lethal contact. The two women involved were eventually exonerated, as they were not aware of what they were doing.

Kim Jong Un has never claimed responsibility for the attack, but it was clearly the North Koreans. It is hard to imagine a government acting in such a clearly inflammatory way as this on foreign soil without a sizable military deterrent of the kind North Korea possesses. It is the typical assumption for many people that these human rights abuses in North Korea are solely the result of Kim Jong Un and his iron grip on power. Conversely, many people question how powerful he really is, or how actively he controls the government. Questions of this sort

were especially prevalent when he assumed power as a young man. Stories focused on his obsession with basketball, playing video games and apparent fondness for alcohol to suggest that he might not be as actively in control of North Korea as the regime want the outside world to believe. To analyse this, we need to look at the structure of the regime and government in North Korea. The state has been controlled at the very top by the Kim family since the very foundation of the country after the Second World War. Kim, and his father and grandfather before him,

have all held the official title General Secretary of the Worker's Party of Korea. They have all been leaders of the sole political party within North Korea, which proclaims itself to still be a communist party in line with its establishment along communist lines after the Second World War. The executive organ of the Worker's Party is the Politburo, a kind of government cabinet that has ministers who, in theory, advise Kim and act as heads of different government departments. Like any country, no matter what kind of system it operates under, there is an entire system of

national, regional and local government. No state can operate without such a system. Therefore, while Kim would appear to be the all-powerful head of North Korea and this is how the regime presents him, there is a functioning political system and government apparatus in North Korea at the same time. within North Korea arises is over the relative power of the Korean People's Army and the generals at the top of it. Simply put, the North Korean regime has survived by placing military strength at the very core of its activity. If North Korea did not have a large military and

a nuclear weapons system that poses a threat to neighbours like South Korea and Japan, the regime would probably not have survived. Yet, like all dictatorships, the Kim family can only remain in power so long as it retains control over the military. If a dictator loses the support of the military, he is usually finished. Accordingly, some international observers have questioned whether Kim Jong Un, who can, as we have seen, come across as an immature and frivolous individual in certain ways, is actually the real power in North Korea or if a cohort of military

generals wield effective power while Kim remains the figurehead of the regime. For instance, Kim Yong Bok is an extremely powerful figure within the North Korean military who appears to wield an enormous amount of influence. He rose steadily during the latter stages of the rule of Kim Il Sung and throughout the rule of Kim Jong Il. Under Jong Un he has become one of the most powerful people in North Korea, sitting on the Central Committee of the Worker's Party, holding the title of Colonel General in the military and heading up several of the

elite units of the Korean People's Army. Through these it is estimated that he oversees hundreds of thousands of military personnel. He has been broadly in charge of the North Korean contribution to Russia's war in Ukraine and is regularly photographed with Kim and during international summits with allied leaders of the regime like Vladimir Putin. Many observers question if people like Yong Bok are the real power behind the metaphorical throne in North Korea. However, there is a lot of evidence to indicate that Kim really is as wholly in control of the

regime as he outwardly seems. He has, for example, ruthlessly demoted people when he thinks that they have become too powerful, and on occasion these individuals and generals have broadly disappeared from public view. "This is what happened with Ri Yong-ho in 2012 only a few months after Kim came to power. Ri rose through the ranks of the military under Kim's grandfather and father. He became the army chief in the final years of Kim Jong Il's rule. Just six months after Kim Jong Un came to power, Ri was purged from his positions. It is unclear to this day if he was killed or what his fate was."This has happened with many potential rivals for

power within North Korea. Nor does Kim simply remove individuals and have them disappeared as soon as he perceives them as a threat. There also appears to be a pattern of demoting officials and rotating them between offices. For instance, Pak Thae-song rose under Kim Jong Il and continued to earn promotion under Kim. He became Chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly in 2019, but then promptly disappeared from public appearances in 2021. However, he has since re-emerged and has been made the Premier of North Korea, a kind of head of cabinet. Clearly what Kim is doing here is making individuals reliant on him but also introducing

uncertainty into the lives and positions of any potential rivals. Concurrently, he has promoted allies who owe their positions exclusively to him. There is a very strong argument that Kim is fully in charge of North Korea. One of the reasons why Kim's control over North Korea has been questioned is owing to some of the more unusual events of his time in charge of the country. Take the example of the visits of Denis Rodman to North Korea over the years. Rodman is one of the most famous and successful basketball players of all time. He won five

NBA championships in the 1990s with the Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs and Chicago Bulls and was considered to be one of the greatest players of his era, second only to Michael Jordan. His post-playing career has been less salubrious. Rodman's issues with alcohol and mental health struggles are well-documented. They in part explain his decision to visit North Korea on several occasions to help train the North Korean basketball team and indulge Kim's passion for the sport as his guest of honour there. During one of these visits in 2014 Rodman was accompanied

by a large entourage and the entire embassy for a documentary entitled Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in Pyongyang. The whole thing turned into something of a dangerous debacle after Rodman appeared visibly drunk and aggressive during several state gatherings with North Korean officials and verbally attacked the narrator of the documentary, the Irish journalist Matt Cooper. The whole thing did not exactly cast Kim and his nation in a serious light. We see a washed-up and drunken former sports-star as the bizarre guest of honour, indulging Kim's hobby in a country with virtually

no experience of any success in professional or national basketball events. Incidents like this are what make it so hard to decipher who Kim is and what he is about as a leader. The Rodman incident should not fool anyone at the same time. North Korea has long been known for its human rights abuses and the brutal way it crushes political dissidents. Accurate figures are hard to come by but there are clearly hundreds of thousands of people either in jail or internment camps in North Korea. The jails are terrible places, rife with disease and often resembling nineteenth-century prisons from other parts of the world.

Slave labour is employed here to produce goods that turn a profit for the regime. Torture is prominent, and Kim sanctions it, though it should be acknowledged that these are both longstanding issues that preceded his time in power and that people are filtered in and out regularly. Many serve as 're-education' camps used to suppress any form of political dissent. They are part of the wider oppressive system of state censorship and the cult of the leader in North Korea. This was built on the same fundamental principles as the cult of leadership around Joseph Stalin and

Mao Zedong in Russia and China at the time when North Korea came into existence. Hundreds of huge statues of Kim, his father and grandfather adorn public places around the country and the state-run news agencies typically refer to him as 'Great Leader', 'Beloved Father of the People' or even the 'Genius of Creation and Construction'. It is also almost impossible to escape the state censored media. For instance, North Korea runs its own internally controlled version of the World Wide Web known as the Kwangmyong. There are virtually no loopholes around it to find information from the wider World Wide Web. Only high-level state

officials or a small number of tech-savvy hackers living near the land border with China are able to get access to the wider internet and its huge traffic. Equally, telecommunications are controlled by Kim's government, with a state-run network called Koryolink running the mobile phone networks. Kim is the member of the dynasty who has overseen all of this. The need for such state censorship of this kind was unnecessary in his grandfather's time and was only emerging as an issue in North Korea towards the final years of his father's rule.

Kim, to use a simple term, is the digital-age dictator of the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Kim's position within North Korean society is not all about brute-force authoritarianism and a cult of leadership. A certain section of North Korean society favours him because their lives had improved during his time as ruler of the country since late 2011. The 1990s and 2000s were tough years for the regime. Conversely, there has been decent economic growth in the 2010s and parts of the 2020s. Elements of the kind of western market liberalisation favoured by China and Vietnam,

two countries that claim to still be communist, but which are clearly not, have been introduced. Collectivised farms and factories are allowed to reinvest their profits and workers are given better pay and conditions based on performance. The average North Korean still lives in poverty, though not to the same extent as in the final years of Kim's grandfather's rule or his father's seventeen-year reign. This is in stark contrast to Kim himself and his wife and children, as well as the upper brass of the government and military. Kim is, for instance, a billionaire in real terms,

with many palaces, a fleet of luxury cars, trains, and huge amounts of disposable assets and cash reserves. The family are always conscious of the possibility of regime change, so billions of dollars in assets are held by Kim and his closest allies in banks in China and Southeast Asia. They also probably hold assets in Swiss and Caribbean banks through third parties and shell accounts, though this is hard to prove. Beyond this, Kim has operatives who engage in a labyrinthine array of schemes to bring in money for himself, his family and his allies. North Korea, for instance,

is now recognised as one of the biggest players worldwide when it comes to cryptocurrency scams. The benefit it enjoys in this area is that it is a state rather than an individual. If an individual cryptocurrency scam artist robs hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto assets, they can avoid detection for a while by moving to places like Dubai, Myanmar, and the Philippines or even somewhere like Serbia and Bulgaria in the Balkans. However, they can eventually face extradition and laws are tightening everywhere. North Korea is an exception: a place where the ruler himself is the

scam artist. Some studies suggest the regime has made several billion dollars in crypto-related scams in recent years, much of which is funnelled to Kim and his family and allies. Kim, like all world leaders, had to oversee his state's management of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Global understanding of how the pandemic played out in North Korea is limited. The regime was slow to admit that the virus had even entered the country or confirm its first cases. The inference was that North Korea remained miraculously free of the disease until well into

the pandemic, despite its proximity to China where the pandemic originated late in 2019. In a way it makes a lot of sense that North Korea would not have had a lot of the virus circulating in its country. It's an isolated nation, with virtually zero tourists or business travellers coming in and out. Furthermore, its land borders are not exactly porous. The southern border is a demilitarised zone that a person can be shot for trying to cross over. North Korea was consequently like an island in the way that it could shut itself off from the world and attempt a zero Covid strategy. And this

is how it tried to present matters, claiming that the virus-free country was indicative of the success of Kim's leadership. In reality, though, the disease was circulating in North Korea earlier than most other countries. Although Kim's government did move extremely quickly to close its borders and limit travel in January 2020, two months before most of the rest of the world, it was already present in cities like Sinuiju where the country's first death took place in February 2020. Information about the disease trajectory in North Korea was extremely limited.

In 2022, by which time the pandemic was dying down worldwide, the country finally admitted to the presence of it in the country and that Kim himself had a fever. The country admits to 74 people having died from Covid-19. At the same time, it stated that over four million experienced what it called 'fever'. If millions of people experienced symptoms it is implausible that only 74 could have died from it. Given the known pathology of the virus, it is more plausible that tens of thousands of people lost their lives in North Korea during the pandemic.

diplomatic incident between North and South Korea in the summer of 2020, or at least it contributed to it. The Korean War has never ended. A ceasefire was declared back in July 1953 at the end of the conflict and a demilitarized zone was set up along the 38th Line of Latitude North of the Equator. There have been a lot of flare ups here over the decades, principally owing to North Koreans trying to flee to the South. In the first years of Kim's rule, it appeared as though things were improving here, despite the routine border skirmishes and shootings of individuals trying to pass through

the demilitarized zone. However, a joint liaison office had been built at Kaesong in an industrial base here near the border. The Inter-Korean Liaison Office, as it is formally known, was built following a meeting in 2018 between Kim and his South Korean counterpart at the time, President Moon Jae-in. Unfortunately, despite millions of US dollars being spent on erecting the four-storey building, the office was closed in late January 2020. It was then destroyed in a controlled demolition on Kim's orders on the 16th of June 2020. Covid had apparently put

peaceful reunification off the cards again. Elsewhere, Kim has strengthened his few remaining international alliances. North Korea has become a direct ally of Vladimir Putin in his war with Ukraine. That conflict has been underway in one shape or another since February 2014 after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine overthrew a pro-Russian leader. While the initial conflict in 2014 involved Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and a localised war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, the war has expanded since late February 2022. It has been

costly for Russia in terms of casualties suffered and Putin is paying extremely large amounts of money to Russians to get them to fight. In 2024 a new source of cheaper fighting men was found. North Korea directly allied with Russia and thousands of North Korean troops began arriving across Eastern Europe to fight the Ukrainians from October that year. Over 10,000 North Koreans are believed to have fought in Ukraine down to late 2025. These men earn far less than their Russian counterparts and are often used as cannon-fodder on the frontlines. Kim in return

has received hundreds of millions of US dollars in funding from Putin in return for his assistance, with hundreds of millions more flowing into North Korea via soldiers' wages and so forth. This is a notable shift in international diplomacy too. It is the first time that North Korea has deployed troops extensively to aid an ally in a foreign war since the armistice in the Korean War was agreed in 1953. North Korea did provide some logistical and material support to the North Vietnamese during the long-running Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, but the deployment of North Korean troops in Ukraine is far more extensive.

It is all too easy to belittle Kim Jong Un as a peripheral player in a network of leaders sometimes called the Axis of Evil in the western media. The view is often of Kim bungling along like a lackey next to figures like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping when they meet in Beijing and so forth. And yet this is not entirely the case. On the 10th of October 2025 the North Korean government held celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of its movement after the end of the Second World War. This involved firing off a new Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile,

the Hwasong-20, the strongest ever launched by North Korea. There is also mounting evidence of the country's efforts to develop AI capabilities as part of its military arsenal and functions. Like Iran, Russia and China, North Korea will soon dwarf most western nations when it comes to unmanned drone warfare technology. Those who dismiss the North Korean regime under Kim as a bit of a joke are misinformed. Their current leader might be around for much longer than we think. With a country that is beginning to develop economically beyond the perilous years

of the 1990s and 2000s, it might well begin to become a much more powerful player again in the politics of the Far East in years to come. This is especially so when we consider the instability of South Korea's politics in recent times when compared with the North. Kim Jong Un is a very strange leader. He has been mocked and vilified for over a decade as North Korea's leader, viewed as a slightly comical figure who only finds himself in a position of power because of the circumstances of his birth. Perhaps there is some truth to this. Intelligence

services worldwide believe that Kim was lucky in gaining the position as the third Supreme Leader of North Korea. Through the process of elimination of other male candidates within the family as potential successors, Kim was chosen to succeed his father. Although international observers have continued to wonder if he is little more than a stooge for some of the more powerful elements within the North Korean military and the long entrenched political elite, there are more than enough signs that Kim is actually well and truly in control of this highly authoritarian regime.

He either eliminates rivals altogether or else moves them around within the government in such a way which limits their capacity to become rivals for power. The assassination of his own brother in such an audacious way demonstrates his ruthlessness. Perhaps the most striking thing of all is the way in which Kim has developed North Korea into a country with one of the most formidable nuclear and inter-continental ballistic weapons programmes anywhere on Earth. Simply put, nobody can remove him from power from abroad. If the US or any other antagonist tried to do

something, Seoul would risk being devastated by nuclear warheads, and perhaps Tokyo too. No foreign power is likely to take that risk. Moreover, through his alliances with China, Iran and Russia, Kim has strong Asian allies that ensure that the North Korean economy can potentially grow as part of a new emerging world order in the Far East. Western governments might focus on his peculiar obsessions with basketball, his alleged fondness for alcohol and his portrayal of himself as an idiot savant. But presumably informed secret services in the US, Britain, Australia, Japan, and South Korea know they are dealing with a far more formidable enemy than is often suggested in media circles.

Only time will tell what happens in North Korea under a ruler who could remain in power there for many decades to come. Could you say ID-ee-owe SAV-ont Jong Un? Is he really the all-powerful absolutist dictator of North Korea, or do you think the power structure behind the scenes of this secretive state is more complex than people often imagine? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.