First, we heard news that Kim Jong Il failed to appear at a parade marking North Korea's 60th anniversary. We were told that Dear Leader was seriously ill after possibly suffering a stroke.

Now, we hear that the man who has held his country hostage since assuming power from his father in 1994 is on the mend. Granted, that last bit of news is coming from the country's propaganda-peddling press officials.

Whether or not this latest North Korean pushback is bogus, the Hermit Kingdom can't delay its post-Kim fate forever. But what will it look like? A younger Kim stepping up to take his father's place? Mass chaos and refugees fleeing across the Chinese border? Reunification with South Korea? It's anyone's guess.

Some guesses are more educated than others, though. So I asked a man who knows the regime well to describe what he thinks is going on behind the scenes right now. Kim Hyun Sik, Kim Jong Il's former Russian teacher and author of a powerful essay about Kim in the current issue of FP, explains that the jostling for power may not involve the usual suspects: 

If proven true, the latest news that Kim Jong Il is seriously ill, perhaps having suffered a stroke, will bring significant changes to North Korea. Should Kim suffer an extended bout with illness and be unable to govern, the most likely candidate to fill the ensuing power vacuum right away is -- contrary to widespread speculations of another father-to-son succession -- Kim’s brother-in-law, Jang Sung Taek, 62. For long, Jang stood at the epicenter of Pyongyang politics as Kim Jong Il’s right-hand man. 

Jang's influence grew so strong that he was purged nearly five years ago. But last year, Jang was restored to his former position as a key decision-maker on personnel. His two brothers hold power over the military and oversee the state's most sacred site, Kim Il Sung's mausoleum. Jang enjoys a good reputation among ordinary North Koreans and is widely respected even by defectors. Jang may even choose, as a "regent" to groom in the short term, either Kim Jong Il's eldest or second son. But, for now, in the "day-after" scenario, the world can expect to see Jang in the spotlight.   

We'll definitely be watching. Stay tuned.

Living under a totalitarian regime requires a daily suspension of disbelief. Nowhere is that more true today than in North Korea, where otherwise ethical people contort themselves into untenable moral positions because they’ve bought into the oft-repeated notion that their country is “Paradise on Earth.”

That's just a snippet of Kim Hyun Sik's fascinating secret history of Kim Jong Il in the latest issue of FP. As the Dear Leader's former teacher, Kim offers a rare portrait of the dictator as a young man, and the suspension of reality that he demands his countrymen participate in every day.

An important element of that effort is, of course, fear, but also a bombardment of propaganda. The California Literary Review recently published a handful of incredible propaganda posters from North Korea, and you might imagine that there's a common theme: Death to the United States. More posters have recently been compiled in this volume by art collector David Heater.

Here are some of the best posters from the CLR's collection with translations:

“When provoking a war of aggression, we will hit back, beginning with the US!”

“Let’s extensively raise goats in all families!”

 

“Do not forget the US imperialist wolves!”

While Kim Jong Il tries to throw his weight around on the world stage, one North Korean has actually done it. Today, Pak Hyon Suk won her country's first Olympic gold medal in Beijing, beating out the favorites in the 63 kg women's weightlifting category. This is the first time a North Korean has won a gold in women's weightlifting since the event started in 2000 (China, by contrast, has swept all five of the weightlifting categories it has entered in these games).

Pak was nearly eliminated after failing at her first two attempts. But, with a little help from "Dear Leader" (who declined an invitation to attend the games), she made it through. Says Pak:

[W]hen I was about to do my third attempt, I kept in my head the thought that my dear general's eyes will be upon me ...And that thought by itself was great encouragement, and that's how I managed to lift the last weight."

Pak may be the first North Korean on the medal stand this year but her country has picked up eight golds over the years, putting it well ahead of the chronic Olympic underperformers on FP's recent list. At least India finally broke its gold medal curse with a win in 10-meter air rifle on Monday.

Speculation is growing that Kim Jong Il will soon make a few pitstops around the Pacific. First up for the North Korean president? Beijing. China's Vice President Xi Jinping, who visited Kim in Pyongyang last week, reportedly asked Kim to attend the Olympics opening ceremony -- though there's been no word yet on Kim's response. Another unconfirmed Kim stop is Vietnam, where North Korea's ties have grown closer in recent months.

For Dear Leader, Beijing probably looks like a good platform for improving his global image and expressing support for China, his chief patron. And U.S.-North Korean relations, which have warmed of late, could be advanced by a hint of greater openness from Pyongyang. (Wouldn't it be interesting if Kim rubbed elbows with Dubya at the games?) There's even talk of the two Korean teams marching together at the opening ceremony in a "gesture of peace."

I'm guessing that Kim's real motive would be aid, much of which comes from China and Vietnam. Food shortages have prompted Kim and Co. to slash citizens' rations in recent months, prompting fears of massive starvation. Kim's recently strained relations with South Korea, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars of yearly aid to the North, certainly makes it necessary for the despot to seek help elsewhere.

Yesterday, Pyongyang submitted a long-overdue declaration of its nuclear programs to China, in accordance with agreements made during the six-party talks. U.S. President George W. Bush welcomed the move as "one step in the multi-step process laid out by the six-party talks," immediately lifted the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act, and notified Congress of his intent to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

What does all this mean in practice? The Bush administration's moves are highly symbolic, and unlikely to have any immediate, practical impact. Most U.S. sanctions based on the Trading with the Enemy Act (pdf) were already lifted in 2000, and most of those still in place are authorized by an overlapping hodgepodge of other laws and regulations. Minor changes will go into effect -- for instance, some imports from North Korea will no longer require licenses -- but for the most part trade policies will remain unchanged.

Bush's intention to remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list is a similarly symbolic gambit; the actual removal cannot go into effect for 45 days after the notification to Congress, and in any case it is probably contingent on verifying North Korea's nuclear declaration. Countries on the terror list cannot receive, among other things, U.S. economic aid or loans from the World Bank and other financial institutions. Removing North Korea from the list may allow more money to flow in, but, as a U.S. Treasury spokesman noted yesterday, sanctions aimed at preventing money laundering, illicit finance, and weapons proliferation will remain firmly in place.

Practicalities aside, this development has rightly been hailed as a diplomatic success; the New York Times today declared it a "triumph." The path to a denuclearized North Korea is still long and the process could easily be derailed at any point, but it is nice to finally have some reason, however slight, for optimism.

You're going to hear a lot in the coming days, I expect, about how the "North Korea model" can be applied to negotiations with Iran. Forgive me for raining on the parade here, but there are some important differences that we need to keep in mind.

1. Iran is not on the brink of mass famine.
2. Iran has enormous oil and gas resources; North Korea is in desperate need of imported fuel oil and has few legitimate sources of foreign exchange.
3. Iran can stir up trouble in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Gulf, and the Palestinian territories.
4. Iran has the ability to launch sophisticated terrorist attacks all over the world; North Korea did not.
5. Iran's nuclear program has broad support in a regime where decision-making is diffuse and opaque; Kim Jong Il had much more lattitude to make the big decision to come in from the cold.

It's also worth noting that North Korea is keeping the nuclear weapons it has already produced, whereas Iran is still in the enrichment and research phase. It's by no means clear the regime has decided to go for the bomb, as opposed to latent nuclear capacity.

I'm not saying the United States shouldn't engage Iran, but just trying to point out that the Islamic Republic is a much tougher nut to crack.

Think your job sucks? Try walking a mile in the shoes of Christopher Hill, who has been the U.S. envoy to the six-party talks since February 2005. For more than three years, Hill has been trying to convince North Korea to shut down its nuclear program and come clean about its nuclear activities.

He's had some success at the former, with the North Koreans agreeing to the dismantling of their plutonium reactor at Yongbyon. But Kim Jong Il's irascible regime has been notoriously coy about acknowledging just what it's been up to on the uranium and proliferation fronts. So, Hill negotiated a delicate workaround: North Korea would acknowledge U.S. concerns but admit to nothing. Then, the United States would remove North Korea from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that has all kinds of other legal and financial ramifications. On balance, it seemed like a good idea to at least mothball Yongbyon and learn as much as possible about the nuclear program. Why let the perfect become the enemy of the good? And on a factual level, North Korea hasn't actually sponsored terrorism since 1987.

But now, Hill's careful game of diplomatic Jenga may be coming apart. For months, North Korea has stalled, appearing to want to wait for a better deal from the next president. Last week's allegations about North Korea's nuclear cooperation with Syria appear to have only inflamed building congressional anger against the deal. And it's not just Republicans who were upset. Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted unanimously to require that the White House certify it has gotten a "complete and correct declaration" from Pyongyang. Hill's plan was, to be frank, to fudge it.

One congressional staffer told the Financial Times the White House would go "ballistic" over the committee's move, but the Bush administration still has a chance to convince the full House and the Senate to scuttle it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed, however, that the White House has let Chris Hill run point on these negotiations for a reason. If things fall apart -- as it seems they might -- he can be hung out to dry and blamed for the failure. That would be a shame, because Hill is a real star of the diplomatic corps and somebody America needs to keep around.

Earlier this week, intelligence officials released new evidence confirming that the "Box on the Euphrates" near al-Kibar in Syria was in fact a nuclear reactor. They also released photographs that they used to argue that North Korea was providing significant levels of assistance to the reactor project in Syria.

 

The Syrian facility apparently contained a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor (a derivation from the Calder Hall design) extremely similar to the reactor at Yongbyon. It's a relatively simple design, extensively described in the public domain, and one that's capable of producing plutonium useable in nuclear weapons. Despite the surfeit of publicly available information on the reactor, the intelligence community firmly asserts that, in this case, the design information came from North Korea.

Noting that the Syrian reactor seemed ill-suited to electricity production (not least because there were no detectable power lines leading away from the site), intelligence analysts also concluded that it would have few uses other than for producing plutonium for an illicit nuclear weapons program. Israel came to a similar conclusion and, judging this to be a potentially existential threat, bombed the reactor as a result.

These revelations raise more questions than they answer. For instance, why release this evidence now? The analysts said it was hoped that, among other things, releasing this information would prod the North Koreans to be more forthcoming in the six-party talks. It seems just as likely that they may just be infuriated and walk away from negotiations (there is no public sign of such a reaction yet, though).

Perhaps most notable in the briefing on Thursday was how coy the analysts were being about the possibility that Syria has a covert nuclear weapons program. They noted very specifically that "there is no reprocessing facility in the region of al Kibar," but refused to elaborate when asked whether the Syrians might be building such a facility elsewhere. They also refused to comment on how Syria might have been planning to acquire the natural uranium required to fuel the reactor and they dodged a question about how North Korean diplomats have so far reacted to this disclosure.

These omissions could be designed to minimize diplomatic blowback -- perhaps the administration simply hoped to nudge the North Koreans gently, rather than shove them -- or perhaps the spooks simply don’t have much more information. Hopefully the North Korean and Syrian reactions over the next week or so will provide more insight. Watch this space.

I've seen this man protesting outside the Sudanese Embassy, just up the street here on Massachusetts Ave. Apparently, his name is "Start Loving":

An anti-war protester who identified himself as Start Loving takes part in a demonstration titled 'March of the Dead' near Arlington Cemetery's Women's Memorial, March 19, 2008, in Arlington, Virginia.

I had an interesting discussion earlier this week with Michael Goldfarb, my counterpart at the Weekly Standard, regarding growing speculation about a North Korean collapse. You can catch my Bloggingheads.tv debut here, in which we also chat about missile defense, Iran, neocon dreamboat John McCain, the next U.S. president's Bush-like foreign policy, and the possibility of a coup in Pakistan (I'm the handsome, if orangish-looking fellow on the left).

In the "diavlog," I mention an interesting article in Military Review (pdf) that argues that the Chinese are making aggressive, serious contingency plans for the fall of Kim Jong Il's regime.

Since our discussion, Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shumbun has looked into the matter further and has this to report:

Security specialists of the Chinese People's Liberation Army have been discussing the possibility of sending troops to North Korea should the present regime of Kim Jong Il collapse, to prevent armed refugees from entering the northeastern part of China, sources close to China-North Korea relations revealed Monday.

China fears that, in addition to ordinary North Korean refugees, armed members of the country's military and security forces might also become refugees, entering the border area in the northeastern region in China. Chinese troops sent to North Korea would help maintain security and safeguard the country's nuclear facilities.

According to the sources, China considers the situation in North Korea to be stable for the time being, but is hastily formulating emergency measures to cope with unexpected circumstances nonetheless.

How likely is a North Korean implosion? Who the heck really knows? But the regime is definitely under a lot of stress lately, so it's a situation that bears close watching. I hope smart people at the Pentagon are thinking hard about the possibility.

Do also check out Andrei Lankov's memo to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "How to Topple Kim Jong Il." Folks tell us it was making the rounds at the State Department back in March 2007 when it was first published, though we can't say for sure whether Condi herself read it.

North Korea is not a normal country. Its leaders and state mouthpieces rarely directly say what they mean. Instead, they resort to the same sorts of tactics a truculent toddler might use to get what he wants: screaming, refusing to budge, and so on. The latest? The country threatened to bolster its "deterrent capabilities" to counter "U.S. attempts to initiate nuclear war."

Faced with such bizarre outbursts, many reporters seem mystified as to why Kim Jong Il's regime would suddenly appear to renege on its commitment to disclose all of its nuclear programs. Just being fickle and untrustworthy? But when it comes to North Korea, there's always something else going on behind the craziness. Facing rising inflation back home, China has cut off food exports to the struggling North Koreans:

In Dandung, Liaoning Province, near China’s border with North Korea, food exports to the impoverished country have been completely suspended. Up until now, an average of approximately 1,200 tons of food has crossed the border every day, but as of the beginning of the year, the Chinese government has not issued any new permissions for exports. [...]

China began blocking grain exports in late December of last year in order to stabilize domestic food prices. On December 20, 2007, Beijing suddenly abolished tax incentives for grain exports. Since then, food assistance to North Korea has been completely stopped. As China has refused to permit food exports, officials are finding it useless to try to pay duties on grains.

Not knowing any other way to communicate, the North Koreans tend to lash out when their food supplies run low. And we could be talking about a humanitarian catastrophe soon:

Almost 80-90 percent of food aid to North Korea is delivered via Dandung. If the current situation continues for an extended period of time, North Korea’s food supplies are expected to deteriorate quickly.

The official in Dandung noted that the demand for food will climb in North Korea owing to what is anticipated to be another season of poverty in the spring. "If external shipments of food aid are blocked, North Korean residents will be forced to depend on smuggling or flee the nation," the official added.

Perhaps there's something more nefarious going on, but Occam's Razor suggests that an impending famine is the main reason for the North's latest tantrum. Until the country's leaders learns how to address such problems in a forthright manner, I'm afraid, this is the kind of thing we can expect.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill, speaking in Seoul on Friday, had this to say about sanctions levied against North Korea for its nuclear test last year:

The sanctions are there until the DPRK (North Korea) gets out of the nuclear business. That is when they ought to be revisited.

Taken at face value, Hill's comments are an enormous hedge on the agreement with the North. The sanctions will stay in place at least until North Korea's nuclear program no longer exists—a process that could take years. A U.S. team is beginning to disable North Korea's Yongbyon reactor today and is expected to complete its work by the end of 2007, but "gets out of the nuclear" business is a broad phrase that could be interpreted any number of ways.

There is also some interesting subtext to Hill's quote. In early September, Israel destroyed an alleged Syrian nuclear facility that was thought to have been built with North Korean help. It looked to many like the North Koreans were negotiating with Hill in bad faith, threatening to torpedo the six-party talks. But anonymous Bush administration officials told the New York Times last week that the Syrian site had existed as early as 2003; hence, cooperation between Syria and North Korea existed long before the current diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang. As the Times' William J. Broad and Mark Mazzetti put it:

If North Korea started its Syrian aid long ago, the [Bush administration] officials could argue that the assistance was historical, not current, and that diplomacy should move ahead.

This hasn't been enough to ease concerns that the United States is treating Pyongyang with kid gloves. Hill's comments might be an attempt to assuage critics of the North Korea deal. First, they make clear to North Korea that providing nuclear assistance of any kind would violate the deal. Second, Hill implies that sanctions will not go away until Pyongyang's nuclear program is completely nonexistent—and even then, the sanctions will merely be "revisited," not lifted automatically. Whether this will be enough to reassure those who believe the United States is taking it easy on North Korea is unclear. I get the sense that some people in the U.S. government won't be happy until the deal with North Korea is dead and buried.

We've all seen photos of the slightly mind-boggling displays of North Korean propaganda known as the Mass Games. Here's this week's installment taken from Wednesday's event, which had special guest South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun in attendance.

 

 

And if you're like me and curious as to whether they teach new formations for each and every event, the answer is no. I stumbled upon a repeat from 2002 while reading up on recent games. Not that repetition makes this any less insane.

The summit between North Korea and South Korea took a strange turn today when news of an offer by the North's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il to extend the conference by two days emerged. The offer—quickly rejected by South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun—came a day after Kim greeted Roh coldly, seemed disinterested in the talks, and appeared ill. But on Wednesday, reports indicate Kim was in good spirits, smiling occasionally, and engaging Roh in conversation. See for yourself:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

On Thursday, the two are expected to issue a joint declaration and unveil a so-called "mystery package," rumored to include plans for increased economic cooperation and a peace plan that could be the first step towards officially ending the Korean War. 

Was Kim's improved mood behind the breakthrough and the invitation to stay a few extra days? Was he happy he had finally reached an agreement to dismantle his nuclear weapons? Did he realize he's in a tight spot with this Syria situation, and hoped a little hospitality might help his international image? Or did Kim ask Roh to stay because he's "a rittle ronery" all by himself Pyongyang?