A name that could be spoken
Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, describes the shift she felt on reaching South Korea in terms of what she could say. She recalls that she could not believe she could call Kim Jong-un’s name without attaching the phrase “our supreme leader.” In North Korea, she says, she had no freedom to speak, listen or wear, and could do nothing by her own free will; in South Korea she could do anything with that freedom. Bob Zadek frames her account as the first experience of freedom after an escape that took her across a frozen river between North Korea and China and across the Gobi Desert with seven other refugees, through Mongolia, to South Korea Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
Park also notes that she remains a spokesperson for North Korean human rights and that there is still some threat from North Korea, so she has to be careful. She describes the adjustment as difficult in an unexpected way: in North Korea no one had asked what she wanted to be or what she thought, because the government set people’s destinies, and she was not used to thinking for herself. She says she now enjoys it.
Markets, information and change from underneath
Park ties the erosion of the government’s control to the market rather than to politics. The market was not strange to her, she says, because it was the place she went most often with her parents; she learned to count money, bargain and trade there before she learned schoolwork, and without the market North Korean society could not move and people could not survive. Zadek asks whether the government tries to suppress this; Park answers that it does, because as markets and economics grow people acquire wealth, reach outside media and access outside information easily — but that the government lacks the money or food to feed people and therefore cannot stop the market Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
On what comes next, Park says she cannot say North Korea will change tomorrow, but that North Korean people are changing from underneath while the government looks unchanged. She reports having spoken by phone with relatives in North Korea a few days earlier and hearing that people know how bad Kim Jong-un is and understand the outside world and why they are poor. She declines to predict a revolution but says nothing lasts forever, and that the biggest possibility is that North Korea changes the way China did — opening its economic system first and changing politically later. Zadek supplies the framework, arguing that a top-down managed economy cannot feed people, that China and the USSR discovered this, and that libertarians call the alternative spontaneous order: people building markets and institutions from the bottom up. He adds that the trend in America runs the opposite way, toward a top-down Washington system. Park agrees that the market brings change and will change the country.
Nuclear weapons, deterrence and the case for engagement
John Mueller tells Zadek that the United States has countries it strongly disagrees with — North Korea, Iraq, certain aspects of China and Russia — but no enemies that present a security threat or that are likely to be dealt with by military means, and therefore no need for a massive military apparatus. Zadek presses the distinction between passive disapproval and disagreement with clenched fists, and says he is not competent to discuss North Korean ICBM and nuclear testing and does not want to China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller’s account of how North Korea acquired nuclear weapons is specific: it got them after George W. Bush named an axis of evil and named North Korea first, then went to war against another member of that axis, Iraq; at that point North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and started working on nuclear weapons. He argues in his book, and in the earlier Atomic Obsession, that proliferation is not much of a threat — many countries considered nuclear weapons and decided it was not worth the candle — and that North Korea’s weapons are basically a deterrent and a defense. If North Korea wanted to pulverize South Korea, he says, it could do so very easily with artillery and does not need nuclear weapons. He recommends back-burnering the nuclear issue, because it is something North Korea will not give on and you cannot go through a closed door, and instead working with North Korea’s noises about becoming a more normal country by freeing up its economy the way China has, with Singapore in mind. He notes North Korea has done some of that, not a lot, under Kim Jong-un, and that stoking his ego and cooperating on business ventures might gradually mellow the economic issue and potentially the political one, over decades. He adds that the United States should in many respects get out of it entirely and let the South Koreans take the lead, as President Moon was interested in doing.
The counter-threat
Dick Morris invokes Kim Jong-un in a different register, as evidence for the utility of Trump’s persona. He says that in the first couple of months of Trump’s presidency Kim Jong-un said he had a button that could blow up America, and Trump shot back that he had a bigger button; that this intimidated Kim and he never said a word for three and a half years; and that as soon as Trump left office he began testing missiles and bombs again. Morris offers this alongside the claim that Putin did not dare invade Ukraine because of Trump’s personality, and concludes that Trump’s abrasiveness is a necessary ingredient rather than a liability Dick Morris on the 2022 and 2024 Elections (2022).
Across episodes: what the excerpts show
The excerpts do not develop a single argument about Kim Jong-un across time so much as place him at the center of three separate ones. Park, in 2014, treats him as the head of a government whose propaganda has lost its hold and whose control is being hollowed out by markets and information from below. Mueller, in 2022, treats North Korea’s nuclear program as a defensive deterrent and recommends engagement and back-burnering disarmament, attributing the program’s origin to the axis-of-evil speech and the Iraq war. Morris, in 2022, treats Kim Jong-un as a figure who was deterred by a personal counter-threat and who resumed testing once that threat left office. The later two episodes both concern how to handle a nuclear-armed North Korea, but they reach opposite conclusions about confrontation: Mueller argues the weapons are not a threat and that the United States should step back and let South Korea lead, while Morris presents belligerent personal signaling as the thing that kept Kim Jong-un quiet. Park’s account of change from underneath is not taken up in either later episode.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about Kim Jong-un’s early life, his accession, his family, his domestic purges, or the structure of the Workers’ Party or the North Korean military. They contain no dates for North Korean nuclear or missile tests, no description of any summit or negotiation with the United States, and no account of sanctions. Park’s escape narrative is summarized by Zadek and by Park in fragments; the excerpts do not give the year of her escape or the details of the crossing beyond the frozen river, the Gobi Desert, the group of seven other refugees and the route through Mongolia.