Taking over as Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at age 28 Dec. 17, 2011 after his father’s death, Kim Jong-il, the young Kim learned quickly about his father’s cult of personality. Yearly war games with the U.S. and South Korea prompted Kim to threaten the prosperous South, a staark testament to the economic success of free market capitalism, standing, according to the World Bank, International Monetary fund as the world’s 13th strongest economic power standing with a GDP of $1,416 trillion. Kim’s North Korea isn’t even listed by the IMF or the World Bank, ranked by the U.N. at 115 with GDP of 15.4 billion, just below the African nation of Mozambique. Nowhere in the world today is there a clearer comparison between two opposite economic systems, attesting to South Korea’s remarkable ascendance to one of the world’s best economies.
Holding yearly military drills prompts Kim to follow in his father’s footsteps, threatening all-out war with the South. Taking power Feb. 25, 2013, South Korean’s 62-year-old President Park Geuen-hye promised Kim a devastating response to any North Korean provocation. She knows what to expect after watching Kim’s father, Kim Jong-un, make the same threats since taking over from his father, North Korea’s Stalinist master Kim Il-sung. South Korea’s leadership recalls Kim Jong-il’s attack on the ROK’s Cheonan’s Naval Frigate March 26, 2010, killing 46 South Korean seamen, wounding 56 others. Since signing a armistice July 27, 1953, Korea Korea likes to remind its prosperous neighbor the war never officially ended. Keeping 28,500 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea is a bitter reminder of how badly the Korean War ended due to Kim’s Russian and Chinese communist backing
Without Russian and Chinese backing the Korean War would have ended in unconditional surrender just like the U.S. war with Japan, ending Sept. 2, 1945 with Emperor Hirohito’s 100% surrender. Fortunataely for the U.S., Japan’s WWII ally, namely, Nazi Germany, had been defeated April 30, 1945 when the Red Army besieged Hitlers’s Berlin bunker. With Communist China’s Mao Zedong and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin backing Kim Il-Sung, the U.S. and its allies hands were tied in 1953, forcing an unsatisfactory armistice. North Korea firing across the demilitarized zone at South Korea is no surprise during U.S.-South Korean summer war games. Firing across the border has been a staple of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jung-il and now Kim Jong-un as a part of the North’s militarized propaganda campaign, keeping the North’s captives in a perpetual state of war.
Since the July 27, 1953 armistice, generations of South Korean leaders have tolerated the North’s blustering, largely idle threats. Like other dictators around the globe, like Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, their insecure hold on power doesn’t permit them to push too hard. Whatever Kim Jong-il or his son does to demonstrate to the world nuclear capability, it’s all to ward off possible threats to the dictator’s power. Iran’s July 14 nuclear deal with the U.N.’s P5+1, including the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany, Iran hopes, like in North Korea, to stave on any threats to Tehran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s concern about Iran’s nuclear program presenting an “existential threat” doesn’t take into account Khamenei’s obsession with power, unwilling to do anything that would threaten the Azeri-Turk mullah’s stranglehold on Tehran’s power.
Protecting Kim’s family rule doesn’t let him to step too far out of line. Without strong backing from Beijing and Moscow, Kim knows he has no chance of prevailing against the U.S. or South Korea. Both Beijing and Moscow have grown fatigued to defending Kim’s shenanigans over the years, both seeking stronger ties with the West. Whether Kim fires off a few unanswered shots, it’s only a publicity stunt to show off his relevance as a world leader. While spending the lion’s share of Pyongyang’s bleak economy on the military, Kim knows he’s lacks the resources really get into it with the U.S. or South Korea. Whether in Moscow’s Red Square or Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square, pageantry doesn’t equate to military victories, though Moscow makes no apologies for its military adventures in Crimea and elsewhere. Kim’s North Korea has far less military resources than Moscow.
Playing to his captive audience in North Korea, Kim’s periodic threats or chest-pounding military displays in Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square keep the myth alive about the infallibility of the North Korean Communist Party. Looking at the tale of two cities between North and South, the economic contrast couldn’t be more stark. Home of some of the world’s most iconic cars, consumer and medical goods, South Korea stands as the world’s true testament of resounding economic success of free market capitalism over communist totalitarianism. Like dictators in other parts of globe, their overriding obsession is maintaining power, not confronting enemies. Eighty-thousand U.S. and South Korean troops send a loud message to Pyongyang that Kim can only push things so far before threatening his rule. Whatever fireworks went off recently in the demilitarized zone, it’s bound to stop.
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