Why Kim Jong-un may be banking on a US military strike to ensure his survival
Bob Savic says with China enforcing UN sanctions and getting closer to South Korea, the North Korean leader may well force America’s hand to show Beijing and Moscow his indispensability as the leader of a buffer state
After the George W. Bush administration declared North Korea as one of the three countries on its “Axis of Evil”, and a month after the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq, North Korea announced that it possessed nuclear weapons. In 2006, it undertook the first of a series of nuclear and missile tests.
Following these, North Korea’s then leader Kim Jong-il refrained from further testing for three years, until 2009, when another round of nuclear and missile tests were carried out.
However, a major divergence in the pattern arose in the wake of the two leaders’ second rounds of testing. After 2009, Kim Jong-il halted further tests, whereas, following the resumption of testing in 2016-17, Kim Jong-un has not only intensified his missile launching activities, but has threatened to escalate nuclear testing as well.
It was not long after Kim Jong-un’s December 2011 ascension to power, after the death of his father Kim Jong-il, that Xi Jinping became China’s leader.
Xi became president in March 2013 – and the relationship between the two leaders was negative from the outset.
Only a few days before Xi formally assumed power, China voted to apply a new round of UN sanctions on North Korea, in response to the younger Kim’s first nuclear test.
For the first time, sanctions included economic components, including a ban on exports of luxury goods to North Korea.
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Shortly thereafter, on January 6, North Korea resumed its nuclear testing.
Xi’s first visit to the Korean peninsula was a trip to Seoul in July 2014, to meet then president Park Geun-hye. It was the first time any Chinese president had chosen to visit South Korea before the North. In fact, during the first three years of Park’s administration from 2013, relations between China and South Korea progressed positively, and were deemed to be at their best ever since bilateral ties were normalised in 1992.
To a large extent, China’s relations with South Korea have been pushed along by rapidly growing economic ties. In addition, Xi’s attempts to move China towards a more market-driven economy, involving the closure of many state industrial and mining companies, has further fuelled the growing divide between Xi’s vision of a modern Chinese economy and those of Kim’s adherence to a state-socialist economic model for North Korea.
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Bob Savic is a senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute in London, UK