Kim Jong Un is threatening the world.
...with endless missile tests.
You might be thinking, what's new?
We're used to North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un being presented either
as a supervillain or laughed off in dictator jokes .
But now some North Korea watchers are sounding the alarm, saying Kim
might ACTUALLY want a war.
How big?
When?
Don't know.
Kim seems to be sick of trying to make peace.
And things are working out in his favor.
These days Kim is very emboldened.
That’s a threat, especially for South Korea,
which is backed by the US.
So is the frozen conflict
between North Korea and South Korea
heating back up?
And is Kim more dangerous than ever?
These days Kim Jong Un seems to be pretty into maps – and when
dictators start focusing a lot on borders that's always
a bit worrying.
Here he is inspecting a model of the South Korean capital Seoul and
warning that his country is ready to "completely annihilate "
his neighbor to the South - IF provoked.
Whatever that means.
And this is the border
he particularly has his eye on.
The disputed maritime border
between North and South Korea,
known as the Northern Limit Line, or NLL.
Instead of just extending the
land border out into the sea, look at
how the boundary is drawn here,
curving up over these islands.
They have remained under
de facto South Korean control.
But North Korea claims these waters.
Which is why it’s not surprising
that they don’t appreciate US and
South Korean navy drills here.
In 2010, North Korea
attacked one of the islands, killing
several people there.
Now North Korea has repeatedly
fired artillery into the waters
AROUND the islands as a threat.
North Korea has been unhappy
about this border for decades.
Now Kim seems done with tolerating it:
he called it illegal.
It seems to me he wants
that clash for some reason.
He wants that to happen
and he's preparing for it.
This is Robert Carlin.
He's been working on North Korea
for over 50 years, and has been
there at least 30 times, including
as a US intelligence officer.
Carlin thinks Kim Jong Un's talk of illegal borders might only be
the first step to wider military action.
Another worrying development: Kim recently declared that South Korea
is now the North's principal enemy.
Before, peaceful reunification was the official goal.
Kim was effectively saying
South Korea is no longer part of
the traditional core of the Korean people
and the implication is
therefore it's a target.
And Kim has the military might
to back up his rhetoric.
He has nuclear weapons.
And he's in charge of one
of the largest armies in the world.
The tensions between the two sides
extend from the sea over
onto the land.
Into the DMZ.
It's the most militarized
de-militarized zone in the world.
And it’s where the war between
North and South Korea has been
frozen for 70 years.
And where the Korean peninsula is basically still split along
Cold War lines.
How did we get here?
At the end of World War 2, the Korean peninsula was liberated
from Japanese occupation.
The winners of the war,
the Soviet Union and the United States,
decided that they would
each occupy half of the peninsula.
They agreed on
THIS latitude as the dividing line.
In 1950, North Korean troops invaded the South —
and the South pushed back.
It was a brutal war.
At least two and a half million people were killed.
The North was backed by the Soviet Union and later also by China –
both communist states.
The South was backed by UN troops, led by the US.
And you’ll see – the Cold War superpowers never really went away.
In 1953, an armistice agreement was signed, freezing the front line of
the war – roughly back along the same line again.
It ended the fighting.
And created the buffer zone we already saw, the DMZ.
But it left many things unresolved.
Like that maritime border.
That wasn't in the agreement.
The UN, led by the US, drew that later,
without actually asking
North Korea's permission.
And it wasn't a peace treaty
so the war between
North and South Korea never officially ended.
The same family that launched the war is still in charge now.
The Kim family is currently the only communist dynasty.
Kim Jong Un rules just like his father and grandfather before him,
with a totalitarian cult of personality and an iron fist,
using intimidation and violence.
North Koreans don't have access to the outside world.
Leaving the country is illegal without permission.
And then came the pandemic...
North Korea had some of the strictest border controls
in the world.
And Kim started building
hundreds of kilometers of fencing and walls
along North Korea's border
with Russia and China.
Like here: Satellite images show
that a double fence pops up
after the pandemic shutdown.
North Korea even introduced
a “shoot-to-kill " order along
the Chinese border.
So Kim has pretty much
sealed off his country and
locked in his people.
But he is open for business
with his authoritarian neighbors.
North Korea shares a 1,400 km-long
border with China.
Without its northern neighbor,
the country wouldn't survive.
Almost all of its very limited trade
happens with China.
Which brings us to Rason,
a North Korean region right on the border
with both China AND Russia.
It's a Special Economic Zone -
which means this is where
the communist country has been
letting a bit of capitalism happen
since the 1990s.
Now, something new is happening here.
Just look at how close North Korea's
Tumangang station and
Russia's Khasan station are.
This satellite image from
October 2023 analyzed by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies
shows an unprecedented number of
railcars at the North Korean train station.
Some of these railcars
seem to end up in Russia.
The crates are covered,
so no one really knows what's inside.
But the CSIS experts say it's likely
North Korean munitions for Russia...
Which is two years into its full-scale
war against Ukraine.
Ukraine says it has found
North Korean artillery shells and
missiles on the battlefield.
The UN has confirmed
the use of missiles.
North Korea and Russia deny the claims.
What is Kim Jong Un getting out of it?
Well, reportedly a lot of money.
And Putin MAY be giving Kim oil – and raw materials and parts to make
more weapons, potentially including banned missile technology.
Some of this stuff has been hard for Kim to come by so far.
North Korea is under international sanctions for building and
testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Oil deliveries, for example, violate those sanctions.
These days Kim is very emboldened.
Jenny Town is the director of a program devoted to
North Korea analysis at the Stimson Center think tank.
She has been working on North Korea for almost 20 years.
This is a big win for Kim Jong-Un.
He bet on Putin.
He bet on the war.
And so far, that bet
now is paying off for him.
This Russian-made luxury limousine is an example of that.
It was a fancy gift from Putin to Kim on his recent trip to Russia.
Luxury items are also sanctioned.
So, this gift is Putin showing how little he cares about all that.
Because both Kim and Putin are under sanctions.
Cheers to a growing friendship.
The two also share a passion for showing off their weapons.
And it's more than just showing off.
Now North Korea's getting
field experience for their missiles.
There's been evidence of them
in the Ukrainian battlefields.
And if they improve the quality
of it could be a cheap choice
for others in the future.
What this means:
improved North Korean weapons
on the illegal market.
Potential buyers include Syria and Iran.
On his trip to Russia, Kim Jong Un also toured a spaceport
in the Far East of the country.
South Korean intelligence has said it probably was Russian help
that enabled North Korea to launch its first spy satellite into orbit.
Right now, what North Korea gets
from Russia is a level of military
cooperation it has not had
since the Cold War, since
the Soviet Union, right?
That is a huge,
huge win for Kim Jong Un.
It might also be a win for Kim’s nuclear weapons, even though no one
knows for sure if Russia is helping him develop them.
What we do know is that Kim has carried out an unprecedented number
of missile launches since 2022.
People call them provocations,
as if they're just intended to get
under our skin.
They're not.
They're testing new systems.
And astoundingly,
almost all of them seem to work.
These missile launches used to have a different purpose.
The idea that they were
always so dangerous was mistaken.
The North Koreans
did not want to go to war before.
The whole purpose of their policy
was to engage the Americans,
not to go to war with them.
In other words, weapons testing was kind of part of
their diplomatic policy.
A way to make sure South Korea — and more importantly,
its superpower backer, the US — kept talking to them.
That takes us back to the DMZ.
It looked pretty good when these
meetings were happening there
a few years ago.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un were taking steps
to try and finally end the war.
Because remember: the two Koreas never officially made peace.
And US President Donald Trump made a surprise appearance.
He also came to visit the DMZ.
And was actually the first US president EVER to set foot into
North Korean territory.
Many didn’t take the meetings between the two seriously.
But actually...
There were clear signs that
Kim Jong Un really
was willing to do
something on his
nuclear weapons program.
So Kim may have been willing to give up a lot in return
for sanctions relief.
But at their summit in Hanoi the talks collapsed.
Hanoi was
a terrific failure.
A personal failure
for Kim Jong Un.
And from that point on,
he began thinking how he was going to
change the policy.
They don't believe
they can get
anything from the US.
I think
they've given up
right now,
the idea
that sanctions
will be lifted or could be lifted
if they just did the right thing, right.
Kim seems to have abandoned the hope for peace.
And all this isn’t happening in a vacuum.
We see China, Russia and North Korea
working more closely together.
And Iran is in the mix as well.
You know, Kim Jong Un
was one of the
first world leaders to talk about
and embrace the idea of a new Cold War.
They are politically aligned
with, you know, Russia and China
against the West.
Kim's allies Russia and China
are back to thinking about spheres
of influence and territorial ambitions.
Russia is trying to take over
Ukraine, and China
is eyeing Taiwan.
That’s the context for Kim’s talk about the maritime border.
It could just be rhetoric or he could be planning to take over one
of these little islands.
So will he start a war?
This could be a long fuse
and a long-term plan.
While he prepares his own people,
while he gathers together
the equipment he needs,
while he convinces his allies
that they need to support him.
I don't know where he thinks he is
in this, and therefore where how
close he is to pulling the trigger.
So there's ...
definitely a reason for concern
and a reason why we should be trying to
rebuild diplomacy with
the North Koreans in order to ...
pull them back into
the international community.
As we've seen –
at the moment, Kim doesn’t really seem
interested in that.
Instead, he's started looking elsewhere for support.
So is that enough to give him what he wants?
Or does he have more dangerous options?