2024 analysed: Kim Jong Un's year
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Alex Dibble and James Hansen. As the year draws to a close, we're bringing you a series of episodes that analyse 2024 from a security perspective and from the perspective of individual world leaders. We've already discussed Putin, Zelensky, Trump and Netanyahu, as well as an episode focusing on Hamas and Hezbollah.

Today, we're focusing on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Over the past 12 months, Kim has continued to foster his growing alliance with Russia, including by welcoming Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang in July and providing North Korean troops to fight against Ukraine. Meanwhile, he's also issued fresh nuclear threats against South Korea.

Our guest today is The Times' Asia editor, Richard Lloyd Parry. Richard, first of all, how would you sum up Kim Jong-un's year? Well, Kim Jong-un has had a year which in some ways has been typical for him. He's made a lot of appearances in the state media recently.

doing the thing that he and his forebears have always done, which is to turn up at arms factories, military units and the like, cheering on the troops. He was seen earlier in the year driving a tank. He's been present at a number of big weapons tests, missile tests and so on, sometimes accompanied by his young daughter, who is more and more a feature of these occasions. But the really big thing is,

that Kim Jong-un has achieved this year, and the more time passes, the more important it's coming to seem, is to establish a strategic partnership with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. So last year, they had a couple of meetings. Kim went to Siberia and met Putin. They shook hands and they promised to build closer ties there.

But then this year, in the early summer, Putin visited Pyongyang for a state visit that lasted a few days. And it was in that that they established this strategic relationship. They didn't quite call it an alliance, but they did say that they would help one another out militarily if either of them was threatened or attacked. And so no one quite knew what was going to come of that.

But it's clear by the end of the year that it is really rather consequential. And among other things, the big development a few weeks ago was that North Korean troops were sent to Russia. And from what we're told by Ukrainian and South Korean intelligence agencies, they

They are now operating apparently in the Kursk region of Russia, which is the area of Russia where Ukraine has seized and held some territory. We don't quite know what they're doing. It's a little unclear whether all the statements being put out by the Ukrainians and South Koreans are sound and reliable and fully backed up.

But it's clear anyway that North Korean troops are in Russia, and it looks very much as if they're supporting the operation in Ukraine, which is a very big deal for the whole world. A partnership between these two countries, which in the view of many of the world's democracies are essentially pariah states, and now they're backing one another up, not just with words, but with soldiers.

Richard, you can understand what Russia gets out of this relationship, namely weapons and troops. But what is in it for North Korea? That's a very good question. And we don't know fully. Yeah, I mean, Russia has certainly been getting a lot of artillery shells from North Korea. And those are landing in Ukraine. The ones that don't fully explode, you can see the Korean writing on them. So we know that's happening.

What exactly the North Korean troops there are doing is not absolutely clear to me. The Ukrainians say that, you know, they're there, they're fighting and that they've killed some of them. But we haven't seen any bodies. We haven't seen any prisoners of war yet. So I think we have to be a bit cautious about that.

But as you say, the key question is, what's a quid pro quo? And what is Kim Jong-un getting? So far, he's got a very nice Russian limousine, which he's been seen in. He's probably getting trading concessions. I mean, there's been stories about North Korean clothes popping up in the market in Russia. Of course, that's all small potatoes. What people in South Korea want

are very worried about is that the Russians will share with North Korea military technology that will help them with their nuclear weapons and

ballistic missile programs. And specifically, the thing I'm most worried about is this, that North Korea has tested a few times long range intercontinental ballistic missiles that in theory have the potential to carry a nuclear bomb to the mainland of the United States. In other words, these are weapons that could potentially nuke New York, LA, San Francisco, wherever, which of course would be huge.

But it's not clear, and some people are very doubtful, that they've perfected that technology yet. In particular, the hard thing when you're building these intercontinental rockets is they go up into space and then they come back down. And in order to re-enter the atmosphere, they need something called a re-entry vehicle, which is a tough thing to make reliably. But if you haven't got it, your ICBMs won't make it to America.

So that's the thing that people are really nervous about, is that the Russians who have mastered this art may share it with North Korea and give an extremely powerful boost to their already fairly advanced nuclear missile programme. And how will Kim Jong-un view the return of Donald Trump? They famously met in Singapore back in 2018. Do we know what relations will be like during Trump's second term?

We don't. It's true that Donald Trump is the only US president who's ever met a North Korean leader. They had a number of very, you know, rather warm and jovial meetings. It all ended at their last summit in Vietnam when they failed to reach a deal. Kim offered one. Trump walked away from it.

And after that, North Korea's relations with South Korea and the West deteriorated rather quickly. And they're now the worst they have been for several decades. So we don't know what's going to happen when Trump comes in. It really depends on Donald Trump. Is he going to be interested in picking that up? He seemed in some ways to be very interested by Kim Jong-un. He liked to say that he understood it, that they had a rapport. He once described it as,

jokingly or not, as a love affair. The love affair soured. Whether he can rekindle it or not remains to be seen. It will be harder. Kim Jong-un has burnt a lot of bridges with the West. But they're both fairly unpredictable men who seem to work a lot of the time very much on instinct. So if their instincts bring them back together, it will be very interesting to see where that leads. But we don't know yet.

And Richard, how secure is Kim Jong-un's personal position? We've seen in Syria this year how long-serving family dynasties can come to an end actually quite quickly and quite dramatically. And whilst it's always very difficult to get accurate information out of North Korea, do we have any sense of how secure Kim is? It's very difficult, as you say, to look into the inner workings of the North Korean leadership.

I don't think even the best informed spies can confidently talk about that, and I certainly can't. But what you can say is there are no obvious and visible signs of any challenges at all to Kim Jong-un's authority. Syria was a very different case. Assad had a war that had been raging in his territory for 14 years, and

There's nothing like that in North Korea. There are no inklings of any opposition at all. The security state is terrifyingly efficient from what we can see. And any rumblings of trouble are quickly snuffed out and people are killed or locked up for a very long time. So honestly, we don't know, but there's no sign of that happening. Richard?

Richard, thank you very much. That is The Times' Asia editor, Richard Lloyd Parry. Well, tomorrow we will be continuing our series looking back at 2024 from a global security perspective by focusing on China's Xi Jinping with Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS University of London. But until then, that's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

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