Since the historic Korean summit last week, Seoul has been consumed with hot gossip—not whether North Korea will abandon the bomb or end a sixty-eight-year-old war but over the quirks of Kim Jong Un, the world’s most mysterious leader. In interviews and conversations, everyone I’ve talked to in the South Korean capital has had a favorite anecdote: the North Korean did not smoke during meetings, despite having a notorious bad habit, photographed in North Korea with a cigarette burning as he toured a hospital, school gymnasium, children’s bedroom, and airport tarmac. He was unexpectedly candid about his country’s shortcomings. In discussing South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s reciprocal visit to Pyongyang next fall, Kim advised him to fly because North Korea’s roads are so bad—an unprecedented admission of failure by a country that long claimed to be a socialist paradise. He publicly acknowledged “defectors,” rather than the “scum of the earth,” as they’re labelled in Pyongyang. At the evening banquet, Kim smiled, bantered, and generally charmed as he moved among tables toasting and hugging officials of a country with which he is technically at war. For the evening entertainment, he brought along a magician who captivated the audience by turning a folded dollar bill into a hundred bucks.
In South Korea, Kim is no longer simply the porky princeling with a bizarrely square coif who killed his way to the top by ordering the assassinations of a powerful uncle and a half brother—among others. “Before, he had a notorious image,” Moon Chung-in, a Presidential adviser on inter-Korean affairs, told me this week. “He had been seen as a demon, evil, impulsive, irrational. That was not the case at the banquet. He was quite rational, reasonable, accommodating, and accessible.” President Moon later described Kim to aides as “frank, open-minded, and courteous.” The North Korean never invoked the superiority of a nuclear power—which he is, and Moon is not.
Among progressives in Seoul’s government circles and conservatives who oppose them, there’s now a sense that Kim will more than match wits with President Trump. At the Korean talks, Kim had a mastery of the issues “from A to Z,” the Presidential adviser added. “At the age of thirty-four, he’s really mature. He didn’t need help from aides or assistants. Moon was quite surprised.”
Kim’s charm offensive is working. Before the summit, only ten per cent of South Koreans said that they trusted the North Korean leader—the third in a dynasty that has ruled Pyongyang ruthlessly for seven decades. After the summit, public faith in his good intentions catapulted to almost eighty per cent. Seoul has been abuzz with speculation that Kim’s youth and years at a Swiss middle school have molded him into a modernizer with a pragmatic streak. Overnight, he’s become a global player.
The summit and its tightly choreographed pageantry produced “the kind of publicity that would normally cost a billion dollars,” Nam Sung-wook, the former head of the Institute for National Security Strategy, told me. Public interest in the Kim persona has been so intense that a major South Korean newspaper hired three lip-readers to decipher what Kim said as he sat with Moon on a park bench.
Kim, of course, may not actually have changed all that much. Even South Koreans who were impressed with his performance admitted that he was playing to the almost three thousand assembled journalists—and foreign leaders, notably Trump, watching from afar. He’s still secretive, suspicious, and scheming. Kim brought his own toilet to Panmunjom, Korean officials told me, so as not to leave behind waste that could be diagnosed for health conditions—or anything else. He brought his own pens and pencils, too. Staff wiped off anything he touched. Not so much as a fingerprint was left behind.
What’s Kim really up to in his overture to Moon, Trump, and the outside world? The analytical gossip mill in Seoul identifies three theories.
The most optimistic assessment—somewhat surrealistic, given his past—contends that Kim has shifted strategy. Since assuming power after his father’s death, in 2011, his two-pronged policy has been byungjin—or “parallel advance”—of North Korea’s nuclear program and economy to create a “great socialist nuclear power.” But, in a speech on April 21st, Kim declared the final victory of byungjin. North Korea had achieved its nuclear capability, he said, and can henceforth focus on bettering the lives of its people.
“He’s an enlightened young man,” Moon, the Presidential adviser who attended the other two inter-Korean summits, in 2000 and 2007, and who has visited Pyongyang eight times, told me. “You can clearly see a change in his strategic thinking to reconstruction of a socialist economy. He wants a normal state with foreign investment.”
During the inter-Korean summit, the adviser recounted, Kim told President Moon that North Korea would not need a nuclear weapon—or make its people suffer to achieve it—if the United States agreed to meet more frequently, foster trust, and formally end the Korean War with a non-aggression treaty.
“The real threat to Kim comes from within, unless he feeds his people well. And weapons cannot feed the North Korean people,” the Presidential adviser told me. He recounted asking a North Korean official what the regime meant by security. “What he said was a Trump Tower coming to the Taedong River and a McDonald’s and U.S. banks in Pyongyang—then the United States will never attack us,” he said.
The second assessment is that Kim has decided to follow the course of other Asian Communists who introduced reforms and reëngaged with the world after long periods of isolation: in the nineteen-eighties, Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policy paved the way for entrepreneurship, foreign investment, and global engagement—and transformed China. In the nineteen-nineties, Prime Minister Võ Văn Kiệt was a leader of Vietnam’s Doi Moi, or “Renovation” policy, to create a “market-oriented socialist economy,” which ended the country’s postwar isolation.
“Kim’s transforming—from being a totalitarian despot to becoming an authoritarian dictator,” Yoon Young-kwan, a former foreign minister now at Seoul National University, who has also visited Pyongyang, told me. What’s the difference? I asked. “A despot wants to close his country, his society,” he replied. “A dictator will accept market mechanisms and allow his people to enjoy economic freedoms, if not political freedoms.” It’s a model also followed by right-wing military dictators in Latin America in the nineteen-sixties, he added, and by Park Chung-hee, the dictator and former general who modernized South Korea in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.
The timing of Kim’s shift, South Koreans told me, reflects the intersection of North Korea’s nuclear capability and the squeeze of economic sanctions, particularly on the country’s three-million-strong élite, in a country of twenty-five million. “This is the sweet spot—the time North Korea can get maximum concessions from the United States at a time of maximum need,” Kim Jung, a director at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, told me. The North Korean leader—who was not initially groomed for power—also now seems more secure after seven years in office, especially compared with his famously shy father, who was averse to public speaking. “It was a surprise to see that Kim is very relaxed and confident and smiley,” he added. “He was more competent than I thought. He was very well prepared for this international stage.”
The third assessment—and the deep fear across Seoul—is that Kim is a master gamesman who is duping Moon, Trump, and the rest of the world. Even amid growing confidence that North Korea is willing to give up some of its bombs and ballistic missiles, there’s anxiety that Pyongyang has no intention of giving up everything. The regime doesn’t want to surrender the nuclear arsenal that finally—after seven decades and periods of deprivation that starved millions—makes North Korea a global power. It doesn’t want to appear to capitulate.
“To survive, Kim needs those nuclear weapons,” Hahm Chaibong, the president of the Asan Institute, told me. Without the bomb and delivery systems, North Korea becomes a poor backwater country that struggles just to generate electricity.
For all the euphoria in Seoul, the three-page Panmunjom Declaration, which sprang from the Korean summit, was vague. The declaration pledged to denuclearize “on the Korean Peninsula,” and that was taken by some experts in Seoul to also include the withdrawal of the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” protecting the South and, de facto, the twenty-eight thousand U.S. troops. It did not spell out North Korea’s nuclear-weapons obligations, unlike the 1992 Joint Declaration, which stipulated that neither North Korea nor South Korea could test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy, or use nuclear weapons.
“There was nothing on substance,” Chaibong warned. “If you were to be kind, you’d say everything has to be decided between Trump and Kim anyway. It was a pre-summit summit. But if you were to be skeptical and cynical, as analysts are supposed to be, you’d say there has been no forward movement whatsoever as far as the North Korean denuclearization agenda is concerned.”
Chung Yung-woo, a former national-security adviser and chief negotiator with North Korea, is among the most skeptical. For years, he was a frequent visitor to North Korea. “Kim is playing a high-risk, high-return survival game,” he told me. “He’s far more sophisticated than his grandfather,” Kim Il Sung, who led North Korea from the time it was established, in 1948, until he died, in 1994. “He’s far more strategic, not swayed by emotions. That’s why he wins every time he plays games with the outside world. So far, he’s never lost a bet.”
