The Hermit Kingdom

Forget the hairdos and the funny suits. Kim Jong Il is no madman.

We don't have access to his shrink, of course, but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that he's irrational. In terms of judging his own people and the international community, he seems to have done a remarkable job with what he has been given. One reason: cold-eyed awareness of the reality of his position. He has told at least one reliable source that his own regime's propaganda is all lies, and he surely knows -- given that he maintains constant access to the Internet and CNN -- that his economy is a basket case and his country is an international pariah.

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He also knows that it's almost impossible for him to reform without putting his own government (and probably his life) at risk. While Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping was able to allow in investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong to jump-start his economy without having to worry that they would end up calling the shots, Kim faces an unhappy neighbor in South Korea whose economic strength means that any sort of perestroika-style economic modernization could quickly lead to loss of political control. Indeed, Kim is thought to have circulated videotapes of the execution of Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to North Korean communist party members, just to make sure they get the point.

Given such constraints, Kim's hysterical rhetoric, missile launches, and stentorian nuclear threats look like a cynical but logical strategy for blackmailing the world into handing over adequate food and money for him to keep his regime in business. Kim may be a dictator, but he's not deluded.

What's more, it's not just about Kim. No one should be expecting the regime to change even if Kim himself departs (a prospect much discussed since his recent bout of poor health). Although Kim has reportedly tapped his third son as his official heir, the day-to-day affairs of the country have been run for years by the Kim-headed National Defense Commission, and Kim's powerful brother-in-law, who recently joined it, is already positioned to act as regent should Kim Senior pass away. Even if 26-year-old Kim Jong Un actually becomes the putative new Great Dear Bright Amazing Leader, he's likely -- given his youth and inexperience -- to be a figurehead.

And even if this latest Kim is granted some measure of real power, you can forget all those hopeful news reports about the presumably liberalizing effect of his purported Swiss education. For Kim 3.0 will face the brutal reality that his father does: Any substantial opening will entail ceding control to the much more powerful South. For the moment, though, the North is gradually moving toward some form of collective leadership. Its aging members will be reluctant to vote for any sort of drastic reform, but they'll face the same sort of pressures that Kim does today.

Those pressures are only increasing as North Korea grows more open to the world than at any point in its 60-year history. Notwithstanding ritual media references to North Korea as "static" and "Orwellian," today's North Korea is a place where people make a living off private markets and international trade. In the mid-1990s the North's economic mismanagement compounded the damage from flooding, triggering an epochal famine that killed as many as 2 million people. The corresponding collapse of state-managed networks for the production and distribution of food forced many North Koreans -- including party members -- to look to their own devices to keep themselves fed (and the government increasingly looked away). In 2002 Kim's government tacitly acknowledged this when it pushed through a series of tentative economic reforms that essentially allowed this minimal market sector to continue existing.

Under the "sunshine policy" instituted by the late South Korean President Kim Dae Jung at the beginning of this century, the North and South dramatically boosted economic cooperation, spurring trade and travel and even creating two enclaves inside the North where Southern managers and tourists mingled with Northerners. The North did its best to restrict access, but knowledge and goods from both zones have spilled out -- perhaps one reason why Pyongyang has seen fit to crack down on both of them in recent months. One defector told Los Angeles Times correspondent Barbara Demick in 2005: "It is not the same old North Korea anymore except in name."

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