Stop the world.

Welcome to STOP THE WORLD.

I'm David Rowe.

And I'm Olivia Nelson.

Now, Liv, we love journos on Stop the World.

I'm obviously biassed because I used to be 1.

But you love them too, because they're great storytellers and they're good at bringing all of their insights together in a way that makes you want to keep listening.

Today's guest personifies that skill.

Yes, we have a real treat for our listeners.

We have the Washington Post, Asia Pacific Editor and a Fifield.

I am a huge, huge fan, particularly in the strength of her book The Great successor, The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, which I can't recommend.

Another, I mean, the title alone is is fantastic.

Yes, I agree.

We were feeling that North Korea had been squeezed out of everyone's attention span, understandably by events elsewhere.

But really it remains one of the great flashpoints because it's still a nuclear armed problem child.

That it is, and we're not the only ones who felt like getting into it this week.

Obviously, The New York Times has been running a really interesting series on Kim Jong UN's mysterious daughter, who is seemingly being positioned as his successor despite being a tweenager.

And well, it's like putting my daughter really in charge of a country, which I, much as I love her, I probably wouldn't do.

And despite the obvious power and influence of Kim's sister, who's a who's an adult.

So there's a succession style rivalry brewing and I couldn't resist the temptation to get stuck into the HBO series, which as you know Liv, I thought was the most pointless and overrated TV show of the decade.

Dave, we don't disagree on much, but this is an area of serious disagreement.

It went round and round for Four Seasons and then the dad just conveniently killed over and died.

It was silly.

Anyway, we digress.

Anna has been The Post's Bureau chief in Beijing, Bureau chief in Tokyo and also editor of the Genuine Post in her native New Zealand.

Before that, she worked as a foreign correspondent for your favourite paper, Dave, the Financial Times.

She is a brilliant journal who spent time in North Korea and really genuinely understands Kim Jong UN's regime like a few other people.

Yeah, it's one of the more fascinating conversations I've had in a long time.

Such a bizarre regime.

It's so dangerous and it's obviously so destructive for the North Korean people and, and, and as insights really capture the full spectrum of that.

So we covered how Kim compares with his father and grandfather, the prospects for a managed succession, as, as mentioned, North Korea's involvement in Ukraine, as relationships with Russia and China, parallel economies that you have where there's a sort of feeble domestic economy.

And then a you've got a regime that's sort of with all these global criminal enterprises.

Donald Trump's failed negotiations with Kim during his first term and the lessons for that for the upcoming summit with Donald, with Vladimir Putin, pardon me.

And of course, the sad reality that North Korea is now now a consolidated nuclear power, and there doesn't seem to be any way to unwind that.

Yeah, that's the situation today.

And Anna also shares with us her favourite anecdote about North Korea.

So listen out for that.

But really, the whole conversation is just packed with colour and insight.

We promise you'll enjoy it.

Let's hear from Anna.

I'm here with Anna Fifield.

Anna, thanks for coming on STOP THE World.

Oh.

I'm thrilled to be here, Dave.

It's great to have you.

So we're going to talk mostly here about North Korea.

Despite being a rogue nuclear armed nation, it's been nudged out of our attention span by all the other crises.

So we're going to treat this as a kind of a chance to to catch up on it and think about how it fits in with all the other crises.

So, and perhaps we can just start with a snapshot of North Korea's strength this time around with in the second Trump administration relative to say the first Trump administration, which was really the last time it was front and centre of the attention on global affairs in the sense of how strong its military is, how strong its economy is, how strong its relationships with other major dictatorships or disruptive powers around the region.

Does Kim have essentially more leverage than ever before?

That's the way it looks to a non expert like myself.

What do you think?

Yeah, well, as so many times before, North Korea and the Kim regime continues to confound and surprise us.

So when we look back to the first Trump administration and the various diplomatic efforts during that period, which which led to nothing like.

So when at the end of that, at 2019, when the diplomatic process with Donald Trump fell over with no result, you would think that North Korea would be in a really weak position.

And in fact, in 2020, North Korea did become in a very much weakened even compared to itself because it really properly closed its borders to China, to the outside world with the outbreak of COVID.

So this is something, you know, we call it the hermit Kingdom.

North Korea had actually not been in that hermetic for some time because they had allowed a lot of trade over that border with N with not between North Korea and China and people to go back and forth, goods to go back and forth.

But with the arrival of COVID, they properly shut their borders.

There was nothing going over that river border.

And so that should have been an existential crisis for North Korea because their decrepit economy relies on that little trickle of trade with the outside world.

So it's really surprising, you know, And then through that three year, 4 year period, we knew almost nothing of what was happening inside North Korea.

We got almost no news whatsoever other than what the North Koreans told us.

So that really should have been yet another existential moment for the Kim regime where it's access to funding, licit and illicit, had dried up with their ability to get their money back from overseas that they'd earned through whatever means had also dried up.

But in fact, we see Kim Jong Un now stronger than ever, despite Cova, despite this enforced hermit Kingdom period.

And that's basically because he really lucked out with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

You know, North Korea has very little that the world wants during normal times, but in the and has very few friends in this situation.

We saw Vladimir Putin left with very few friends after his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

February and also really hungry for ammunition, for artillery, for troops, for cannon fodder for one of the better friends.

And what does North Korea have?

It has a lot of Soviet compatible old artillery ammunition stuff that it can continue to make.

It has, you know, people.

And we know that Kim Jong Un does not care about the welfare of the people and he's happy to send them into battle.

So suddenly Kim Jong Un was relevant and needed and in demand in a way like never before.

And I think that has given him a lot more confidence on the world stage.

He doesn't need to talk to Donald Trump this time around or the South Koreans or the Chinese for that matter, because he now has the strategic comprehensive partnership with Vladimir Putin that really, I mean, very few details have come out.

They're not exactly forthcoming, these two, but it does seem to be operational.

They're both getting something out of that.

So Kim Jong Un, see, you know, despite all the odds, appears to have emerged even stronger than than before.

And that's why this time around, you know, Donald Trump keeps talking about how he would be willing to talk to Kim, Kim Jong Un.

We haven't heard a peep out of North Korea on anything like that because they just don't need him in the way they did previously.

That's a lovely summary of the trajectory of the last six years or so.

We'll definitely come back to to North Korea, Russia, North Korea, China and so forth.

I just want to concentrate on Kim in a little bit more detail for the moment.

As a, as a leader, as a dictator, as a, as a personality.

How does he compare with his father and his grandfather who ruled the country before him?

Is it a case of similar ambitions, different era?

Does he have different qualities to his predecessors and and how do they manifest in terms of the the leadership that he imposes on his country and the relations with the rest of the world?

Yeah, I mean, he has the same aims overall, which is, you know, for the Kim raging to stay in power and to keep enriching themselves.

So the overarching goal is definitely the same.

But his method is quite different from his father's.

In particular, his grandfather, Kim Illinois Sung was the founding leader of North Korea and was genuinely beloved by North Korean people during that time.

Because it was a period of when North Korea was strong, was relevant during the Cold War, had friends in the communist bloc, but the economy in North Korea was doing better than South Korea's right up till 1975.

And so to this day, defectors from North Korea will remember Kim Illinois Sung relatively fondly as opposed to his son Kim Jong Illinois's father, Kim Jong UN's father, Sorry, Kim Jong Illinois, who was the second Kim in the mix.

He presided during quite difficult times.

There was this devastating famine, the collapse of the Soviet Union, a whole bunch of events that should have spelled the end of the regime that he somehow managed to survive.

But he was a very different kind of leader from his own father in terms of being quite restrained, quite reserved.

He only said one sentence in public during his 17 years in power.

Yeah.

And then?

Right, I did not know that.

That's right, he uttered a phrase, glory to the military kind of thing at a military parade one time.

That is the only time that he spoke in public.

Whereas then we had Kim Jong Illinois come in there.

We had Kim Jong Un come in.

You know, the least.

Yeah, even I get confused with all the Kims.

The least qualified of all.

You know, he was 27 years old, no political experience, no military experience.

Really difficult to see how this young guy could take the reins of this decrepit regime that should have collapsed a long time ago.

But against the odds, he did it.

And a big part of that was because he tried to literally embody his grandfather.

You know the funny haircut, the the horn rimmed glasses, the suits, the gravelly voice, even this is all reminiscent of Kim Illinois Sung.

And you know it shocked N Koreans when they first saw him just how much he looked like his grandfather.

And that's all designed to to instil legitimacy in him and to say this person is the clear, legitimate successor of this regime.

And in many ways, it's worked.

But at the same time, he's really been his own person in terms of being quite bold and audacious.

Many surprising things he did, like drink Coca Cola with Dennis Rodman in North Korea, had to explain that according to communist ideals, you know, leaving the country, flying to Singapore to see to meet Donald Trump, you know, he has done a whole bunch of things that were unprecedented.

And so he has set out to chart his own path.

And then on the military front as well, he's obviously continued the ambitions of his predecessors, but has made much, much more progress in terms of being able to now demonstrate credible missile programmes, nuclear destinations and things to show that they are.

They have got a long way to go, but they have been really clearly making progress under the third Kim.

There, there are certainly some of the current crop of leaders around the world, both dictators and Democrats, who I wish would only after one sentence in 17 years, but sadly not OK.

If if you were to, if you were to use a few adjectives to describe the Kim Jong Un.

I mean, is he, is he?

Does he, do you think he's smart?

Do you think he's a good strategic thinker?

Do you think he's ruthless in an effective way?

How?

How effective is he?

Yes, all of those things.

He is absolutely very smart, very strategic, very ruthless.

And I don't say this to flatter him.

The the proof is the fact that he has been able to keep this regime together, right?

Like, it's a pretty hard thing to do in 2011 as a 27 year old to hold together this regime full of octogenarians who, yeah, have been helping to run the state, which is close to collapse.

But he has managed to do it in part by the internal management there in North Korea.

You know, he took advantage of all the institutional knowledge that was there.

His uncle was the money man.

You know, there was the propaganda chiefs, the army chief, all of these people who knew how the system worked.

He took advantage of that over the first couple of years in power, set himself up and then one by one dispatched with all of these people.

You know, he had his uncle executed, hauled out of a Politburo meeting.

He had his defence minister blow into smithereens with an anti aircraft gun.

You know, he sent a message in the way that he dispatched with these people as well.

But again, it's very like if you're wanting to send a message to the people who remain in the regime, don't cross me.

Nobody is safe having your uncle kill executed in that way.

Having your half brother assassinated in an airport in Malaysia also sends a real message.

So I think he has been ruthless and strategic along the way.

And even if we look to the way that he played Donald Trump during Trump's first term, you know, now we see all these leaders around the world, you know, from Japan to Cambodia to Latin America saying that they will nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Prize, Peace Prize, you know, trying to Curry favour.

Kim Jong Un is the OG of that, you know, approach.

And he was the one who sent this comedic sized letter and Boston gold flowery language to Donald Trump, flattering him in that first administration that Donald Trump, you know, that was one of the classified documents that was found at Mar a Lago because Donald Trump was so proud of it.

So he really knew how to play Donald Trump at that stage as well and appeal to him and get what he wanted, which was was that meeting.

You know, his grandfather had wanted that meeting as well with the American president.

Kim Jong Un was the one who actually got it.

And that bestowed so much legitimacy on him because he went on to the world stage standing shoulder to shoulder with the leader of, you know, the strongest, richest country on earth.

So.

So he has been very tactical and strategic in the way he's approached the job of being a 21st century dictator.

This might be a question that's almost beside the point, but I mean, obviously you see those ridiculous videos where he's parading in front of his his troops and his officials and they're all clapping their hands so loudly, so hard, you worry they're going to break bones in their fingers.

But do you have any way of assessing how liked or loved I mean, you, you mentioned Kim Illinois Sung being genuinely loved by by the people.

Is there any way of assessing the the degree of his popularity or unpopularity and whether you know his the stability of his rule is purely down to ruthlessness, or how have have people actually sort of embraced him as a leader in in any genuine way?

Yeah, short answer is no, there is no public polling in North Korea to tell us that.

But there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that, I mean, at those military parades, that's obviously a select group of people from Pyongyang brought in there.

And you know, those people don't need to be told to clap and cheer hard.

Like you don't want to be the one with the camera on you where you're being half hearted about the applause, right?

So that's people know what they need, what their role is and that kind of situation.

And what we have had in talking to people over the years who have escaped from North Korea, almost universally, they have talked about how, you know, they there was some hope when he came in this millennial young leader that he would be a liberalizer and that he would do things differently.

But that really has not turned out to be the case.

He has centralised the economy more.

He has tightened security and the border more.

He has been very harsh in his role.

So of all of the people who have escaped that I have spoken to and my colleagues have spoken to, people you know, have no affection for him.

They and try to ignore him as much as they can in their daily lives, right?

They're just trying to get on, feed their families, make the best of a bad situation.

And really, Kim Jong Un doesn't care about those people because they are no use to him.

He really only cares about that top elite in Pyongyang, the people who keep him in power.

They are the ones who, if you're doing the public opinion poll, they are the ones he cares about because they are the ones who have who know where the money is, who know how the system works, who could potentially build factions to rival him.

So they are the people that he wants to keep under control, most of all to keep in fear of him, but also he they are the ones he wants to enrich and make them feel like they have something to gain from the system.

So throughout his Kim Jong UN's leadership, we have seen these kleptocrats in Pyongyang get richer and richer and enjoy an increasing standard of living under Kim Jong Un, mostly thanks to corruption that he is allowed to flourish.

But you know, the 20 somethings in North Korea, but well before COVID at least used to call it Pyong Hatton, they would joke about the skyline in North Korea now looking like New York because it had so many more skyscrapers and things like that.

I mean, it's still very much a Potemkin village.

They do have 70 Storey skyscrapers now, but the elevators don't work because there's not enough electricity.

So nobody wants to live on the top floor of these fancy new buildings, that's for sure.

But Kim Jong Un wanted to try to create a sense that their lives were getting better under him and therefore they should keep him as the leader, and that they would occupy a a social and economic position in North Korea that they would not occupy if they escaped to South Korea and had to be a taxi driver.

Yeah, meanwhile, the rest of the country would make the Bronx in the 1920s look good, presumably.

One more question on the the people before we get on to the geopolitics.

But Kim's only 41 years old, but he doesn't look to be in great shape.

And there's the history of I think there's the family history of heart problems.

There's been talk recently and some stories about his, his daughter Kim Juai succeeding him.

I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.

She's only about 12 years old, I think.

At the same time, his sister, Kim's sister Kim Yo Jong, seems to be fairly influential.

What's your what's your assessment, I guess, of the sort of succession dynamic series?

Is it unusual, first of all, for for a child to be publicly positioned in the way that that Kim the daughter is?

What kind of potential future trouble does that Does that portend in the vein of the vastly overrated HBOTV show succession?

Yes, yes, even by North Korean standards, this is extremely unusual.

This daughter, Kim Joo A is her name.

We know her name because Dennis Rodman held her when she was a baby and he went to see on he was on the yacht with Kim Jong Un and one son.

So this is our source of intelligence.

She has never been named in the North Korean media, but she is referred to as Kim's daughter.

And recently she has been called a great person of guidance as she's been out and about with her great her with her father.

So he's clearly positioning her look.

North Korea, and to a lesser extent South Korea, remains a very Confucian hierarchical country, has a culture of Confucian hierarchy where maleness and age is prized.

So it was surprising in many ways that Kim Jong Un was able to take over being only 27.

But at least he was a man, you know?

And then that's been the kind of thinking around his sister as well, Kim Yo Jong, as she has risen to prominence over the past decade or so, that it's hard to see how she could take over being a woman and young as well, not even 40 years.

But also there's nobody else like is clearly the only person in the family and this is very much run as a family business that Kim say they have this kind of like God like blood running through their veins that enables them to lead the country and only them.

So it has to be a family member.

So Kim Yo Jong had been on the scene.

Obviously she still is there.

She is kind of the attack dog who comes out and issues all of these very fierce statements, but she is very much working in the system.

Whereas over the past couple of years, we have seen Kim Jong Un take his young daughter with him to a lot of military events in particular.

And at the beginning, it seemed like maybe she was going to be the successor.

Maybe he's trying to prepare North Korea for this.

Now, I think there's no doubt that that is exactly what he is trying to do.

She is, yes, maybe 12, maybe 13.

But she is increasingly prominent in all of these public appearances.

She is there when the missiles are launched.

She is there at military celebration, sitting in the front row with her father.

She dresses like a 40 year old rather than a year old.

And she's wearing, like leather coats and skirt suits and things that are not typical tweenage attire.

And so he is clearly positioning her for that.

I think a big part of that is the fact that his own succession was very rushed.

Whereas the transition from Kim one to Kim 2, they laid the foundations over 25 years, the second Kim was steadily elevated through the ranks.

Kim Jong Un did not have that same preparation.

He was introduced to the public and then installed as leader.

Within a couple of years, barely two years had passed.

So that felt very rush and may have been a little hairy in terms of getting his grip on control.

So I would say that that is what he is doing now.

He is laying the groundwork for the North Korean public to accept the idea of a woman taking over because she has this special blood in her veins.

And that Kim Yo Jong, the sister, would be a kind of Regent who would be able to guide her as Kim Ju A rose up through the ranks.

I mean, I've learned a long time ago not to dismiss things as impossible with North Korea.

This seems impossible to me that that a 17 year old girl you know, Kim Jong Un clearly is not healthy.

It's clearly obese.

He continues to smoke a lot.

If he was to drop dead in the next 5 years, would the North Korean people accept Kim Jong Un as their leader?

I don't know.

I mean, we, we can't, as with Kim Jong Un, we, we can never say never.

It seems really difficult to understand.

But they have a lot of tools at their disposal to be able to keep people under control in terms of the censorship and the really brutal prison system.

You know, you only have to raise your eyebrows at the Kims really to, to end up in a gulag.

So never say never.

Fascinating.

You talked in your first answer about the, the benefit that Kim had got from North Korea's involvement in Ukraine and it's stepped up relationship with, with Russia generally.

I mean, it's certainly from the outside it, it seems to have been a pretty clever play by Kim as you, as you said, he, he sends the things that he has in abundance, which is, which is people as cannon fodder and and basic ammunition that the Russians have been running short on.

He in, in return, he gets military tech, He gets, you know, I suppose, diplomatic credibility, at least in certain circles.

He gets some money, hard cash, by the sound of things, fuel.

I think they've got a security treaty as well, correct?

They do.

Yeah.

So I mean, just expand on that a little bit.

I mean, you, you've, you've said basically it was central to the reviving of North Korea's and and Kim's power and leverage.

Just give us a bit more of a sense of just, I suppose how it's unfolded and is there, I don't know.

I mean, does that just go on in perpetuity for as long as the as Russia's war against Ukraine goes on?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess it depends on how long that does go on.

Maybe Donald Trump will have solved it all by the end of this week.

Who knows?

Yeah, I think that this is it looks to be more than just transactional now.

These two seem to have forged something more like an ideological bond around the strategic partnership that they have forged there.

And in addition to this, you know, there's been quite a lot of activity like Russians are the only foreigners who can enter North Korea at the moment.

There's this big water park that he's created.

So there's like quite a lot of tourism going on at the same time and people to people exchanges in addition to the to the military stuff.

And a lot of Russian oil is also flowing to North Korea, which is also something that North Korea needs.

We don't know what is happening with the military cooperation.

These two leaders are obviously very secretive.

But we do know that, you know, over the years, Russia and the Soviet Union before it made a lot of advances in terms of missile technology, more recently in terms of drone technology, nuclear powered submarines and things that they have proven to be able to do and that North Korea would dearly like to do.

So it's reasonable to think that this technology and knowledge transfer is part of the deal.

We probably won't know until we see proof of that.

And it's actually been quite a surprisingly quiet period.

And it's the quiet periods that make me most concerned, you know, because we can absolutely believe that North Korea is developing, testing missile technology like they've they've made clear they want hypersonic vehicles, weapons and drones and all these other more.

Kim Jong Un wants a more developed and more diversified arsenal.

And so I think they are probably working away on it and eventually we will begin to see launches and tests of these kind of technologies.

And, and probably some of them will fail at the beginning as they usually do, but they will continue to test and test until they are able to master a lot of this stuff.

So I think this, we should be quite worried about what Russia is teaching North Korea how to do.

And then at the same time, I think one of the big questions and the big changes about North Korea is where they're getting the money from.

And when we think back like even 20 years ago and you'd think like Russia, North Korean diplomats were used to be caught in Eastern Europe with, you know, boots full of heroin.

And there were these super dollars, these counterfeit $100 notes that they could make, which were incredible, undetectable almost.

We don't hear any of that kind of stuff anymore because it's all become cyber now.

They've trained this incredible army of hackers who are going out there planting malware, ransomware, conducting these enormous cyber thefts or crypto theft.

So that, I mean, there was 1, I think last year where they managed to get their hands on $1.5 billion worth of crypto.

So North Korea has found new modern ways to steal money so that it doesn't need to be doing so many of these, you know, piece meal things like they were before.

So between these newfangled technologies that they've got to make money and the technology and know how that they're getting from North Korea, I think they're probably feeling like they're in quite a good position.

Yeah, really interesting.

The well, let's stay on that for a moment.

I mean, I'm always fascinated by North Korea's well, quote unquote economy and how much of it is, I suppose, legitimate or normal economic activity going on within the country itself.

So people growing things, people making things, people, people selling them back and forth.

Is that sort of happening on one level?

And meanwhile, the regime has this sort of global network of a combination of, you know, sort of criminal enterprises, relationships with other dictatorships that simply supply them things on a out of geopolitical transactionalism or or shared values and and shared interest in disrupting the AUS LED order.

Can you just, I mean how would you sort of quantify and characterise the the internal economy and what portion of that is just completely illegitimate criminal activity?

Yeah, I would say there's almost 2 economies operating in North Korea and that there's the ordinary everyday, day to day economy.

You know, the official state economy doesn't really work anymore.

You know, there are still shoe factories, but with no energy and no raw inputs, you know, they can't make shoes and things like that.

So people don't really, I mean, they still have to go to work in many cases, but that is not their source of income.

There's still this unofficial trading economy that takes place often through the markets, often run by women because they are not required to go to the workplace like the men are.

And so that economy was flourishing before COVID and that Kim Jong Un had allowed that kind of grey market economy to thrive because that was the way for ordinary people to make ends meet.

And so there were various kind of ways that people would let people in the border regions would bribe their way across the river, go to China, buy second hand clothes or washing machines or rice cookers or what have your DVDs and bring them back into North Korea.

And that would kind of be the lifeblood of the economy as that was sold in the markets.

And meanwhile, you had, yeah, women cutting hair or making tofa, or you're producing on a low level to make ends meet.

And the regime turned a blind eye to all of that stuff because it knew that that's how they could just like it would let out steam out of the, you know, people wouldn't be angry about not being able to eat.

They could feed themselves.

So that was existing until, I mean, and the big question about this is what happened on the border when COVID came and that border was shut down and that kind of seed money that would come in from China all dried up.

It has become much, much more difficult for people to trade.

They can only really trade on the things that they have or they can make in North Korea, not so much in terms of imports coming in from China.

So that's a big stress on ordinary people.

And then there's the the regime economy.

And so we've we've seen that Kim Jong Un and his family have continued to flourish despite the COVID closures.

You know, he's still getting the latest model Mercedes Benz delivered to him somehow in North Korea.

His 12 year old daughter is wearing what appears, according to experts, not me, to be Christian Dior and Gucci outfits there in North Korea.

So the family continues to prosper.

They are clearly still getting the money and the goods that they need to run the missile programme and to pursue their military aims.

But, you know, it's difficult to tell how they are doing that.

I mean, a lot of the money will be stolen, as I said before, in terms of the crypto assets or other scams that they've come up with to get money.

So they can and, and that's what Kim Jong Un really cares about, right?

He wants his family and his cronies to continue to feel rich and prosper.

And so he has prioritised that for sure over the way that the ordinary people live.

Big question in all of this is how China is viewing North Korea's direction at the moment.

How would you describe the trajectory or how would you, how has the the North Korea China relationship been tracking recently and what impact has the closeness between North Korea and Russia had?

Is China worried about that?

Are they happy about it?

What do you?

Think, yeah, I think ever since, you know, Xi Jinping took power in China at the same time almost just a little after Kim Jong Un in North Korea, so 2012, she has really made it clear he has no time for this little punk next door who fires missiles during big important events in China and things.

And so they had had been very little contact until Donald Trump came along and started with the summits.

That is what focused she Jinping mind and and forced them to have their first meeting, she and Kim before the Trump summit.

I think XI Jinping's preferred position would be to just ignore North Korea.

They want them to be, they want them to exist.

They want them to be stable and quiet and acting as that buffer between northeastern China and American backed democratic South Korea.

So they would really like to just be able to ignore them most of the time.

And and that has been they have been able to do that.

They did support them somewhat during the COVID years just to make sure it didn't collapse.

But I think this development with the friendship with Russia will be quite concerning to them because China does want to have all of the leverage over North Korea.

They do want to be able to force Kim Jong Un to act or not act in certain ways.

It's quite a surprise that they North Korea has not conducted a nuclear test since 2017.

And that may well be because Xi Jinping has made it really clear that that's a red line.

They certainly have the nuclear material for it in North Korea to be able to do it.

So it's puzzling that they haven't.

But so I think from XI Jinping's perspective, they will very much be looking at this and concerned about the relationship and wanting to keep a sense that they have some control over North Korea in there.

But at the same time, you know, China, Beijing wants Russia to prevail in its war against Ukraine, right?

They look at this very much through the lens of China's own territorial claims ambitions over Taiwan.

And so they do not want this idea that the West or democratic world will help Ukraine prepare, get kick out Russia so or prevail over Russia.

So I think that remains their top priority.

They could definitely have done more in terms of China supporting Russia in this.

They have been quite guarded in what they have done and said publicly, but despite the no limits friendship, but I think that this is kind of a careful balancing act that they are trying to keep in place in North East Asia.

OK, OK.

Perhaps we can look at a, a parallel and we, we're getting into, into Donald Trump a bit here.

I, I try not to make every episode focus too much on, on Trump just because he's, it's, it's easy to get drawn into that.

But it's, it's as we're recording this, he's, we're a few days away from the planned summit between Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Of course, it's a tremendously important moment.

But I've always felt when it comes to Trump, Putin negotiations, there's a, there's the danger of a, of a, of a repeat of what we saw between Trump and Kim Jong Un, where the the, the the summits themselves are portrayed as some, as successors.

But Trump ultimately loses patience, loses interest, walks away, and then the dictator goes on doing what he pleases.

I suppose I'm just interested in your reflections on that.

What lessons, if any, do you draw from that episode between Trump and Kim Jong Un in terms of, you know what, what we may see between Trump and Putin in the coming days?

Yeah.

I mean, there are so many parallels in terms of Trump's kind of the art of his deal, I guess, in that if you cast your mind back to 2017 when Donald Trump was talking about Little Rocket Man and talking about being locked and loaded and all this kind of fire and fury and all of this kind of rhetoric that we were getting out of him.

And he was really in that bad cop mode until he was in good cop mode.

And I think we've seen a lot of back and forth on this in terms of Trump's approach to Putin over the past few months, right?

But I think that this both in both cases that it comes down to Trump thinking as a personalistic leader that he and as a deal maker, that he alone can cut this kind of deal with another world leader.

I'm no expert on Russia, so I will not opine on that.

But it certainly didn't work with Kim Jong Un at that time.

I think, I mean, I was probably a little bit of an outlier in 2018.

And I actually thought it was good that Donald Trump went and met with Kim Jong Un because over the previous like 2-3 decades, various American leaders had been trying the same thing over and over again to convince the North Koreans to denuclearize.

And it hadn't worked, right?

That's kind of horse trading through the six party talks and that oil for denuclearization hadn't worked.

So I thought why not try something different?

You know, it, it made a little bit of progress, I guess in, in Singapore and, and that they agreed to meet again, but obviously ultimately failed, did not lead to anything that is widely credited to John Bolton nixing the deal and and Hanoi and stopping it going any further.

So clearly it didn't work.

But I still do think that at least now we know that that approach doesn't work.

You know, that we don't have to imagine there are no more what ifs around that.

So I think it was worth a go.

And now the dynamic, I think is very different partly because, and this is part of the reason as well why North Korea has fallen off the front pages because there are so many other crises around the world happening, you know, other people dying of starvation, other nuclear armed powers locked in conflicts, you know, So the threat of North Korea, while still there and still really credible, doesn't seem as urgent as the ongoing conflicts that are happening in other parts of the world.

So I think that has distracted Donald Trump a bit.

But also the fact that Kim Jong Un has this new strategic partnership that is multifaceted and seems to be working for his to his advantage with Russia just reduces his reliance on other people in the outside world too, so.

We've even seen that over the past couple of months with South Korea, which now has a new progressive, you know, more talks, diplomacy friendly leader in place there in South Korea.

But so far, their efforts to forge like send an olive branch to North Korea and things have met with nothing except, you know, slamming the door in their face again.

So there is this real sense that whether it's South Korea, the US, China, Kim Jong Un doesn't feel like he needs them as much anymore.

The real question then, you know, is what happens if if Putin goes away And whatever way that happens, you know, where does that leave Kim Jong Un?

But I think the fact that he still does have, you know, then he goes back to his old playbook, right?

He still does have nuclear and nuclear stockpiles.

All of these missiles, he can go back to using them as a bargaining chip for talks once again.

But I mean, the bottom line here is that he holds a lot of the cards.

Kim Jong Un holds a lot of the cards right now.

Yeah, yeah.

So in terms of North South relations, would you summarise it as being largely just disengaged at the moment?

I remember there was, I think it was Kim's sister, Kim Yo Jong, who made some remarks a while back that no, they have no interest in in talking to the new leader in the South.

And does that just look like the way it's going to continue for the time being?

Yes, I think so.

I mean, I think they have no need to talk to them.

It's there's a real limit as to what South Korea could give them other than talks and face.

So I think that there is no nothing really for them to gain North Korea to gain from that.

So I can't imagine a situation where North Korea would want to talk to them anytime soon.

And also it goes back to the same old playbook you know of, of treating them mean.

What are they going to do?

They're not the South.

The South Korean government isn't going to walk away and refuse to talk it down the line.

So North Korea does keep all of the cards in its hand.

All right, now I am in danger of running over time, so I'll just, we'll go through a couple of other quick ones that I do need to cover, cover off.

I mean, one is, and, and you've, you've touched on this in, in your, your last answer, but I mean, is, is denuclearisation pretty much a dead idea today?

You know, I mean, we haven't talked seriously about it for a number of years now.

And if So, what?

What should a reasonable realistic expectation be for the US or for for the international community in terms of the expectations that they might put to North Korea in terms of some sort of international agreement to tame the future that it represents?

Yeah, I mean, yes, it's definitely dead.

There's no way that Kim Jong Un would ever consider giving up his nuclear weapons.

They are what makes him relevant and powerful.

You know, Donald Trump wouldn't be bothered with a country of 25 million people, one of the poorest countries in the world, if they did not have nuclear weapons.

And the fact that, I mean, that relates to the first term, of course, But the fact that Kim Jong Un, you know, he rose to power just after Muammar Gaddafi was pulled out of, you know, a drain in Libya and now looks at how Ukraine has been invaded and is, you know, doing pretty well but has not been able to prevail in that war.

Both of these countries are ones that gave up their nuclear weapons, right?

So why would North Korea ever give up their nuclear stockpiles?

That is what makes them relevant and that's what serves as a deterrent.

So I think now, I mean, even if countries don't say it out loud, I think there is an acknowledgement that North Korea is a nuclear state and will be remain one for the foreseeable future.

And that the all of the emphasis is on containment, you know, deterrence, not letting them, you know, the the three knows the US could have no more no exporting something.

You know, I can't remember that the three now, but but that they, as long as they don't use this in an offensive way, I think the world will just have to live with it.

So managing it as a nuclear power basically.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

Look, 11 last one.

And it's it's a sort of a quirky 1.

I won't say lighthearted because it might not be.

But you've you've written a book about North Korea, You've spent time there.

Give us an anecdote that you feel would best sum up the country, the regime, and just the life there in North Korea.

Yeah, I think the the stories about Pyonghatten are the ones that are emblematic of North Korea today because and the And the last time I went to North Korea, it was in 2016.

The the North Koreans have not let me back in since then.

And actually, I wouldn't go anymore.

Yeah, but when I arrived after not having been for a few years and arrived into Kim Jong UN's North Korea, it did look impressive that he has obviously poured a lot of money into Pyongyang, where the elite live.

And there are buildings.

There is a, you know, a German restaurant and a pizza parlour and the young people can go and do yoga and things like this.

But it is.

So it looks like it's getting better and looks like people have a better standard of living.

But it is still very much a facade.

Like when you get up close to those buildings, you see the tiles are already falling off.

Yeah.

There is not enough electricity to power the lift or pump the water up to the upper floors.

You know, it's still decrepit on the inside even though it's had a facelift on the outside.

So that's how I kind of think about North Korea and that we shouldn't be fooled by the facade that Kim Jong Un has put up.

And that's the capital, right?

So God knows what's happening in the rest of the country.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

All right, look, and I like, I have to say that's been one of the most informative conversations I've had this year.

It was really, really interesting and I've learnt a lot.

So thank you so much for coming on Stop THE World.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to Stop the World.

That's all we have time for today, folks.

We'll be back with another episode soon.