When North Korea’s military publicly announced plans for a mid-August launch of four intermediate ballistic missiles near the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, President Donald Trump quickly responded. He famously told reporters that “fire and fury” would be the likely response to any North Korean provocation. A follow-up Presidential tweet on August 11th proclaimed that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded should North Korea act unwisely.” Western media again then immediately focused attention on the unpredictability of the “paranoid guy” Kim Jong-un. 

Kim Jong-un’s actions since coming to power in late 2011 have, in fact, demonstrated that he has shrewdly calculated the best means for preserving his family dynasty. At the time of his accession, a number of North Korean watchers had predicted a new day in Pyongyang of enlightened economic reform and opening, mirroring what happened in China following the replacement of the inward-looking and ideological Mao Zedong by reformist Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. This analysis was based largely upon the fact that Kim Jong-un had spent his formative adolescent years at an international school in Switzerland in the late 1990s and was a known sports fan of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. His extroverted, outgoing personality harkened back to the successful regime of his gregarious grandfather, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung. This was seen as a stark contrast to his introverted and insular father Kim Jong-il, who presided over an era of marked North Korean decline, including the years in the late 1990s of the Great Famine.

Other commentators, in contrast, including Kim Jong-un’s own half-brother, predicted an alternate fate for the new and untested leader. Kim Jong-nam reportedly told Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi of Tokyo Shimbun in January 2012 that the dynastic succession of his half-brother was “a joke to the outside world” and that, with or without reforms, “the Kim Jong-un regime will not last long.” Fast forward five-and-a-half years. The prodigal half-brother, Kim Jong-nam is now dead, murdered by North Korean agents with a chemical weapon in a Malaysian airport earlier this year. Kim Jong-un, in the meantime, continues to rule, largely unchallenged, in Pyongyang, having increased his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and conducted a series of nuclear and missile tests in the interim years. 

That is not to say that Kim Jong-un does not have issues. These include a strain of narcissism stemming from having been surrounded his entire life by a series of yes-men there to do his bidding and to carry out his every whim with unquestioning precision. His extreme sensitivity to criticism was clearly demonstrated in 2014, when North Korean hackers, known euphemistically as “the Guardians of Peace,” leaked confidential financial and other data from the film company Sony Pictures. This was in obvious retaliation for Sony’s release of the highly unflattering, satirical betrayal of Kim Jong-un in the film The Interview which had drawn the Young General’s pique. 

The lesson here is both psychological and cultural. Given Kim Jong-un’s sensitivities and the always present Confucian need to preserve public face, inflammatory remarks, even those directly echoing North Korean “sea of fire” propaganda, may not be the best means for securing continued peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, something which the policies of previous American administrations, whatever their shortcomings, managed to accomplish. The catastrophic consequences of a second Korean War, including the disruption and partial destruction of the East Asian economic engine that drives the global economy, is definitely not worth the personal satisfaction of playing one-up with the admittedly verbally bombastic Pyongyang regime.

As President Trump noted in an interview with “Face the Nation” in April, speaking of Kim Jong-un: “People are saying: Is he sane? I have no idea. I can tell you this, and a lot of people don’t like when I say it, but he was a young man of 26 or 27 when he took over from his father… A lot of people, I’m sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else. And he was able to do it.” 

The young inexperienced leader Kim Jong-un has played the cards handed to him with considerable skill. Like other authoritarian leaders before him, such as Mao and Stalin, he has purged old guard remnants of potential alternative power centers and replaced them with those beholden directly to him. He removed his former mentor and uncle, Jang Song-thaek, Beijing’s purported man in Pyongyang, in a particularly public and bloody purge in late 2013.

He has also resumed his grandfather’s Cold War tactic of seeking to preserve Pyongyang’s precarious position among greater powers as a “shrimp” among “whales” to quote the Korean proverb. He has sought to balance the influence of two authoritarian neighbors, Beijing and Moscow, rather than relying solely on the suspect Chinese to preserve regime stability, by making overtures to the Putin regime. These diplomatic forays appear to be the calculated maneuvers of a crafty but amoral leader, like Henry VIII, rather than the wild ravings of a madman.  

And Kim Jong-un is likely smart enough, having looked at the fate of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who surrendered his weapons of mass destruction only to end up being “caught like a rat in a drain” pipe, dragged out and beaten to death by a rebel mob, not to make the same miscalculation. Thus continuing U.S. demands for the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of North Korea’s nuclear program is likely to fall on deaf ears in Pyongyang. 

In May of 2012, early in the new Kim Jong-un era, North Korea announced that it had revised its constitution in order to declare itself a “nuclear state.” There seems little chance of any backtracking on this declaration, especially given the series of nuclear tests which have followed, one in 2013 and two in 2016. A sixth nuclear test could take place at any time. 

Kim Jong-un’s momentary tactical retreat with regard to the firing of missiles toward Guam indicates that he will carefully calibrate his series of provocations so as not to trigger a wider conflict which would likely spell the end of his regime. Still, with annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises Ulchi-Freedom Guardian now underway involving 17,500 U.S. and 50,000 South Korean forces, Kim has left his options on the table. Pyongyang declared that “If the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions… we will make an important decision as already declared.” Korea Central News Agency further threatened “merciless retaliation” resulting from the joint military drills. 

So a missile test ending in waters near Guam, as has been done in the past in waters near Russia, South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, remains a distinct possibility. Any American attempt to intercept a missile launched toward Guam, especially if such an intercept failed, would further escalate the crisis. And despite the South Korean President’s recent claim of having veto power over any American military action directed toward North Korea, any inadvertent North Korean missile landing on the territory of Guam itself would be a likely Pearl Harbor moment for Americans. So the Guam crisis may just have been deferred until the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises are concluded rather than permanently resolved. For like the fictional Dr. Strangelove, Kim Jong-un has apparently learned to stop worrying and come to love the bomb.

Dennis P. Halpin, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS), is former Congressional staff on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.