By Isaac Chotiner Contributor. The North Korean regime had a busy February. The country began by launching a new ballistic missile, in response to which its chief patron, China, suspended coal imports. Then, last week, Kim Jong-nam, the son of North Korea's former ruler and the half-brother of its current leader, Kim Jong-un, was killed by two women in a bizarre assassination at a Malaysian airport.
Meanwhile, the United States and South Korea were each in a state of relative chaos, thanks respectively to Trump's hectic foreign policy he had previously stated that he would negotiate with Kim , and the South Korean president's conservative, scandal-ridden government. She has just been impeached for corruption. What is the importance of the assassination in Malaysia? Is it merely a sign of Kim's paranoia?
There's more to it than that, considering that Kim Jong-nam was able to visit North Korea without incident in One group of prominent defectors had evidently been hoping to make him the head of an exile government, in the hope of undermining Kim Jong-un's standing with the ruling elite. When you understand that North Korea is effectively a monarchy and that the bloodline is the current dictator's main source of legitimacy, the plan starts to make more sense; Kim Jong-nam's lack of interest in political life is beside the point.
The defectors were not seriously trying to put him in power in Pyongyang, but to divide and topple the state. Apparently Kim Jong-nam was stupid or extroverted enough to have met with these people, if only for the purpose of turning them down, whereupon Kim Jong-un urged him to return to North Korea for good. He refused. It seems the dictator concluded either that his half-brother was up to something, or that the mere fact of his existence might undermine his rule. Obama apparently told Trump that North Korea would be his biggest foreign-policy headache.
The American approach to North Korea has not yielded much. Does Trump's apparent willingness to consider negotiating make any more sense? The goal of [North Korean] nuclear armament is not mere security from U.
