When Kim Jong Un first appeared in Pyongyang's carefully stage-managed public spotlight in the fall of 2010, North Korea watchers began scouring for clues to learn whether the pudgy heir apparent would be a reformist or simply the newest face of a despotic regime.I didn't insert that word, pudgy, it's right out of the WaPo!
Nearly 16 months after taking the reins of the hermit state following the death of his stoic father, North Korea's 30-year-old
Having disavowed his country's armistice with South Korea and threatened to fire his increasingly capable missiles toward the United States,
"His father and his grandfather always figured into their provocation cycle an off-ramp of how to get out of it," Adm. Samuel Locklear III, the commander of U.S. troops in the Pacific, told Congress this past week. "It's not clear to me that he has thought through how to get out of it. This is what makes this scenario, I think, particularly challenging."
As Kim Jong Un eases into the top job of a nation whose elite has long been presumed to be rife with intrigue and rivalries, he appears determined to assert a tight grip on the levers of power.
"He has an inferiority complex," said Kongdan Oh Hassig, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria. "He is trying to show that he has a strategic mind, that the military stands behind him and that no one stands against him."
I used to think he was just dangerous, but with an inferiority complex... inherently unstable comes to mind.