Who Is Really Calling The Shots In North Korea? Is It 29 Year Old Kim Or The Antique Generals?

War cries, threats and counter-threats, moves and counter-moves are emanating from the Korean peninsula. Pundits have pronounced on what’s going on and where things are headed. So this may be a good time to engage in some humility and to reflect on how little we know.

To make things easy, let’s start with what we do know, as a matter of fact.

North Korea has a young (he’s 30), untested leader, Kim Jong-un, who has been at the helm for barely a year, following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, a domineering presence. The Korean peninsula is crammed with soldiers and armaments, more so than any other place on the planet. A war would thus be a catastrophe — no question about it.

There’s no way that the United States could stay clear: it has alliance with South Korea and 28,000 troops stationed there.

Ditto for Japan, which hosts some 49,000 U.S. forces (11,000 are offshore) and over 80 American military installations, and would come under immediate attack by North Korea.

North Korea is the weaker side, based on the standard measures of power. The South has a GDP that’s close to 40 times the size of the North’s and a defense budget larger than the North’s entire GDP. Its arsenal is much more advanced than the North’s, which consists of Chinese and Soviet weaponry dating back to the 1970s, much of it even older.

The United States is treaty-bound to defend South Korea; North Korea lacks an identical arrangement with China, its principal patron.

Now for what we don’t know, which is where the problems begin.

Who’s calling the shots in North Korea? Is it the young, unseasoned Kim Jong-un? If so, he may fear that looking weak during his first big test will undermine irreparably his newly acquired authority. That might induce him to ramp up the rhetoric and to back it up with bold moves. That’s one possibility and it’s worrisome. Another is that he doesn’t want to lose his newly acquired patrimony and will look for ways to wind down this crisis. There’s no way to tell what’s in his mind, though, apart from guesswork.

Or are North Korea’s generals, much older men, who have held their posts for many years, running the show, at least during this crisis? If that’s the case, how does the world look to them? For all their bluster, they are experienced military professionals and should — I emphasize the word — understand what the balance of power is and realize that they can’t win a war and that it would bring down the North Korean state. Well, that’s a plausible conclusion. MOREHERE