North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared on state media, touring a fertilizer factory on Friday.
Photo: kcna/ReutersNorth Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s re-emergence in public ended weeks of speculation about his whereabouts and avoided a thorny diplomatic and military problem for China, the U.S. and South Korea at a tricky time.
Photos and video published by North Korean state media showed Mr. Kim smiling as he walked around a fertilizer factory on Friday. Close North Korea watchers said the images appeared to be authentic.
Leadership upheaval in the North would uncork one of the world’s most vexing—and dangerous—security dilemmas. Pyongyang, armed with nuclear weapons and missiles potentially capable of striking the U.S., is unpredictable and cloistered, and would be especially volatile in the aftermath of a sudden exit by Mr. Kim.
But the North Korean leader’s reappearance brings a paradoxical outcome by returning the status quo: flawed, though predictable, harmony.
“People recognized all the terrible acts Kim Jong Un committed,” said S. Paul Choi, a former strategist for the U.S. military in South Korea. “But the likely challenges resulting from his sudden death seemed to have had all neighboring governments hoping he was OK.”
North Korean instability would have arrived at a particularly delicate time. The U.S., jostling for a better deal on shared military costs, has strained ties with South Korea, which has an even frostier relationship with fellow American ally Japan. China and the U.S.—the two powers with so much to gain or lose by swaying Pyongyang—aren’t so chummy right now. And all five countries are preoccupied by their respective responses to the coronavirus pandemic.
Before his reappearance, Mr. Kim hadn’t been seen in public since April 11. He missed a celebration honoring the birth date of his grandfather on April 15. The hiatus triggered a string of unconfirmed reports that the North Korean leader’s health was in serious danger.
If health problems had anything to do with Mr. Kim’s three-week absence from the public view, the images released by North Korean state media betrayed no evidence of it. Video footage aired on the official Korean Central Television showed Mr. Kim walking without any major apparent impairment and at one point seated with a cigarette and ashtray.
The likelihood that the video is authentic is boosted by having run in domestic media, where the North takes fewer liberties than when it publishes reports solely for a foreign audience, longtime Kim watchers said.
“There was nothing suggesting the videos and photos were fabricated,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior North Korea researcher at the Sejong Institute, a South Korean think tank based near Seoul.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed concerns about Mr. Kim’s whereabouts. “We know there have been other extended periods of time when Chairman Kim has been out of public view as well, so it’s not unprecedented,” Mr. Pompeo said on ABC News’s “This Week” program, adding that the U.S. mission of trying to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons remained.
For seven decades, the Korean Peninsula has remained divided, its war still technically stalemated. North and South Korean troops exchanged gunfire on Sunday in an indication of the ever-present tensions. There were no known casualties. The incident didn’t escalate.
The surrounding powers have avoided full-scale conflict by allowing the dynastic Kim family to remain in power, independent enough to shirk Beijing’s full influence and dangerous enough to stave off Washington and Seoul.
Retired Army Col. David Maxwell, a co-author of the original U.S.-South Korean plan for instability or government collapse in North Korea in the 1990s, said Pentagon planning for sudden change in that country has covered two broad scenarios. In the “implosion” scenario, he said, instability stays inside North Korea. In the “explosion” scenario, consequences spill over to China, South Korea and Japan.
Instability or government collapse in North Korea could prompt catastrophic conditions, including violence among military units and refugees trying to flee to China; to South Korea across the heavily mined demilitarized zone; or by boat to Japan, said Col. Maxwell, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank.
“On top of that is the [weapons of mass destruction] problem. It’s not just nuclear.” North Korea also has chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, he said. “We obviously don’t want loose nukes. We don’t want people proliferating…to terrorist organizations or hostile countries. All of that has to be dealt with.”
North Korea has about 2,500 to 5,000 tons of chemical weapons, Seoul’s military has said, and up to 37 nuclear weapons, according to recent estimates by Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford University professor who has visited some of the North’s nuclear facilities.
The death of Mr. Kim’s grandfather and father, in 1994 and 2011 respectively, didn’t trigger any regional military conflict, as power transferred to an heir apparent.
“In both cases, the U.S. chose to watch the dust settle. China played protector telling everyone to stay away. I would not expect that much to change” if Mr. Kim dies, said Victor Cha, a former national-security official in the George W. Bush administration.
But the geopolitics around the Korean Peninsula has shifted in recent years.
China, its own ambitions having grown over the past decade, saw its relationship with North Korea recently thaw after years of frost. Ahead of his first state visit to Pyongyang last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged his full support to Mr. Kim, noting the two countries would remain friends “no matter how the wind and clouds of the international situation change.”
In the event of North Korean instability, Mr. Xi’s moves would be carefully calibrated, likely moving ground troops inside the country closer to the North Korean border—but hesitant to do anything that would alert U.S. and South Korean forces, as well as Pyongyang, said Zhao Tong, a senior fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.
During prior tense moments with the North, the U.S. and others have tried to coordinate with China, though Beijing has been reluctant to participate over fears any planning could be leaked and threaten its relationship with the Kim regime.
The likelihood of such strategizing looks even lower today, given Washington and Beijing failed to share information to aid their responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, said Bonnie S. Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, who has consulted the U.S. government.
“I am extremely pessimistic we’d be able to work together on any aspect involving North Korea,” Ms. Glaser said.
The political cooperation between the U.S. and its allies also looks strained of late. South Korea, home to America’s largest overseas military base, has clashed with the U.S. over shared military costs. Thousands of South Koreans employed on U.S. military bases have been furloughed for over a month, as the two allies have so far failed to renew a cost-sharing deal needed to create the cash to pay their salaries.
One military adage is that the first casualty in a war is the contingency plan. But the frayed ties between the U.S. and allies mean that in the event of a North Korea crisis, China has less incentive and interest to engage in a shared plan, security experts say.
“President Xi Jinping is focused on getting the Covid-19 outbreak under control and reviving the economy,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
The world probably wasn’t ready for a swift changeover in North Korea, though all parties risk being seen as threatening by preparing too brazenly, said Brad Glosserman, senior adviser to the Pacific Forum, a Hawaii-based think tank.
Another variable is South Korea’s sitting government, led by left-leaning President Moon Jae-in, whose party won a three-fifths majority in April’s legislative elections. Mr. Moon has sought to warm ties with the North.
“Conservative governments have led discussions on contingency planning,” said Kim Yeol-su, a senior fellow at the Korea Institute for Military Affairs, a state-funded think tank near Seoul. “Progressive governments have a tendency not to do things that the North would be uncomfortable with or dislike.”
—Warren P. Strobel and Aruna Viswanatha in Washington and Timothy W. Martin in Seoul contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Jeong at andrew.jeong@wsj.com
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