Kim Jong-un cut a cosmopolitan figure as a youth—Swiss finishing schools, trips abroad with his dictator dad—but he’s turned reclusive as he’s ruled North Korea. Indeed, he hasn’t departed his country once since assuming the throne.
If reports from several outlets are to be believed, that might have changed.
A heavily armored train from North Korea arrived in Beijing on Monday, and it looks strikingly similar to one the late Kim Jong-il used to travel in. (Kim Jong-il was famously afraid of flying, even going so far as to take a train all the way to Moscow more than once.) The train was met by a VIP motorcade. Massive security also was apparent around Beijing’s main train station.
The North Korean regime has remained silent about any trips abroad. This, too, is of a piece of Kim Jong-il’s behavior: When he used to travel to Russia or China, his visits were always announced after the fact. The South Korean government, for its apart, appears caught unawares, according to the Joongang Ilbo.
If Kim Jong-un is indeed in Beijing, that suggests the same thing that his surprising invitation to Donald Trump earlier this month did: that his calculus has changed. For his more than half-decade in power, Kim has tended to reject outside entreaties. He cut off the hotline that connected his regime with Seoul, for example. And perhaps more surprising, he spurned advice from Beijing—his only treaty ally—even going so far as to kill the Chinese’s preferred figure in North Korean, his uncle Jang Song-thaek in 2013. Yet now he is inviting South Korean delegations to Pyongyang, and attempted a ballyhooed “charm offensive” at last month’s winter Olympics.
So something has shifted, quite profoundly. If Kim is indeed in Beijing and looking to engage, it suggests that he is more worried than he was a few years ago; maybe because of ratcheting sanctions, maybe because of not-actually-loose loose talk about a potential military strike on his nuclear facilities. (I suspect it’s a little of both.) But one thing is for certain: Kim looks much more chastened than he did a few years ago, when the United States and the rest of the world were engaging in “strategic patience”—sitting around and hoping that North Korea would denuclearize.
