North Korea will implode

The massive Communist Party rallies in North Korea this month provided the world's first real glimpse of that mysterious country's next leader. Kim Jong-eun, youngest son of ‘Dear Leader' Kim Jong-il, seen in pictures for the first time, was almost certainly named the successor to his ailing father through his recent promotions to the rank of four-star army general and second-in-command of the party. He is under 30 years of age.

In a country of hyper-isolation and xenophobia, the "young general" reportedly has a cosmopolitan upbringing. Believed to have been educated in Switzerland, he speaks some German and some English. He has a penchant for at least some popular western amusements, including NBA basketball and pop music. North Korean propaganda praises him as a "brilliant genius," wise beyond his years with "high-tech 21st century knowledge."

On occasion in world history, courageous leaders have brought about monumental change. Does the young Kim have what it takes to finally catapult the North Korean people out of the Dark Ages? Probably not.

His youth is not the issue. His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, was only 33 when he was chosen by Joseph Stalin to be North Korea's first leader after the Second World War. The young general's father, Kim Jong-il, began climbing the party ladder at 30 and was anointed as the successor to his father at 38. For the Kim family dynasty, picking them young is the natural requisite for 40 to 50 years of continuous rule.

The real problem is the system itself. There are three obstacles to reform. First, despotic regimes such as North Korea's cannot survive without an ideology to justify their iron grip. And the ideology that accompanies the son's rise appears to look backward rather than forward. I call it "neojuche revivalism." It is a return to the conservative and hard-line ‘juche' (self-reliance) ideology of the 1950s and 1960s, harking back to a day when the North was doing well relative to South Korea.

Military-first ideology

Neojuche revivalism is laced with songun (military-first) ideology, which features the North's emergence as a nuclear weapons state (Kim Jong-il's one accomplishment during his rule). This revivalist ideology leaves no room for an opening-up, because it blames the past decade of poor performance on "ideological pollution" stemming from experiments with reform.

Second, true reform in the post-Kim Jong-il era would require the courage to loosen the political instruments of control that allow the regime to keep its iron grip on the people. The dilemma the young Kim faces is that he needs to reform to survive, but the process of opening up will undeniably lead to the end of his political control. This was perhaps the most important lesson North Korea learned from the end of the Cold War.

Finally, even if Kim Jong-eun is an enlightened leader who has the courage to attempt such reform, he will be dealing with a generation of institutions and people who are the most isolated in North Korean history. The generals, party officials and bureaucrats of the Cold War era were far more worldly than those of the post-Cold War years.

The generation of leadership the young son will inherit sees nothing comforting about the outside world. The revolution in North Korea died long ago, but the young son will be forced to cling to the outdated core ideological principles that worked during the Cold War.

It is no coincidence that in recent months Kim Jong-il has frequented factory towns that were the centre of North Korea's mass worker mobilisation (Chollima) movements of the 1950s. It is no coincidence that NKEconWatch's website, which has the best Google Earth imagery of the North, has reported the rebuilding of chemical and vinylon factories that were the heart of Cold War-era Pyongyang's now decrepit economy.

Neojuche revivalism is untenable in the long term. Mass mobilisation of workers without reform can succeed only with massive inputs of food, fuel and equipment, which the Chinese will be increasingly relied upon to provide.

The North Korean leadership changes will not lead to changes in US policy, which must stay the course. It should focus on sanctions but hold open the avenue for negotiations should the young general kick his father's nuclear addiction.

Victor Cha is a professor at Georgetown University and a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.