North Korea is very interesting, maybe the most interesting country in the world, which makes Kim Jong Un the most interesting man in the world. The kid is a few years older than I, and he's running a nation that, if not hated by most of the world, is at the very least scorned because of the way the leadership treats its citizens.
For any concerns people may have about this young person being in charge of possibly the most unstable regime on the planet, consider this: he's not even 30 yet.
Things have started well enough for his term in power, after the North Koreans agreed to accept a few hundred thousand tons of food in exchange for suspending their uranium enrichment program and allowing International Atomic Energy inspectors to monitor exactly what they've been up to with that nuclear program.
He's only got four years on me, so he probably really just wants to watch basketball, like his old man, and talk to his friends on Facebook. He probably hates that he has all this responsibility thrown in his lap. He has to run a country, and it's North Korea.
He probably doesn't let on when he's hanging out with his advisers and military leaders that he'd rather be at home playing video games than talking to them about the status of the troops and overseeing which targets the nukes are aimed at.
His ears probably prick up when they mention war games out at sea, but then he'll realize it's just a bunch of nautical mumbo-jumbo and has nothing to do with hunting down German U-boats in the Second World War. He would definitely rather spend his days playing Call of Duty than running North Korea. I know this because I understand 20-year-olds as well as anybody, and running that country is just not on the radar of any of us.
Kim Jong Un knows full well he isn't prepared to oversee a country and that he's just the face of power until he actually has the capacity to make decisions. He still has all these obligations to talk to people who will tell him what to do, and he has to get his state photographer to shoot photos of him with the generals. He's just a middle man right now. They make decisions, tell him the verdict and then he signs his name to make it official, but he's still stuck playing the part of supreme leader without any of the power that a title like that should come with.
That sounds like a terrible job. Sure he's his own boss, but it's not like he started up a hipster design firm with an office in a loft and hired all of his buddies. He's still responsible for North Korea, and he's been outside the country plenty in his young age. He may never leave again, but he knows how the rest of the world operates and knows there are much better countries to run.
I see comments about how corrupt Kim Jong Un is because like father like son, but think about it from the perspective that he's 28 years old. He wants to hit the Pyongyang bars and go clubbing. He probably has no interest in beginning a global incident. That would just mean more work for him. He doesn't want to stay at the office late on a Friday night. He definitely doesn't want to have to go back in on Saturday morning.
That's what his job would mean if he started to get aggressive with his southern brothers. He doesn't want to give himself any more work. He knows life would be easier if he just keeps quiet, and North Korea will probably be a quiet country for a long time.
