Why Kim might actually be in charge

There appears to be an awful lot of turmoil inside North Korea at the moment. Rumors that Kim Jong Il is dying just won’t die. The North Korean sinking of the South Korea naval vessel Cheonan has ratcheted up regional tensions to genuinely alarming heights. Botched backpedalling on economic reforms inside North Korea a few months ago forced a rare government apology to the North Korean people, and the country’s Finance Minister was executed. A former Railway Minister was executed in March 2009 after workers stole and sold parts of locomotives. Just this week, according to South Korean reports, a former chief delegate to talks with South Korea was killed by firing squad.

Whenever there’s an unusual amount of upheaval inside North Korea, the question arises again: Does Kim Jong Il really call all the shots in the DPRK — including on decisions of war and peace? Even within a regime built atop an extreme form of cult of personality, can one man really be fully in charge?

In Kim’s case, no one outside the North Korean elite knows for sure. But I can say from firsthand experience that sometimes there really is just one man behind the curtain.

In 1998, as Eurasia Group organized an event with the Turkmen delegation to the UN General Assembly, I found myself in the middle of a diplomatic dust-up involving then-President Bill Clinton and Turkmenistan’s President Saparmurat Niyazov, aka Turkmenbashi, the "Father of All Turkmen."

This is a man who ordered construction in the center of Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan’s capital, of a triumphal, three-pronged arch, combined with a 220-foot victory column, that served as pedestal for a massive, pure-gold statue of himself, rotating a full 360 degrees every 24 hours. This is the author of Ruhnama, "the answer to all questions," a text meant to replace the Koran as his people’s principal source of wisdom and spiritual sustenance. This is the guy who renamed days of the week and months of the year after himself and his family.

Kim has his wacky side, but he’s got nothing on the father of All Turkmen.

Just before Niyazov was to hold talks with Clinton for the first (and only) time, his government announced the arrest of an exiled former foreign minister. The former ally-turned critic saw the meeting with Clinton as an opportunity to return to his country and stir up trouble as the world was watching. Turkmenbashi was having none of it. Frightened that the arrest would scuttle the talks before they had begun, I watched as cabinet officials, military brass and even family members took turns trying to convince Niyazov to play it cool. Some even managed to broach the subject. Niyazov was unmoved.

The impasse was finally resolved, but not until Turkmenbashi had proven beyond all doubt that only he made high-level decisions in Turkmenistan. His control, exerted through a combination of patronage and terror, was astonishing. The president for life died in December 2006, and his statue is about to be retired, but his legacy in Turkmenistan will prove harder to dismantle.

That’s why we should give credence to stories from Russian diplomats that no one in Iraq ever gave Saddam Hussein bad news. And that’s why it’s not impossible that war and peace on the Korean peninsula might one day depend on a decision made by Kim Jong Il. Within an extreme authoritarian regime, very, very few officials have access to the information that might inform key decisions. That’s part of why these brittle regimes eventually fall with a bang. See Ceausescu, Nicolae.

But North Korea is not Turkmenistan, Iraq, or Romania. It is home to one of the world’s largest militaries. It has nuclear weapons. It can export significant numbers of sick and starving refugees, and its implosion would pose a reunification challenge that dwarfs the costs faced in Germany.

That’s why North Korea is a problem we can never afford to ignore.

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?