The Washington Post reports:

After closing off his country at the start of 2020, as covid-19 erupted in neighboring China, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is storming back onto the world stage with a series of audacious moves.

He has abandoned North Korea’s seven-decade goal of reuniting with the South. He has dramatically ramped up idol-worship propaganda around himself. And he has sent thousands of North Korean troops to Russia — demonstrating his commitment to an alternative world order aligned against the West.

Heading into 2025, Kim is presenting himself as more confident than ever — with more-advanced nuclear capabilities and a newfound alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That means President-elect Donald Trump, who courted Kim during a first term that included two chummy summits and says the North Korean leader “misses” him, will find a much more brazen counterpart in Pyongyang in his second term.

“We’re seeing an emboldened Kim Jong Un,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an expert on North Korean state media who has noticed a clear shift in the way Pyongyang portrays its role in the world. “I think it views itself as a bigger player than it used to.”

The shift comes after four years in which Kim not only survived the pandemic-induced border closures that should have sunk his broken economy, but used the opportunity to impose even-more-draconian measures to keep the populace under control, restricting the movement of his citizens inside the country and making it virtually impossible to escape it. [Continue reading…]