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Who Is Really Pulling the Strings? Personality Profile and Threat Assessment of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un Jacob J

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Who Is Really Pulling the Strings? Personality Profile and Threat Assessment of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un Jacob J College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day Undergraduate Research 4-26-2018 Who is Really Pulling the Strings? Personality Profile and Threat Assessment of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un Jacob J. W. Wankel College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/ur_cscday Part of the Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Wankel, Jacob J. W., "Who is Really Pulling the Strings? Personality Profile and Threat Assessment of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un" (2018). Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day. 45. https://digitalcommons.csbsju.edu/ur_cscday/45 This Presentation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@CSB/SJU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Who is Really Pulling the Strings? Personality Profile and Threat Assessment of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un Jacob J. W. Wankel College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University Wankel 1 Acknowledgements To begin I would like to thank I would like to thank my advisor and mentor, Dr. Aubrey Immelman, whose guidance and assistance in this project was absolutely invaluable. It has been a pleasure working with him on this project and others throughout my time at Saint John’s University. I would also like to thank all the student researchers who assisted in the data gathering process for the Dr. Immelman’s initial study of Kim Jong-un and this recent study. Their work greatly assisted my own and allowed me to start this project with a solid foundation to build upon. In particular, I would like to thank Megan Keaveny, whose tireless work and dedication to my project and Dr. Immelman’s was incredibly helpful. Additionally, I would like to thank my friends who reminded me that it is possible to balance a thesis, schoolwork, a job, and a social life. Their support and pestering kept me from locking myself in my room every night this past semester (for the most part.) Lastly and most importantly, I would like to thank my parents, Martina and David, who were constantly and consistently supportive and loving throughout this process. Thank you for putting up with my occasional stress induced breakdown over the phone, and thank you for always reminding me that the end goal will be worth it. Your support has kept me strong throughout this project and throughout these four years of college. I know you will always be my biggest fans! Wankel 2 Introduction North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has been called “a total nut job” by current U.S. president Donald Trump (Choe, 2017). In China, internet search engines suddenly turned up empty for the popular nickname given to the leader by young Chinese citizens, “Kim Fatty the Third,” although a spokesperson for the country denies that the government initiated the censorship (Domonoske, 2016). Arizona senator John McCain recently labeled the North Korean dictator a “crazy fat kid” who is irrational (McLaughlin, 2017). A simple internet search will bring up hundreds of articles with similar stories, many labeling the young marshal of North Korea as dangerous, irrational, impulsive, and inexperienced. However, one must not forget that North Korea is one of the world’s most isolated and inaccessible countries in part from severe travel restrictions and complete control of the press and media (Lee, Lew, Lee, Yu, & Hahn, 1999). The outside world knows very little about the inner workings of North Korea and all we really know about Kim Jong-un is what can be derived from defector accounts, the few foreigners who have been allowed inside the country’s borders, or North Korean state media which, as stated before, is completely controlled by the ruling Korean Workers’ Party (WPK). With the rapid escalation of North Korea’s ballistic missile program, deteriorating North Korea–U.S. relations, and the specter of nuclear war, it is important to gain as much information regarding North Korea and its leader as possible to enable a proper threat assessment. In the wake of recent nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles potentially capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental United States, the media have been quick to label Kim dangerous, impulsive, and unstable. The main issue with these claims are that they are based on the assumption that Kim Jong-un is directly responsible for policymaking and issueing orders, which has not been officially confirmed. A secondary, though related, issue is that these Wankel 3 claims, at base, are descriptions of regime behavior, with little if any direct, empirical evidence that Kim actually possesses these personality traits. This paper will attempt to shed light on three important questions that as of yet do not appear to have been empirically resolved. The first is questioning who is truly in charge of decision-making in the North Korean regime. This question is incredibly important as it is directly relevant to determining the source of the military threat posed by North Korea. Second, with the working assumption that Kim is in charge or plays an instrumental policymaking role, this paper offers a personality profile of Kim Jong-un using a theory-driven method whose heuristic value has been established in previous studies (Immelman, 2012). Finally, the personality profile will be factored into a threat assessment of North Korea and employed as the conceptual basis for proposals designed to mitigate the military threat posed by the country. This paper conceptualizes personality and politics as construed by Fred Greenstein (1992). Therefore, Politics by his definition, “refers to the politics most often studied by political scientists — that of civil government and of the extra-governmental processes that more or less directly impinge upon government, such as political parties.” and Personality, within the confines of political psychology, “excludes political attitudes and opinions … and applies only to nonpolitical personal differences” (p. 107). Immelman (2002, 2003, 2005), following Millon (1996) defines personality as: a complex pattern of deeply embedded psychological characteristics that are largely nonconscious and not easily altered, expressing themselves automatically in almost every facet of functioning. Intrinsic and pervasive, these traits emerge from a complicated matrix of biological dispositions and experiential learnings, and ultimately comprise the Wankel 4 individual’s distinctive pattern of perceiving, feeling, thinking, coping, and behaving. (Millon, 1996, p. 4) Conceptually, the study is informed by Theodore Millon’s (1969, 1986a, 1986b, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1996, 2003; Millon & Davis, 2000; Millon & Everly, 1985) model of personality as adapted by Immelman (1993, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2005) for the study of personality in politics. Methodologically, the present assessment of Kim Jong-un replicates clinical psychodiagnostic procedures in an archival research setting, mainly through extracting psychologically relevant data available in the public domain such as biographies and unbiased media reports. Only data from which the personality attributes of the subject can be inferred are included in the data set. The primary assessment tool is the third edition of the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC; Immelman & Steinberg, 1999; Immelman, 2015) which was compiled and adapted from Millon’s (1969, 1986b; 1990, 1996; Millon & Everly, 1985) prototypal features and diagnostic criteria for normal personality styles and their pathological variants. The research instrument yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications on 12 scales congruent with Axis II of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA; 1994) and coordinated with the normal personality styles in which those disorders are rooted, as described by Millon and Everly (1985), Millon (1994), Oldham and Morris (1995), and Strack (1997). The profile constructed in the study is interpreted on the basis of theoretically grounded descriptions, explanations, inferences, and predictions provided by Millon’s model of personality (1969, 1986a, 1986b, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1996, 2003; Millon & Davis, 2000; Millon & Everly, 1985) with the ultimate goal of evaluating whether Kim Jong-un truly is the dangerous leader Wankel 5 portrayed in the media, or whether actors behind the scenes are really pulling the strings, essentially using Kim Jong-un as a dynastic puppet to ensure regime survival. The secretive nature of North Korea demands that any conclusions be treated as tentative until verified by direct evidence. Therefore, the present personality profile of Kim Jong-un, although backed by copious amounts of evidence gathered and a solid theoretical basis, must be regarded as speculative rather than the final word. Wankel 6 Political History of North Korea Humans have inhabited the Korean Peninsula since prehistoric times, but it was not until the Silla dynasty that the people of Korea were unified for the first time in 676 A.D. Silla was one of three kingdoms of ancient Korea and following its conquest of the other two kingdoms became the sole rulers of the Korean Peninsula (Seth, 2016a, p.1). Coincidentally, the Silla kingdom also had a hereditary monarchy led by a family with the surname Kim (“Silla,” 1999). The Silla kingdom was then renamed Koryŏ which is what the modern English word Korea is derived from. This kingdom stood from 918 through 1392 when Koryŏ was renamed Chosŏn. Chosŏn was ruled by the Yi family from 1392 until the Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910 (Seth, 2016a, pp. 54, 83). In 1897, King Gojong proclaimed the rise of the Korean Empire with the goal of freeing Korea from its domination by China, Japan, and Russia. He hoped that this course of modernization and independence would bring stability.
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