The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - China No Longer Controls North Korea || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

To simply call North Korea a Chinese puppet state doesn't capture the complexity of that relationship. To fully understand it, we must look back at three generations of the Kim dynasty, the current partnerships with other powers, and Kim Jong Un's aspirations. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3PQgjTd

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 8th of June and the big news is the chairman Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China is in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. Fiumits, fun stuff. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to give you the rundown of what's brought us to this point and what the status of Chinese North Korean relations are because it's not what most people think. If you go back in time to the early Cold War years, we had a guy by the name of Kim Il-sung, who was kind of the grandfather, well, literally the grandfather of the current Kim, who's in charge in Pyongyang.

Anyway, Kim Il-sung is the guy who founded North Korea as a state. He fought the Japanese during World War II, had lots of gravitas, good military leader. But then he ran this hermit kingdom, as people like to call it. with a ideology called Jusha, which basically translates into self-reliance. And so while the entire world advanced into the industrial age, North Korea just kind of stalled. Really famously, Pyongyang is really the only city in the country until recently that has even had electricity. And if you were an affiliate of the Kim dynasty, you got food. And if you weren't, life kind of sucked.

That continued on until the Cold War ended. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, Kim Il-sung realized that the writing was on the wall. And that the Jusha ideology just wasn't going to work in a world that was globalizing without the ongoing payments that came in from the Soviets. So according to the best collective guesses of the world's intelligence agencies, and by that I mean American, Japanese, Chinese, South Korean, British, French, French, and others, Kim Il-sung had invited himself to Seoul, to meet with the then-South Korean leader, another Kim, and to talk about reunification in a practical sense. As the story goes, within a couple of days, the generals who had fought with Kimel-sung back during World War II killed him because they knew that in any version of a reunified Korea, their jobs would be gone.

Because if you're not fighting the South, then the Army doesn't need to be as big. And if the South and North and integrate, you don't need as many generals. And the Southern generals certainly had more military expertise with better equipment. Anyway, so they off to the guy. And that left Kim Il Sung's son, Kim Jong-il. He's the crazy one. The one always looks like this. Yeah, left him in charge.

and Kim Jong-il was a best way to phrase this. Well, he was bat-shit crazy. He had been educated in North Korea, grew up drinking the Kool-Aid and the ideology, and didn't really understand how the rest of the world worked. So he's most infamous for leading a series of agricultural reforms

that ended up triggering mass famine and killing two million people and gutting what little hydropower the country had. And as the story goes, the generals who had oft his dad were like, oh, shit, that's totally not what we meant to happen. We've got to make sure that the next generation isn't like this. So they sent the third generation of kids who were only now teenagers out into the wider world to learn how the world actually works. And Kim Jong-un, who is the current leader, the son of Kim Jong-il and the grandson of Kim Il-sung, was actually in Switzerland, in middle school in high school. school. Anywho, Kim Jong-il, the crazy one, deliberately got bad medical care on the orders of the

military, and eventually died relatively young, which meant that Kim Jong-un, at the tender age of, I think it was 23 or 26 at the time, got recalled from his studies to basically run the country. And that set up a really interesting power dynamic. On the one hand, you had these generals who knew that modernization was inevitable, some degree of openness with the South was inevitable. They just didn't want to happen on their watch because they didn't want to lose their prospects and their wealth and their position. And then you had Kim Jong-un whose father had been killed by these guys and who's, or mistreated from his point of view and whose grandfather had been killed by these guys. He's like, I really hate these guys. So you had this interesting situation where the crazies of the second generation were still around.

And the iron-clad dictators of the first generation were still around. And then you had this kid alone who suddenly was the nominal leader. And so what happened over the next decade is Kim Jong-un, he's the chubby guy, learned how the system worked. And whenever he had an opportunity, he offed one of his father's generation. So we had a guy in Singapore who got hit with some sort of poisonous nerve agent. My personal favorite are the Minister of Railways who got run over by a train. And a defense attache who accidentally got shot by an anti-aircraft gun. I mean, just imagine the mechanics of that.

Anyway, thinning out the crazy generation and waiting for the first generation to die. Well, folks, it's been 80 years since World War II. Anyone who fought with Kim Il-sung in World War II is now long gone, and the generation that rose to power in the 50, 60s, and 70s are mostly gone as well. So it's just Kim Jong-un now. Now, let's bring that from 10 years ago to roughly the present. Most people assume that North Korea is just the yipping rabid chihuahua on the end of the leash controlled by Beijing. And under Kim Jong-il, the crazy one, there was something to that.

But that's not the case anymore. North Korea has an independent streak and is looking for, and has been looking under Kim Jong-un for any sort of leverage, not just to strengthen his personal power and that of his family and entrenched the regime in North Korea, but more importantly to make sure that Beijing can't just dictate terms. So if you go back to 2017, 2018, 2019, That's when Kim Jong-un started expressing a degree of independence that Beijing really didn't like. There was a series of bilateral meetings between Chairman Xi and China and Kim Jong-un. Most of these meetings happened in Beijing. And basically, to sum it up, it was Chairman Xi, who's a short dude, standing or sitting with a boost

so he could lecture down to Kim Jong-un and lecture the Wayward Province about how things were supposed to be. And the Chinese citizenship ate that up because it made China look important, but it just infuriated Kim Jong-un. And after one of those summits, he's basically on his train coming back. He doesn't fly. Coming back to North Korea. And he directs his staff to call up Donald Trump, who had been musing about maybe having a summit. And he basically said, call Donald Trump, tell him the summit's on. Never going to talk to these fuckers again. And over the course of the next few months, we had two summits between the younger Kim and Donald Trump, one in Singapore and one in Vietnam. Now, that's from the American point of view where it ended.

Trump didn't really read the briefing materials, as we know now, that the State Department and the CIA provided to him. And after the second meeting, which I believe was in 2019, you basically just moved on to other topics. And from the point of Kim Jong-un, who felt that he had... really put his neck out there, he was, he was pissed. And so not that American, North Korean relations have ever been great, but if there was a chance for a break, that was the moment and the moment passed, which meant Kim Jong-un and North Korea all of a sudden were kind of out of luck. If the Americans were not paying enough attention to cut a deal, and he was still worried about whatever was going on in China and them dominating North Korea, there really wasn't

anybody else left, because the Russians had fallen. far, enter the Ukraine war. Because all of a sudden, in 2022, the Russians found themselves just as isolated from international markets as North Korea was. And all of a sudden, Kim Jong-un is like, hey, there's an opportunity here for us. And if you fast forward another year, suddenly we've got over 10,000 North Koreans at a time fighting in places like Kursk in the Russian-Ukrainian borderlands and ultimately in Ukraine itself. and we have decades of built-up supplies, stockpiles of North Korean artillery that is being sent by the trainload to the Russian front with Ukraine.

And at one point, it's not in that way anymore, but at one point, well over one-third of the artillery shots that the Russians were using were sourced from North Korea. And that partnership has continued to a degree. There's still North Korean troops, there's still North Korean weapons, and then exchange. the North Koreans are getting Russian technology, most notably intercontinental ballistic missiles. Because remember, Russia, even in its weakened state, is still a space power. And so you could argue that while they haven't tested it, the North Koreans could easily launch an ICBM and strike anywhere in the continental United States now.

That's all, water under the bridge. Anyway, bottom line is that Kim Jong-un and North Korea found they're out in Moscow. And while being friends with Moscow these days doesn't get you a whole lot. It certainly is an interesting piece of leverage to use against Beijing, which brings us to today. Chairman Xi is in Pyongyang meeting with the younger Kim for only the second time that he's actually been to North Korea. And the entire topic of the talks is China's effort to rake North Korea back into the Chinese. Chinese sphere instead of being in the Russian sphere. The North Koreans, Kim Jong-un specifically, have long been just as allergic about cutting deals

with the Chinese as they have with the Americans and everyone else. So if Xi is going to actually get this, he's going to have to offer quite a bit, especially when you consider that the normal goalposts for bilateral relations, economic aid, technological aid, money, energy, the North Koreans are really getting everything that he could need right now from the Russians. So for China to get back into the position where they're the dominant external power in North Korea, it's not just that it would have to offer a lot more, but they'd have to offer it without strings. And from China's point of view, that kind of defeats the point, because China wants a regime it can control. That, all of that

is kind of piece one. Piece two is that Kim Jong-un has done more to change the strategic position of North Korea just this year than any leader in North Korea has done since its formation at the end of the Korean War, beginning of the Korean War. He's changed the Constitution so that North Korea now defines itself as an independent state that is not seeking reunification with the South. One of the polite fictions slash aspirational goals of both Pyongyang and Seoul has, been that the division of the Korean peninsula was imposed by outsiders, namely the Soviet Union, the United States. And at some point, they would really like to be reunified into a single entity.

Now, there's a billion details as to how that might happen, and nobody agrees on any of it. Because, you know, who's in charge, for example. I mean, the South Korean population is twice the size of the north, that it's a first world technocracy, much of North Korea is still pre-industrial. If it was a straight-up merger, it's obvious who would be in charge. And if there's one thing that Kim Dynasty cares about, it's regime preservation, because that's their power. Anyway, the official position of North Korea now has shifted that reunification is completely off the agenda.

It's an independent state. It does not seek union. It's still hostile to the South, still hostile to Japan and the United States. But it's no longer even retortical. aiming for state merger, which means it really has come of age as a wild card in international affairs. It's playing the Russians and getting a lot of really advanced tech from their point of view, at the low cost of just a few thousand troops that just get massacred. The Chinese see it as an unknown that they can't manage, which I personally find delightful. It's got

fairly reliable, short and medium-range ballistic missiles, and a fairly advanced nuclear program for a state that has under 30 million people, and all of South Korea and all of Japan are in the easy hit zone. And now, courtesy of their alliance with the Russians, it probably could nuke the United States, or at least send the missile, whether we could intercept it or not as an open question. So it's a different North Korea now than what we've been dealing with before. And The first world leader to go there and get a taste of it is Chairman Gee of China, and he's there right now. And from what few communiques have been released so far,

reading between the lines, it's clear that Xi is not having a good time of it, which I also find delightful. But with the one caution that if an authoritarian madman like Xi doesn't care for the new North Korea, imagine what everybody else is going to think. So this is good for drama and good for shaking up the strategic map, but it is something that is gestating at the edge of Asia in the heart of some of the most dynamic economies in the world in a way that's going to cause a lot of pain in the not too distant future.