What’s Kim Jong Un’s Game?

Josh Rogin tries to understand North Korea’s reasons for hacking Sony:

For Kim, it’s all about himself and his ongoing effort to consolidate power. Therefore, his image is the one thing he cannot afford to take chances on.

“This is a signal of the fragility of Kim Jong Un’s rule,” said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and long time North Korea watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We can take a joke, Kim can’t because he doesn’t want his people to get any ideas. The last thing he wants is his subjects to see him as an object of ridicule, much less able to be assassinated.”

Max Fisher, on the other hand, contends that North Korea “wants us to see them as crazy, irrational, volatile — and dangerous”:

Kim Jong Un isn’t stupid: he knows that his weak, impoverished state is much weaker than the US and South Korea and Japan, all of whom would just love to see his government collapse. North Korea can only deter those enemies by being more threatening and dangerous; it will never be stronger, so it has to be crazier instead, always more willing to escalate. This convinces the US and other countries, even if they see through Kim’s game, that it’s just easier to stay away from North Korea than to risk provoking the country into another flamboyant attack. …

This strategy of portraying itself as crazy is remarkably effective at securing North Korea’s strategic goals. But it is also quite dangerous. By design, the risk of escalation is high, so as to make the situation just dangerous enough that foreign leaders will want to deescalate. And it puts pressure on American, South Korean, and Japanese leaders to decide how to respond — knowing that any punishment will only serve to bolster North Korean propaganda and encourage further belligerence. In this sense, the attacks are calibrated to be just severe enough to demand our attention, but not so bad as to lead to all-out war.

The Sony hack certainly demanded out attention. Though he fully admits that the hack was “a far smaller thing” that 9/11, Drum sees some similarities in terms of “bang for the buck”:

Despite what press reports say, it wasn’t really all that sophisticated. It was, to be sure, a step up from box cutters, but it’s not like North Korea tried to hack into a nuclear power plant or the Pentagon. They picked a soft target. In fact, based on press reports, it sounds like even in the vast sea of crappy IT security that we call America, Sony Pictures was unusually lax. Hacking into their network was something that probably dozens of groups around the world could have done if they had thought about it. And like al-Qaeda before them, North Korea thought about it. And they realized that a Sony Pictures hack, done right, could have an outsized emotional impact. Like 9/11, it was a brilliant example of using a relatively crude tool to produce a gigantic payoff.