Kim's new military threats -- declaring the end of his testing freeze and pledging to "shock" the U.S. over sanctions -- could also jeopardize what diplomatic space he has secured for himself. Besides provoking Trump, Kim could anger Chinese President Xi Jinping if he raises the threat of another war on the Korean Peninsula or conducts tests that send radiation wafting across the border. Kim had already begun to escalate tensions since Trump walked out of their last formal summit in February, carrying out a record-breaking barrage of ballistic missile tests last year. His speech promised to soon debut a "new strategic weapon," which non-proliferation experts say could be anything from a nuclear-armed submarine to a more advanced form of intercontinental ballistic missile. Even though sanctions have helped push North Korea's economy into its worst downturn since a historic famine in the 1990s, the regime has continued to make nuclear advances. Kim might believe he has found enough holes in the sanctions regime to push off negotiations with the U.S., a former UN official told Bloomberg News in November. The renewed emphasis on self-reliance -- a concept central to the "Juche" ideology of Kim's grandfather, Kim Il Sung -- may help stoke nationalistic fervor to ride out a prolonged recession. Still, any demand for belt-tightening risks fomenting dissent, especially among Pyongyang elites who have reaped many of the gains from Kim's experiments with market reforms. Kim has gone back and forth on the need for austerity since vowing shortly after taking power in 2011 that the people would "never have to tighten their belt again."
"It's a gamble," Robert Carlin, a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation who has made more than 20 trips to North Korea, told reporters Tuesday. "Kim has been, in effect, loosening -- helping them loosen -- the belt over the past several years, and now to tighten it up again is going to cause, at least cause grumbling, if not worse, among some in the population, maybe some in the leadership." That danger may help explain recent efforts by North Korea's omnipresent state propaganda machine to portray Kim as a commanding figure in the mold of his revered grandfather. Marathon state television coverage of Kim's speech, which he delivered seated behind a large and ornate wooden desk raised above the gathering, demonstrated his control over the ruling party. That was followed by the release of a video Thursday of Kim riding a white horse through the snows of Mt. Paektu, a sacred site where the regime says Kim Sung Il led guerrillas against the Japanese. In the speech, Kim indicated that sanctions have forced him to shift his approach. "Nothing has changed between the days when we maintained the line of simultaneously pushing forward the economic construction and building of nuclear force and now when we struggle to direct our efforts to the economic construction due to the U.S.'s gangster-like acts," Kim told party leaders. "There is no need to hesitate with any expectations of the U.S. lifting sanctions."
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