North Korea's Kim Jong Il is dead , now what?

Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il was an enigma, that western politicians could not truly understand, there are so many questions they didn’t have answers for; his place of birth, his age, his original name, why the North Korean propaganda machine says a swallow sang to the Koreans of his birth, there was a double rainbow over the mountain of his birthplace and why new star was born in the sky. Westerners also didn’t know him well enough to know when he said he would stop his nuclear program, that he wasn’t being honest with them. I am pretty confident that most western politicians also will not understand his son the twenty something year old new leader of the nation. Western leaders are already calling on him to make changes in the North, what they haven’t realized is he was chosen to lead because he is more like his father than his other siblings.

As I listen to analyst ponder the possible changes in the future of North Korea, it brings back memories of the days when I attended Yonsei University in Seoul South Korea 1990, my group of friends and I use to  debate the future of the Koreas while drinking soju, chewing on dry cuttlefish and smoking Korean cigarettes (the type with ginseng in them were my favorite, I thought it was healthier ha ha ha) as young foreign students we assumed this was apart of the Korean experience.

 

David Nealis in Seoul while attending Yonsei University 1990

Our debates would often go on late into the night, though we might have had different views on how the unification would happen, we all had high hopes that when Kim Il Sung passed on that his playboy son Kim Jong Il would fail and that unification would happen.

Flash forward 21 years and  Kim Jung Il has passed on as well, days later when the North Koreans released the news of his death the Kospi  fell about 5% and then closed  at -3.43%, minus any mischief from the North I believe it will quickly rebound to normal trading levels.

As Kim Jung-un solidifies his base of power it will be interesting to see which old guard North Korean generals suffer from the Pyongyang Flu this winter and what international incidents the North will cause to bribe the world into supplying them with aid.

There could be some exciting days ahead of us to trade the Korean Won and the Kospi.

My concern for the region is if Kim Jung-un is unable to keep control of the nation and that it will designate into chaos and the people of the North will suffer more than they have already.

It would be nice to fantasize about the unification of North and South Korea, but minus some catastrophic event, I do not see a reunification, actually I see the North becoming closer and closer to being a de facto semiautonomous zone of China.

In the months to come, I am sure that there will be more to blog about on this subject.