In the North Korea watcher world, where access is scarce and status is conferred by proximity to power or time on CNN, vanity is more than a character flaw—it’s a vulnerability. For analysts, journalists, and policy wonks who dedicate their careers to decoding the Hermit Kingdom, reputation is currency.
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Not every state can, or should, try to understand every other state on its own. For small and medium-sized states like Australia or Canada, when it comes to deeply opaque regimes such as North Korea, pursuing direct analytical insight is an exercise in futility.
So, you completed your liberal arts degree and discovered there were no jobs. You enrolled in a master’s degree in international studies and at the halfway point with poor grades, realized there are still no jobs. What do you do?
Ideas in foreign and strategic policy are no longer formulated in academia and passed to the government in cheap lunchtime meetings or over stale coffee at poorly catered academic-government 1.5-track conferences.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the rules of phishing. It no longer relies on clumsy English or poorly spoofed addresses. Today, it’s powered by large language models (LLMs), social graph mining, and contextual mimicry.
Are North Korea Watchers just different? Or is there more to their distinct proclivities? We’ve all felt it before. At least, anyone who’s spent more than their fair share of time amidst North Korea Watchers, has felt it before. A disturbingly acute sense that not all is quite right.
Every North Korea Watcher sooner or later questions what they do.There’s the relentless routine of reading write-ups on North Korea, scanning academic dribble for insight, and dissecting the latest KCNA image. They see highly respected and feted North Korea Watchers rehashing the same crap year after year, and they know that their own ideas will never be heard beyond two graduate students and a dyslexic professor who ended up in the wrong room at an academic conference.
There are a small number of North Korean defectors who make it onto the global stage. Some of them, don’t just tell their stories—they tell the right kind of stories.
On Tuesday morning, North Korea watchers in Seoul awoke to the news that President Trump made a video call from the stage at the Commander in Chief Ball, and asked U.S. service members in South Korea a question - How’s Kim Jong Un?
