Jong-Il Kim dead, son takes over leadership..... Now what??

Nobody knows. Nobody even knows what became of Kim Jong Il's half-brother Kim Pyong Il. Some suspect he's been under house arrest in Pyongyang since last May. The only thing that seems certain is that Kim Jong Un has no power base whatsoever and is nothing more than a figurehead for the powerful Kim family/military players behind the scenes.

My biggest worries are, in order of possible appearance:

1. The manufacturing of a new military incident by the North Korean military, to signal the DPRK's continued ballsiness and the "Great Successor's" might. The possible, if unlikely, escalation of military conflict with the South.

2. Factional infighting leading to an open power play and a tipping point, i.e. rapid disintegration of official control, leading to a mass flight of refugees across Korean and Manchurian borders.

3. An intensification of nuclear blackmail rhetoric.


I strongly doubt that Kim's accession as a figurehead ("The Great Successor") will lead to any appreciable relaxation of (Stalinist-type) military and Korean Worker Party controls.

The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.