Kim Jong Un's Beijing Summit Marks His Rise from Isolated Pariah to Confident International Player

On Wednesday, Kim Jong Un walked onto the rostrum above Tiananmen Square between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The three men moved shoulder to shoulder, pausing along the way to shake hands with veterans of World War II. The occasion was a massive military parade marking 80 years since the war's end. Xi had invited 26 foreign leaders, and by most accounts Kim drew the most attention among them.

It was one of the largest international stages of his 14 years as North Korea's leader, and he appeared at ease on it. He laughed with Xi and Putin, pledged lasting support to Moscow in its war against Ukraine, and worked to firm up a relationship with China that has at times been shaky. He also brought his young daughter, who may be a possible successor. Kim was due to return home Friday.

The contrast with his early years is stark. He came to power after his father's death in 2011, and in the violent, uncertain period that followed, some analysts doubted the inexperienced young man could survive threats to his rule. Multilateral diplomacy with a crowd of heads of state was unthinkable. Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said Kim now looks like a seasoned realist and political survivor who has added calculated diplomacy to a toolkit that already included human rights violations and nuclear missile development.

The limits are real. No leaders from the United States, Western Europe or Japan attended the parade. Kim has not appeared at the United Nations or at established Western global forums. And the leaders who were in Beijing showed little interest in pressing him about human rights abuses or his nuclear weapons. Still, the week stands out as a watershed in how he uses diplomacy to advance the aims of a largely secluded country.

The change began in 2018, when Kim met US President Donald Trump in Singapore, the first of three encounters. They met again in Vietnam in 2019 and later held talks on the border between the two Koreas. These were the first summits between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader. They did not halt the country's decades-long pursuit of nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them, which have drawn harsh international sanctions. Critics said Trump helped turn Kim from pariah into a legitimate dialogue partner. Jeff Kingston of Temple University Japan said the meetings gifted Kim the legitimacy he craves, and that Kim will keep using Trump to gain attention and seek aid, an old formula for the dynastic regime. Kim also traveled to Russia twice: to Vladivostok in April 2019 to meet Putin, and in September 2023 for another meeting at a space facility.

His predecessors traveled very differently. Kim Il Sung, the founder, was more adventurous, but Kim Jong Il avoided flying and made roughly a dozen trips abroad in 17 years, nearly all by armored train to China. He was on a train when he died in 2011. Experts believe the earlier rulers shunned gatherings of many heads of state partly because of propaganda that cast them as peerless, and partly because of international condemnation of their nuclear ambitions. Trips to China were another matter: Beijing supplies the North with everything from fuel to shrimp chips and is its main link to the outside world by air and rail. Kim Jong Un still rides the bullet-proof green train, and this trip went to Beijing, but little else resembles the old pattern.

That dependence on China is a vulnerability, which is one reason Kim has widened his circle. Seeing a chance to help a heavily sanctioned and isolated Russia, he sent thousands of North Korean troops and large quantities of military equipment to fight Ukrainian forces, in return for economic and military assistance.

The open question is what this means for talks with Washington over his nuclear and missile programs. Trump has repeatedly signaled he wants to talk, and North Korea has rejected those offers. Kim has conducted far more weapons tests than his father or grandfather, enduring condemnation and crippling sanctions, apparently convinced that nuclear arms alone guarantee his nation's survival. Koh Yu-hwan, former president of South Korea's Korean Institute for National Unification, said Kim has stepped onto the stage with the confidence of a strategic power and has been treated accordingly. If Beijing gave him added leverage, any test of it would come in a negotiation that has not yet begun.