In the last half of the 1990s, he was sent to two different schools in Switzerland, where his mother was secretly being treated for breast cancer, ultimately to no avail. The first of these was the International School of Berne, in Gümligen, and the second was the Liebefeld Steinhölzli school, near Bern. At the latter, he was introduced to his teenage classmates as “Un Pak,” the son of a North Korean diplomat.

He understandably struggled in classes taught in German and English.

He assumed power when Kim II died, in December 2011, and at around the same time he was wed, in an arranged marriage, to Ri Sol Ju, a former cheerleader and singer about five years his junior.

Kim slowly pulls the country out of its Dark Age and lives a long life, overseeing decades of moderate prosperity and perhaps cracking open the door to more domestic freedom and better relations with the West.
The problem with best-case scenarios is that reality usually intrudes. One of the most unsettling things about Kim Jong Un is his tendency to act unpredictably, even bizarrely. It may be, as Pinkston maintains, that Kim is “totally on top of it” and that “people underestimate him at their peril.” But it’s also true that he inhabits a kind of never-never land.

The most hopeful reading of Kim’s rule so far is that maybe—maybe—he is on the path to becoming a relatively benevolent dictator, at least by the grim standards of his father and grandfather. When North Korea-watchers talk about a best-case scenario, it looks like this: Kim slowly pulls the country out of its Dark Age and lives a long life, overseeing decades of moderate prosperity and perhaps cracking open the door to more domestic freedom and better relations with the West.

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un used his talent, intelligence and deceptively hard work to become the only top-ranked military figure in the world without