Unanswered Questions about North Korean Leadership

Please join the Korea Chair for a discussion on the North Korean leadership, including unanswered questions about Kim Jong-un's health, the succession plan, and new revelations about the Kim family.

Dr. Victor Cha will be joined by Dr. Sue Mi Terry of the Wilson Center, Dr. Soo Kim of RAND Corporation, Mr. Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation and Dr. John Delury of Yonsei University. 

Dr. Sue Mi Terry, the Director of the Asia Program and the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy, is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia. She has had an extensive career in the U.S. government, academia, and the private sector. Formerly a Senior Fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), she served as a Senior Analyst on Korean issues at the CIA (2001-2008), where she produced hundreds of intelligence assessments--including a record number of contributions to the President’s Daily Brief, the Intelligence Community’s most prestigious product.  She received numerous awards for her leadership and outstanding mission support, including the CIA Foreign Language award in 2008.  From 2008 to 2009, Dr. Terry was the Director for Korea, Japan, and Oceanic Affairs at the National Security Council under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.  In that role, she formulated, coordinated, and implemented U.S. government policy on Korea and Japan, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania.  From 2009 to 2010, she was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council.  In that position, she led the US. Intelligence community’s production of strategic analysis on East Asian issues and authored multiple National Intelligence Estimates.  From 2010 to 2011, Dr. Terry served as the National Intelligence Fellow in the David Rockefeller Studies Program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Dr. Soo Kim is a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation focused on national security and policy issues in the Indo-Pacific, the intelligence community and U.S. homeland security. Kim began her career in national security at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she served for seven years as a Korea analyst. She has also done stints at the Department of State and several CIA-led interagency task forces handling the DPRK nuclear and leadership crises. Kim most recently served in the Department of Homeland Security, focusing on strategy conceptualization and implementation and policy support. Kim served as an adjunct professor at American University, teaching courses in East Asian history and politics.

Mr. Bruce Klingner is Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation. His analysis and writing about North Korea, South Korea and Japan, as well as related issues, are informed by his 20 years of service at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. From 1996 to 2001, Klingner was CIA’s deputy division chief for Korea, responsible for the analysis of political, military, economic and leadership issues for the president of the United States and other senior U.S. policymakers. In 1993-1994, he was the chief of CIA’s Korea branch, which analyzed military developments during a nuclear crisis with North Korea.

Dr. John Delury is a professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS), where he serves as chair of the Program in International Cooperation. He is also chair of the undergraduate program in International Studies at Yonsei’s Underwood International College (UIC), and the founding director of the Yonsei Center on Oceania Studies. He is the author, with Orville Schell, of Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century, and is writing a book about US-China relations in the early Cold War. Based in Seoul since 2010, his articles can be found in journals such as Asian Survey, Late Imperial China, and Journal of Asian Studies, his commentaries appear in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Washington Post, and 38 North, and he contributes book reviews for the quarterly journal Global Asia, where he is associate managing editor. 

This is the third of three events for the CSIS Korea Chair 2022 Tipping Points project, which looks at potential variables for critical change in North Korea and the peninsula. This project is supported by CSIS and the Korea Foundation.