Welcome to North Korea

A desire for innovative openness or simple soft power gestures? Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, a communist citadel sheltered behind its nuclear power, a ruthless dictatorship under international sanctions, will open to tourists from December. While it welcomed around 100,000 foreign visitors per year before Covid, it had closed its doors to them since then.

This reopening, which follows a modest resumption of air links, will be partial at first but could be extended. It will initially concern a city on the Chinese border: Samjiyon, Kim’s flagship project, a “model of a highly civilized mountain city” with modern hotels and ski slopes, next to the superb Mount Paektu, where his father Kim Jong-il is said to have been born. No doubt tourists will be taken care of and will not be asked questions, denounce communist lies, much less criticize the dictator…

As the country faces shortages, This opening may correspond to a desire to diversify one’s income and break one’s isolation.

But what kind of opening is this?

In February, several Russian tourists landed in Pyongyang on an organized tour. It was part of a dramatic rapprochement with Moscow. In June, a month after he went to Beijing to beg for more support for the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin was greeted like a king by Kim.

He signed with him “an agreement providing for mutual assistance in the event of aggression”. Enough to make South Korea, the United States, Japan and the Philippines shudder. A vast, opaque and multifaceted Russian aid: oil in exchange for thousands of Korean shells, and technical assistance for North Korean space research, in particular.

Far from the tourist showcase, the threat remains.

That of an unpredictable regime – even in the eyes of its great mentor, Beijing – which provokes the world with its missiles. Not to mention that the links continue to tighten between Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, Tehran… around an anti-Western Global South project. It would be wrong to minimize this challenge.