SEOUL, South Korea — It’s good to be Kim, and as dictators go, Kim Jong-un is arguably sitting prettier today than either his late father, Kim Jong-il, or grandfather Kim Il-sung ever did.

On Friday, Mr. Kim will oversee celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Korean Workers’ Party. VIP guests are expected from China, Laos, Russia, Vietnam and elsewhere.

Having succeeded his father after his death in 2011, he is the third Kim to rule North Korea. He is jeered globally for his portliness, his tailoring and the over-the-top adulation he commands among his populace. However, he has been an effective leader.

Nationally, he has ruthlessly crushed dissent and put forward a potential successor. Globally, he has proved a savvy player and risk manager, sitting down with the U.S. and earning new support from Russia and China.

“I would say KJU is the most successful [‘supreme leader’] when it comes to enhancing his impoverished nation’s international status,” said Lee Sung-yoon, author of a biography of Mr. Kim’s sibling Kim Yo Jong called “The Sister.” “He has elevated his nation’s international status from an endlessly mockable pariah state to a de facto member of the “International Tyrannical Triumvirate.”

This referenced Mr. Kim’s prestige positioning alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during Beijing’s World War II 80th anniversary victory celebration last month.

Established as a communist satellite state of the Soviet Union, North Korea has mutated into a highly nationalist, ultramilitarized, third-generation absolute monarchy and one of America’s most intractable adversaries.

Though stalked by malnutrition and heavily sanctioned by the global community, North Korea has defied all predictions of collapse and become a poster child for dictatorial governance.

For decades, powerful state control mechanisms dug roots deep into the nation’s social and political spheres. There is no known internal opposition. No guerrilla force is massing over the borders.

Tightly insulated against outside influences, its citizens have minimal rights and freedoms. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2025 found North Korea to be the third most authoritarian state, behind Myanmar and Afghanistan.

Yet unlike ramshackle Afghanistan and war-ravaged Myanmar, nuclear-armed North Korea is stable — very stable.

The only hairline cracks in the facade are economic.

Because of the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, the abrupt ending of managed trade and devastating famines, Pyongyang’s state distribution system collapsed. It was replaced by semi-official market capitalism, which has led to widespread corruption that persists today.

There is no doubt who is in charge. Mr. Kim infamously had his own uncle, regime power broker Jang Song-thaek, executed in 2013. Experts are divided over whether that was because of Jang’s personal corruption or his dangerously close ties to China.

A message was sent. Jang was killed with a quadruple-barreled anti-aircraft gun, generating a new idiom: To “quad barrel” a task means to “do it to an extreme.”

Mr. Kim can promise his people something the leaders of Iran, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine — states that halted or failed to complete nuclear arms programs — cannot. His nuclear deterrent virtually guarantees their safety from overseas attack.

He inherited nuclear weapons from his father, Kim Jong-il, who first tested a device in 2006. In 2017, Kim Jong-un oversaw the test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile with the range to hit the continental United States.

That grabbed U.S. attention. In 2018 and 2019, Mr. Kim met with President Trump, which neither of his predecessors achieved. Mr. Trump failed to reach a deal but said he was impressed by Mr. Kim.

Last year, Mr. Kim signed a defense treaty with Mr. Putin. He deployed a division of elite troops to fight alongside Russian forces against Ukraine, earning his soldiers their first large-scale combat experience since the Korean War.

His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, started the war in 1950. It ended in a stalemate, with North Korea reduced to rubble by U.S. airpower by 1953. Unlike his grandfather’s disastrous adventure, the grandson’s war-making has not ruined his nation. Instead, North Korea has earned its diplomatic, technological and economic support from Russia.

China, competing against the U.S. and benefiting from the North Korean buffer state on its northeastern flank, is also backing Mr. Kim. Beijing has pointedly stopped referring to North Korean denuclearization.

“Kim has used very great skill and secured all [diplomatic] connections,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Kookmin University. Still, he warned that the ties with Moscow and Beijing are tenuous.

“Russia looks fine on paper, but in case of war, will it rush to save North Korea?” he asked. “Significant Chinese economic assistance is unlikely. It will be a money-losing enterprise.”

Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Kim’s administration has not killed a single South Korean. The last deadly clashes, a warship sinking and an island shelling, took place in 2010 under his ailing father.

Some experts believe they were the son’s initiatives. Since he assumed power, Kim Jong-un has seen no reason to repeat them.

“He sees no need to risk military provocations,” said Lee Hyun-seung, a North Korean defector and program strategist at the Global Peace Foundation. “Key reasons include no tangible gains — provocations yield little, as South Korea’s alliance with the U.S. ensures overwhelming retaliation — and Kim wishes to avoid regressing to the ‘Rocket Man’ era with Trump, prioritizing the diplomatic progress made through summits.”

Unlike his father and grandfather, Kim Jong-un has placed his child in the public gaze, and experts are unsure what to make of it. Peter Ward, a North Korean researcher at Seoul’s Sejong Institute, lists the theories behind teenager Kim Ju-ae’s public appearances.

“She is the successor, and he wants to get her out there — he was rushed as a successor and wants her to have a long runway — or he is not in good health, and so is worried about having someone in place when he snuffs it,” he said.

Putting his daughter forward at a young age also may “acclimatize patriarchal North Korea to a female supreme leader,” he said. Still, he warned: “He may be engaging in some kind of false flag deception and will not appoint her.”

Strangely, he has kept the Kim personality cult in check. Unlike his father and grandfather, he has not erected statues of himself in public spaces, nor is his portrait hung on walls nationwide.

That may simply be because of personal choice. He is the only ruling Kim with a Western education, having attended a Swiss boarding school.

“You would expect three portraits everywhere, you would expect ‘Kim Jong-un’ flowers to be developed and planted across the country, but we don’t see it,” Mr. Lankov said. “He is a person with personal ideas who may simply not want it. And he is the boss.”

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.