Make way for Kim Jong… who?

North Korea may be weird and whacky…but it’s almost never illogical.

As I had suspected, the rationale for North Korea’s recent missile firings and underground nuclear tests became more clear today with the announcement that Dear Leader Kim Jong-il has anointed his 26-year-old third son as his heir apparent.

In the midst of any tussle over succession and “regime change,” it is always the North Korea military that gets the final “veto” power…And it is vitally important for any dictator in North Korea to keep his generals happy.

So news that a succession order finally has been identified by Kim Jong-il –who recently suffered a stroke, and is in failing health –is completely consistent with the notion that the DPRK has its own internal rationale for ratcheting up its military aggressiveness just now. Show your military might and the people will united behind your choice when it comes to “regime change” — or so the thinking seems to be. And picking your own son might be controversial in some nations, but not in a nation that seems to run on dynastic succession.

So while the North Koreans have successfully rattled Asian cages in the last few weeks with their exploits, this announcement may actually offer the Obama administration and other national security experts a serious rationale to slow down and take the confrontational tone down a bit in the weeks to come.

We know very little about Kim Jong-un, the son of the nation’s leader and a former dancer, who died in 2004. The youngest son studied in Switzerland,  is said to speak English and German, and to be a fan of both Hollywood movies and the National Basketball Association.  Kim Jong-il’s former sushi chef, who wrote a tell-all memoir about his years working for the Dear Leader in Pyongyang, said Kim Jon-un was a “spitting image” of his father.

But since we (or anyone else in the West apparently)  has ever seen his photograph…we’ll have to wait a while to judge

N. Korea’s Kim taps 26-year-old son as successor – Yahoo News.