When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently broached the subject of Kim Jong Il's succession, she was criticized for speaking about a topic some thought was better left untouched. Clinton should indeed have refrained from talking about Kim's current health and future successor-- not because the subject should be taboo but because it is probably irrelevant.
North Korea's behavior and nuclear ambitions are best understood by looking not at its admittedly bizarre leader but at its circumstances. Consider that there are 26,000 invasion-ready U.S. troops in South Korea, with 33,000 more in Japan. A leadership succession won't change that -- or Pyongyang's desire to be relevant in the world. North Korea's international demeanor most likely will remain intact whenever Kim's successor takes charge.
When makers of foreign policy personify states, they view their opponents' moves as evidence of who they are, not of the pressures they face. This is the essential logic of what psychologists call the "fundamental attribution error," a cognitive bias whereby people attribute the actions of others to their dispositions rather than to their situations. If the error enters into thinking about U.S. foreign policy, it means our assessments of future threats could be wildly off. By at first framing the "war on terrorism" as a hunt for Osama bin Laden, for example, President Bush shifted attention from Al Qaeda as a whole and left himself vulnerable to criticism that, with Bin Laden still at large, his war was a failure.
Putting stock in individual leaders is usually a bad idea, and it was one of the Bush administration's fatal flaws. To Bush, an ally was trustworthy because its leader was, and an enemy was only as devious as its leader. Shortly after he entered office, he famously answered a reporter's question about whether he trusted then-Russian President Vladimir Putin by saying, "I was able to get a sense of his soul." As the U.S.-Russian relationship deteriorated over time, Bush's confidence appeared misplaced.
When it came to Saddam Hussein, the animosity was personal. "After all," Bush said in 2002, "this is the guy who tried to kill my dad." Because the U.S.-Iraq dispute morphed into the Bush-Saddam dispute, the decision to go to war was stripped of a rationality that perhaps would have called for more restraint.
