When Kim Jong Il succeeded his father as leader of North Korea six years ago, he was lampooned by the rest of the world as a pudgy playboy who drank cognac while his countrymen barely subsisted, many of them reduced to eating roots. He favored James Bond and Daffy Duck in his collection of some 20,000 videotapes. He was a lush who once showed up at a meeting so drunk that his father had him thrown out. Nobody had heard him utter anything more than "Glory to the heroic Korean People's Army!" He had a Howard Hughes-like obsession about germs, was so paranoid that he would have rivals purged, so ruthless that he was accused of masterminding a plot to assassinate a South Korean President and to down an airliner. He wore shoe lifts.
The portrait created by these rumors and suspicions--North Korea's Dear Leader was unpredictable and goofy, and because he was thought to control a nuclear weapons program on one side of the world's most fortified border, he was dangerous. Fast forward to last week's summit in Pyongyang. When Kim Jong Il, still pudgy, and still wearing a poufy black hairdo, reached out with both hands to welcome South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the makeover of the madman image was complete. The 58-year-old leader of the world's most mysterious country had been transformed into a fellow who could crack jokes at his own expense, banter about kimchi recipes and show proper Confucian deference to the elder President Kim. "I am aware that one of your legs is not very comfortable," he remarked to his 74-year-old South Korean counterpart during the limousine drive from the airport to the capital. Clasping Kim Dae Jung's hands in a surprisingly touching show of warmth, he told the President, "I hope you stay here comfortably."
If there was one thing that most Korea watchers felt they knew for sure, it was that the comfort of a South Korean President was not on the list of things Kim Jong Il cared about. But that was the old Kim. The new one is a masterwork of political repositioning. Part spin, part smarts and all opportunism, Kim 2.0 is an impressive creation, an example of a 180-degree image shift that was achieved in near Internet time--hardly something anyone would have expected from Pyongyang, where cell phones are as uncommon as Cokes.
But that's precisely what the world got--much to the astonishment of the White House, which just weeks ago had been using Kim as Example A of a "rogue dictator" while trying to convince Russia of the value of a missile-defense shield. It's too early to be sure that the new Kim is for real. The makeover, though, does seem to have legs. It's not really that Kim is such a different guy--his charmingly opportunistic streak once helped him extort billions from foreign governments in exchange for capping his nukes program. It's that his interests--and the world around him--have changed for good.