Dec 12th 2021LOOKING ACROSS the Han river estuary from the Aegibong peace park observatory in Gimpo near Seoul, South Korea’s capital, North Korea is just a short paddle away. Less than a mile from the observatory, North Koreans can be seen tending to fields, driving lorries along the road to a small quarry and riding bicycles past a cluster of low-rise blocks of flats not far from the river bank. If any of them took a moment to peer back the other way, they could see gaggles of South Korean school children trying to get a closer look at their village through the row of binoculars erected at the viewpoint.Attempting to cross the border has always been ill-advised, whether by land or water. But the sense of closeness that comes from looking out over the river in Gimpo has rarely been more deceptive than today, ten years into the rule of Kim Jong Un, the North’s millennial dictator. The latest hope for opening and reform was dashed when Mr Kim and Donald Trump, then America’s president, failed to come to an agreement to exchange relief from sanctions for arms control at their final meeting in Vietnam in 2019. Over the past two years, ever more of the few remaining links between North Korea and the outside world have been severed as Mr Kim has instituted one of the world’s strictest border closures in response to the coronavirus pandemic. What little information still trickles out is hardly encouraging: there are reports of severe food shortages and political purges, even as North Korea’s state media rebuff any diplomatic overtures from America or the South.When Mr Kim took over following the death of his father on December 17th 2011, such a grim state of affairs did not seem inevitable. Some observers at the time expected the regime to collapse within weeks or months, to be followed by economic opening under Chinese supervision. Others, such as this newspaper, doubted that Mr Kim would develop an appetite for serious reform but still assumed that he would not be able to resist pressure for change entirely. Both elites and ordinary North Koreans were increasingly cynical about the power of the state after witnessing its inability to provide for them during the famine in the 1990s.For the first few years of Mr Kim’s tenure, such predictions seemed sound. In a speech on the centennial of his grandfather’s birth, in 2012, the freshly-anointed dictator laid out his plan to build an “economically powerful state” and “improve the people’s livelihood”. He reformed laws governing agriculture and state-owned enterprises to allow a degree of private enterprise in the economy, invited outside experts to advise him on the establishment of new special economic zones, awarded official status to hundreds of informal markets and largely turned a blind eye to petty wheeling and dealing. He embarked on a binge of “socialist construction”, filling Pyongyang with futuristic skyscrapers, water parks and a dolphinarium. He also set to work on new tourist infrastructure elsewhere in the country, notably at his summer retreat in Wonsan on the east coast. Trade with China picked up, driven largely by a new class of quasi-entrepreneurs operating from within state enterprises.As a result, things visibly improved—albeit from a low level and mostly in the capital, where those with spare cash could enjoy new coffee shops, foreign restaurants and well-stocked supermarkets. Refugees from North Korea arriving in the South began to report different reasons for leaving the country, suggesting both economic improvements in parts of North Korea beyond Pyongyang and a growing awareness of what life was like in the outside world. “In earlier years people would say they were fleeing to survive; now most say they fled for freedom,” says Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, an NGO in Seoul that helps North Koreans reach the South. “His father and grandfather built their identity around conflict, suffering and sacrifice,” says Jenny Town of the Stimson Centre in Washington DC. “He didn’t have that, so promising people a better life was an alternative way to build legitimacy.”But the boundaries of that “better life” have been gradually curtailed in the more recent years of Mr Kim’s reign. The point of building a “prosperous state” was to make his rule more stable. It did not extend to allowing a proper market economy or granting more political freedoms to ordinary people. It has been accompanied by heightened repression inside the country, more control at the borders and the acceleration of the nuclear programme started by Mr Kim’s predecessors, notably through several tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles which North Korea claims are capable of reaching America. The economic sanctions imposed on the North by the international community to slow down the nuclear programme, which were strengthened in 2017 after the ICBM tests, left Mr Kim with little money to advance other goals beyond building his arsenal.Mr Kim’s attempts to resolve that contradiction in 2018 by courting Mr Trump and Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, ended in failure. Mr Kim miscalculated during his final meeting with Mr Trump in Hanoi in February 2019. He demanded comprehensive sanctions relief from America in return for dismantling Yongbyon, an important but ageing nuclear facility. Mr Trump rebuffed him, causing the summit to collapse.That might have been manageable, since Mr Kim’s other diplomatic overtures in this period, notably towards China, had slightly more success and ensured a steady flow of trade, both legal and illicit. But when the coronavirus pandemic struck, Mr Kim’s response put paid to that, too. The border with China has been closed for the best part of two years. It is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, though there have recently been rumours of a limited opening. Tourism is moribund. Most foreign diplomats have left the country. Aid organisations have not had access for nearly two years, making it especially hard to discern what is going on in the country.There are hints of increasing distress, with food running low and even the privileged in Pyongyang suffering shortages. Mr Kim himself has admitted that the food situation is “tense” and urged his people to prepare for hardship. But he has also increased penalties for smuggling and for watching foreign entertainment, such as South Korean dramas.There is little indication that things will soon improve. Mr Kim continues to rebuff offers of aid and even covid vaccines. Attempts by South Korea and America to revive a spirit of detente, for instance by negotiating a formal end to the Korean war, have gone unanswered. Ten years into his rule, the “economically powerful state” Mr Kim set out to build is looking rather feeble. He may console himself with the continuing growth of his nuclear arsenal. His people have no such luxury.