Kimg Jong Un Reuters
On his birthday on January 8th, when he may have turned 32, North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Un, could bask in the cowed admiration of his benighted people.

Abroad, few were wishing him many happy returns. North Korea's old nemesis, America, has tightened sanctions against it. Even China, the Kim dynasty's longtime protector, is witnessing a public debate about whether to abandon its awkward ally.

And perhaps most galling of all, millions of people around the world have downloaded "The Interview", a satirical film in which Mr Kim is mocked, sobs pathetically on live television and suffers the indignity of his head dissolving into flames. Even the deadly earnest New Year's Day speech on television by the real Mr Kim provoked titters in cyberspace, where there was more interest in his latest grooming feature (a drastic curtailment of his eyebrows) than in his words.

David Goldman/AP
Just because Mr Kim runs a paranoid, delusional despotism, does not mean that the outside world is not out to get him. And of late he has had particular reasons to worry. As Mr Kim's government portrays them, the new American sanctions, directed at North Korea's illicit arms-export business, are merely intended to add weight to a spurious charge: that the regime ordered the hacking of Sony Pictures' computer systems and the threats of violence should it distribute "The Interview".

Propagandists have even been able to cite Western cyber-security experts, who cast doubt on North Korea's guilt. But even if North Korea was, as the Americans insist, the source of the cyber-attacks, it would have felt it was acting in self-defence.

The plot of "The Interview", involving an attempt to assassinate Mr Kim, must seem less than fanciful to his advisers. Among a rarefied elite with access to the internet, they will have watched the YouTube video of a retired American general, John Macdonald, with ten years' service on the peninsula, ruminating at a symposium about geopolitical strategy last year on the failure of American North Korean policy. He listed the assassination of Kim Jong Un as a policy to have in your "kitbag".

screenshot/"The Interview"

"I'm only presenting options," he protested. But he expressed an exasperation that is shared by many: "A nation...with one of the most failed economies in the world, run by a crime family, is a major irritant between two of the most powerful nations in the world. We've got to do something about that."

It is not just soldiers who think like this. Mr Kim's circle will also have read last month's piece in the Wall Street Journal by Richard Haass, a former senior diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank. Mr Haass cited the danger North Korea poses as a cyber-vandal, an unauthorised nuclear power, a possessor of a large conventional military force and a onetime sponsor of terrorism.

He concluded: "Only one approach is commensurate with the challenge--ending North Korea's existence as an independent entity and reunifying the Korean peninsula." Others disagree with Mr Haass's prescription, and neither he nor Mr Macdonald represents official American policy--which is still one of "strategic patience", hoping to avoid crisis and confrontation and that economic and political isolation will eventually force North Korea into talks on its nuclear programme. But to paranoid totalitarians, that such ideas are freely aired must seem menacing enough.

Worse still is the obvious Chinese huffiness towards Mr Kim. The Chinese government never really got on with his father, Kim Jong Il. But at least he did not execute China's main interlocutor, as Kim Jong Un did, when in December 2013 he disposed of his mentor and uncle by marriage, Jang Song Taek.

In office, the younger Kim has never been invited to China. But Park Geun-hye, South Korea's president, is welcome there and gets on famously with China's leader, Xi Jinping. And the value of the North Korean alliance is being publicly questioned in China. Last month a retired general, Wang Hongguang, wrote in Global Times, a Communist Party daily, that, in the future, China need not clean up North Korea's "mess". And, he added, "if an administration is not supported by the people, collapse is just a matter of time."

Again, that is just one Chinese view. Other theorists in China argue that, though cussedly unmalleable, an independent North Korea remains an essential buffer between China and the American-garrisoned South. China is stuck with it. Perversely, an incident last month in which a North Korean soldier attempting to defect crossed the Chinese border and killed four people in the course of a burglary, may have strengthened this conservative Chinese view of North Korea: just think what might happen if the regime were allowed to collapse and millions were fleeing!

Mr Kim has few foreign friends. Russia's Vladimir Putin presumably knows how he feels and seems sympathetic. Russia keeps supplying oil, and Mr Kim has an invitation to make his first foreign trip as leader to Moscow in May. But Russia is probably more interested in using North Korea to demonstrate its ability to complicate life for America and its allies than in providing serious financial or other assistance.

Plucked To The Bone

So in his small-eyebrowed speech, Mr Kim was, by past standards, positively emollient, responding obliquely but positively to a South Korean offer of talks. He even suggested the possibility of a summit with Ms Park, though his government had once declared her to be "a despicable prostitute selling off the nation."

Yet a summit still seems unlikely. North Korea's survival has relied on playing America, China, Japan, the South and sometimes Russia off against one another. But for now the South, despite this week resuming modest humanitarian aid, is not ready to break ranks.

More broadly, the comforting calculation for North Korea's regime--that, painful though its existence is to its people and the outside world, its collapse would be worse--may not hold for ever in Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington.

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