NewDeadly purge of Jang could usher in greater instability in North Korea

Kim Jong-il's death in December 2011 made his brother-in-law Jang Song-thaek the most powerful man in North Korea, the alleged puppetmaster of the pudgy, giggling boy now on the throne. Two years later, state media announced Jang's execution for an implausibly long and lurid list of crimes, the most heinous being conspiracy to usurp his nephew and rule the country himself.

Facing the murk of Pyongyang politics, we resort to speculation as to what went wrong for Uncle Jang and what it shows. Could it be that Kim Jong-un has finally rid himself of a constraint he chafed under - or rather that a rival has neutralised his greatest champion and protector? Does the purge bode well for the regime's stability, demonstrating that a ruthless young Kim is consolidating power and proving shrewder than a cynical world expected - or does it bode ill, signifying elite conflict so intense that it has spilled into the open and turned lethal? Should we read the purge as a sign of Kim Jong-un's confidence - or might he have overreached?

Such speculation about the causes of the purge - about what it signifies - are a dead end for now. Nobody outside North Korea knows. Nobody can. Even the most seasoned North Korea hands are split on the verdict, so if the rest of us are to believe the experts then we will have to flip a coin. But, facing uncertainty and high stakes, prudence demands that we prepare for the worst.

What if, instead of taking the purge as our end point and looking backwards to guess at explanations, we instead start with what we know and look forward? Take the purge not as an indicator of risk but as a source of it. We can perhaps speculate more helpfully about the purge's effects, if not its causes.

What we know for sure is that, for the first time in decades, one of the country's most senior leaders has been humiliated before the nation and reportedly killed. What consequences might flow from this development alone?

Foremost, it will be interpreted as a precedent that implies nobody is safe. It throws out the unwritten rules of court politics and gives the country's topmost elite reason, in principle, to fear for their lives. This alone raises an ominous possibility - that powerful people may be put in positions where they feel they have nothing to lose from such desperate measures as conspiracy or defection.

In particular, Jang's men, who are probably numerous, senior and experienced, will perceive a lethal threat and may resort to extreme pre-emptive measures to protect themselves. Whoever is now running the show (not necessarily Kim) will have no choice but to purge them to pre-empt their pre-emption. Regardless of who moves first, the situation is unstable.