Does Kim Jong-un want the ‘dotard’ or the ‘snob’ to win?

Donald Trump has made plenty of enemies in his time as president, but as the US president himself has claimed, he also gained an unlikely friend: Kim Jong-un. North Korea will be watching the result of next week’s US election closely. But would Pyongyang prefer four more years of an impulsive Trump, or a new Biden administration in its place?

Both leaders have not been immune from denigrations from the top of the North Korean regime. Trump may have been decried as a ‘dotard’, but his Democratic challenger has been degraded as a ‘low-IQ snob’ and an ‘imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being’; a ‘rabid dog’ who ‘must be beaten to death with a stick.’

Name-calling aside, while we may not have seen the usual election-year provocations from the North, the DPRK’s display of new ballistic missile technologies – intercontinental and submarine-launched – at the parade commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the Workers Party, earlier this month, made a clear point.