The role of the U.S. and South Korea is to incentivize the merger of bottom-up market changes and elites’ questioning of the Kim leadership, said Kongdan Oh of the Council on Foreign Relations and its Korea Task Force.

This can be done by providing as much information about the outside world as possible through defectors and technology, she said.

“One of the problems of understanding North Korea is that a lot of people think that North Korea is unique. But, it’s not,” said Oh. Like any other dictatorial regime, she said that the Kims know how to use force,