It must be nice to be a 27 year old 4 star general:

North Korea’s ailing leader Kim Jong Il has laid the groundwork for a transition of power to his youngest son, but it remains to be seen if the reclusive nuclear-armed regime will soften its combative stance toward the international community.

The impoverished nation has long used both carrots and sticks to get what it wants: offering dialogue and promises to dismantle its nuclear program to get aid, and when it runs into resistance, conducting missile and atomic tests and threatening to destroy rival South Korea.

Analysts see little prospect of that strategy changing, and on Wednesday, a top North Korean official told delegates to the United Nations that Pyongyang would continue to expand its nuclear arsenal in order to deter what it perceives as American and South Korean aggression in the region.

Despite such volatile rhetoric, some experts speculate that the North might start to seek a period of calm — after a turbulent past two years — to minimize confrontation with the outside world as it enters a time of transition in its top ranks.

This week’s elevation of Kim Jong Il’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un, to a four-star general and to a key position in the ruling communist party at a political convention signaled that the little-known 20-something is on track to eventually succeed his 68-year-old father, believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008. [Associated Press]

Really nothing new here but it always good to listen to what Andrei Lankov has to say:

Pyongyang has used its military assets and its unpredictability to get what it wants internationally in the past — a strategy it is likely to stick to.

“The best way to squeeze aid from the outside world is to use contradictions between the great powers and a bit of nuclear blackmail,” said Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korea at Seoul’s Kookmin University. “This is absolutely a rational policy, and it has worked quite fine for the last few decades, and I don’t see that they would ever consider changing it in the near future.”

Read the rest but some think that North Korea is going to lie low for a while to focus on the succession process. I don’t think they are likely to keep quiet for long but what does everyone else think?