A leading North Korea watcher, Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul, has issued a stern warning on North Korea to the international community. “We are heading towards serious changes,” he believes, “and unfortunately nobody seems prepared.”

Hitherto reticent to predict disaster for the regime in Pyongyang, Lankov concludes in his piece for Asia Times last week, “Is the Dear Leader losing his grip?”, that the “once formidable manipulators” and “brilliant Machiavellians” in the North Korean leadership structure have “for some reason lost their ability to judge and plan,” and that this is likely to lead to changes with which the international community is ill-prepared to cope.

Lankov argues that two things provide proof this new weakness; the currency redenomination of late 2009, and the North’s negotiating tactics since the second nuclear test earlier the same year.

From the regime’s point of view, Lankov claims that the majority of last year’s currency reform measures were, though cruel and confiscatory, standard and well-tested moves which had been employed by socialist states on more than one previous occasion. However, the raising of the wages of state workers was an unprecedented, and moreover stupid, factor which, he believes, “doomed the entire affair from the start.”

Meanwhile, Lankov also believes that North Korea has been negotiating very poorly of late on a range of issues. If they had been slightly more careful last year, for example, Lankov asserts that, “a significant part of the U.S. establishment would still nurture the illusionary dream of ‘denuclearization through negotiations’.”

Instead, North Korea used both its trump cards, the second nuclear test and Taepodong-2 missile launch, in quick succession, and subsequently “showered Washington with especially bellicose rhetoric, even though the Barack Obama administration was initially relatively soft on the North Korean issue.”

The result, Lankov notes, was that “the US foreign policy establishment finally realized that North Korea would not surrender its nuclear program under whatever circumstances,” and concluded that if North Korea cannot be persuaded to that end, there is little point offering Pyongyang much in the way of incentives.

Since August, Lankov therefore believes, “North Korea has essentially begged to restart negotiations with the US and, especially, South Korea,” notably regarding inter-Korean tourist projects.

Lankov, like everyone else, is unable to decisively conclude why the North Korean government has suddenly started making “such weird and self-defeating policy decisions,” but he does assert that Kim Jong Il’s clear frailty is probably a factor, one which not only influences his own policy decisions, but also allows for a “growing rivalry between factions,” meaning that the North Korean leadership may be becoming disunited, with “rival groups pushing through their own agendas.”

Therefore, Lankov concludes carefully, “something unusual seems to be happening in Pyongyang and it's probably the time to think about the future a bit more seriously.”