Who are the pop-up North Korea experts?

The opportunistic pundits who've built a career on being available to comment on any crisis, regardless of their actual knowledge of the subject.

The pop-up North Korea expert is a curious phenomenon. They appear out of nowhere whenever North Korea makes the headlines, offering their "insights" on everything from Kim Jong-un’s latest missile tests to his relationship with his sister. 

These are the same people who were pontificating on different geopolitical crises just a week ago, whether it was Ukraine, the Middle East, or China. Now, with North Korea in the spotlight, they switch gears as easily as they switch networks, offering opinions that are often little more than sound bites. In the modern media landscape, becoming a "North Korea expert" appears to be less about actual expertise and more about opportunistic positioning.

This revolving door of experts is not a coincidence, but a byproduct of how modern media operates. In an age of 24/7 news, where clickbait and sensationalism are prioritized, there’s little room for genuine analysis or deep expertise. The public needs to be fed a constant diet of simplified narratives, and networks need talking heads to fill airtime. 

Enter the opportunistic pundit—someone who has built a career on being available to comment on any crisis, regardless of their actual knowledge of the subject. The result is a kind of expertise-for-hire, where depth is sacrificed for ubiquity, and nuance is replaced by sensationalism.

Many of these so-called North Korea experts have a shallow understanding of the country, cobbled together from secondhand sources and cursory readings. They regurgitate the same tired tropes about the regime: the nuclear-armed dictator, the starving population, the oppressive police state. 

It’s a narrative that’s been carefully crafted over decades, but it only scratches the surface of the complexities that define North Korea. The country’s ideology, its internal power dynamics, its military strategies, and the very real human lives of its people are often reduced to the level of a cartoonish villain and his suffering subjects. It’s easy to understand why the media would gravitate toward this kind of narrative—it’s simple, dramatic, and easy to package—but it fails to offer any meaningful understanding of what’s really happening inside the country.

The reality is that genuine expertise on North Korea is hard to come by. To truly understand North Korea, one needs to dedicate years—if not decades—to studying the regime, its history, its ideology, and its geopolitical maneuvers. It requires fluency in the language, an understanding of the region’s cultural and historical context, and the ability to navigate the limited but valuable information that comes from defectors, analysts, and those rare few who have spent time in the country.

But why bother with all that when you can simply parrot the same talking points and ride the wave of media attention? After all, the networks don’t seem to care about real expertise—they care about filling airtime with opinions that fit their preferred narratives. This is how generalists, with little more than a surface-level understanding of North Korea, are able to pass themselves off as experts.

And it’s not just North Korea; these pundits are equally happy to comment on Russia, China, Iran, or whichever country happens to be making the headlines at any given moment. They’re a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, whose "expertise" shifts with the news cycle.

In this environment, actual North Korea experts—those who have dedicated their careers to studying the regime—are often sidelined. Their nuanced analyses don’t fit into the media’s neat and tidy boxes. They can’t offer the kind of simplistic narratives that the networks crave. Instead, they complicate things, pointing out the contradictions and the grey areas that define North Korea’s domestic and foreign policies. For the media, this is a problem. Complexity doesn’t sell. Binary conclusions do.

Perhaps the most cynical aspect of this whole spectacle is that the public, by and large, doesn’t seem to care. We live in a time where expertise has become devalued, where opinions are treated as equivalent to knowledge, and where the loudest voices are often mistaken for the most informed. A pundit who can confidently assert that North Korea is on the verge of collapse, or that Kim Jong-un is planning a major military strike, is far more valuable to a network than someone who points out the more likely, less dramatic outcomes.

The public wants drama, and the media is all too happy to deliver. What’s more, the worst of these pundits are part of a thinktank empire that thrives on media attention - and funding from, you guessed it, the military-industrial complex. They are backed by social media teams that ensure their tired two-bit takes are trotted across social platforms on a regular basis. 

The true tragedy here is that this approach to expertise creates a distorted understanding of North Korea, both for the public and for policymakers. If all we hear are simplistic narratives and recycled tropes, how can we expect to develop informed policies that address the real issues? How can we engage diplomatically with a regime that we don’t actually understand? Instead, we rely on pundits who are more interested in maintaining their relevance than in offering any real insight.

So, the next time you see someone labeled as a North Korea expert, take a moment to consider whether they’re truly knowledgeable or just the latest spruiker to adopt a new “specialty” as the media spotlight shifts. Chances are, they’ll be talking about another crisis by next week, wearing a new hat, playing the role of "expert" all over again.