Prognostications on the incoming Barack Obama administration's North Korea policy should dwell less on the president-elect's purported propensity for diplomacy and more on the North Korean leader's proven predilection for patience and gaining attention. In 2009 and beyond, events - rather than ideological orientation or diplomatic initiative - will shape the new US administration's approach to North Korea. Events that will largely be of Pyongyang's, not Washington's, making.
Over the past decade, Kim has proven most adept at playing the post-provocation waiting game against the US. Even in the rhetorically hostile early years of the George W Bush administration, North Korea was able to gain the upper hand by taking provocative actions - like expelling International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from the Yongbyon nuclear reactor site, withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reactivating the reactor - then simply waiting for the US to respond.
The response came in the form of the Beijing talks in April, 2003, followed by the first six-party negotiations in August that year. From the outset, North Korea dictated the terms of the denuclearization talks by making verbal threats of nuclear proliferation to US negotiators.