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not substantiate his claim that the risk o
war is greater in the Indian Ocean than in
the South China Sea, but it shatters any
complacency the Indian navy and its
partners might have about their ability to
dominate these waters without challenge.The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect
Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un
BY ANNA FIFIELD. PublicAairs,
2019, 336 pp.As the younger son o his father’s third
wife, Kim Jong Un was an unlikely heir to
the North Korean throne, but from the
regime’s perspective, he turned out to be a
brilliant choice. He has taken over his
grandfather and father’s dynastic cult o
personality; reportedly killed, imprisoned,
or brought to heel the senior advisers he
inherited; maintained the system o
hereditary political castes and the gulag;
tightened the country’s borders; height-
ened surveillance o ordinary citizens;
restored some economic dynamism;
fostered a small moneyed class o sup-
porters; pushed forward missile and
nuclear weapons testing; evaded global
sanctions; resisted Chinese pressure; and
run rings around two U.S. presidents.
To ¿gure out how Kim has done it all,
Fi¿eld tracked down his aunt and uncle,
who run a dry cleaning shop in the
United States; interviewed his school-
mates from Switzerland; spoke with the
business partner o Kim’s assassinated
hal brother, Kim Jong Nam; and visited
North Korea 11 times. The North Korean
system, Fi¿eld concludes, is strong
enough to last for a long time. The
biggest questions concern the state o the
economy and Kim’s health. I he survives
to hand power to a fourth generation,
the man Fi¿eld labels “the mostmovements were led by pro-Soviet
Uighur intellectuals who had received
modern educations. Although they were
ethnic nationalists, they used elements
o Islam to forge a fragile common
identity with other classes and ethnic
groups, including the more numerous,
nomadic Kazakhs. The two short-lived
episodes o self-rule showed what the
government o an independent East
Turkestan might look like and that such
a country would not survive without
Russian support, which in both historical
cases proved neither strong nor lasting.
The Costliest Pearl: China’s Struggle for
India’s Ocean
BY BERTIL LINTNER. Hurst, 2019,
288 pp.
The Indian Ocean is scattered with
islands, some small, some large, some
inhabited, some not, but all strategically
signi¿cant and all more or less milita-
rized. They range from the Comoros and
Madagascar, near the African coast, to the
Maldives and Diego Garcia, south o
India, to the Andaman and Nicobar
Islands and the Cocos Islands, o the
coasts o Myanmar and Indonesia,
respectively. Lintner recounts centuries o
competition among pirates, ¿shermen,
slave traders, mercenaries, money laun-
derers, colonists, and the occasional North
Korean adviser to an island dictator. In
recent times, the Indian and U.S. navies
have dominated the ocean. But under its
Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has been
building ports at a rate that suggests
China may have ambitions to join them as
a major Indian Ocean power. Lintner’s
decades o reporting from all over Asia
lend him shrewd insight into the region’s
geography and politics. The book does