FPI / January 25, 2026
North Korea observers say that Kim Jong-Un’s greatest fear is that the United States, which for years rehearsed so-called “decapitation” operations, will whisk in and stifle the North Korean leader as suddenly and effectively as it snatched Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
“North Korea’s Kim expected to cling to [his] nuclear security blanket after Venezuela,” blared one headline in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
Kim “is getting the message: He’s vulnerable to the same quick hit” that U.S. President Donald Trump ordered to pluck Maduro from power and toss him into custody in Brooklyn, Donald Kirk wrote in a Jan. 19 analysis for The Daily Beast.
A veteran North Korea watcher and correspondent, Kirk is a contributing editor for Geostrategy-Direct.com
The Jan. 3 raid on Caracas, in which Venezuelan troops and many Cubans who were part of Maduro’s security detail were overwhelmed by U.S. forces, “almost certainly struck more fear into the potbellied dictator than any military drills or aerial shows of force ever could. In doing so, it’s also ramped up the risks of a potential nuclear showdown as Kim goes into panic mode, triggered by the same American president who has routinely boasted of the pair’s ‘very good relationship,’ ” Kirk wrote.
Sydney Seiler, former national intelligence officer for North Korea at the National Intelligence Council said, “the operation to ‘rendition’ the president of Venezuela demonstrates the capabilities that have to be of concern to North Korea.”
The word “rendition,” as used by Seiler, is CIA-speak for capturing an enemy operative and sending him elsewhere for prosecution, or worse..
The other key word is “decapitation,” which Kim is well aware the Americans have been practicing in annual military exercises for years.
“What’s appealing is that decapitation is the quickest way to terminate a conflict,” Seiler, who visited North Korea on negotiating teams before the North cut off all communications after the failure of Kim’s meetings with Trump in 2019, told the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“Decapitation would be helpful in trying to deter North Korea,” Seiler believes. “Without Kim Jong-Un,” he notes, North Korea would have no leader, no one who would know how to lead its outsized, underfed armed forces of 1.2 million troops, much less anyone in charge of its nuclear program.
Kim Jong-Un’s deepest fears of a decapitation operation were seemingly manifested in his authorizing the release for North Korean audiences of a film about the capture of Maduro.
The film “Days and Nights of Confrontation,” could not have aired on North Korean state TV “at a more propitious moment, days after elite U.S. troops seized Maduro and his wife,” Kirk wrote. “The message is clear: what’s to stop the Americans from repeating themselves in North Korea?”
The film epitomizes “the trend of racy, Hollywood-style content aimed at appealing to young people,” says a South Korean website, NK News, that tracks North Korea. “Surely Mr. Kim and his family, including his fiery younger sister Yo-Jong, and his beloved teenage daughter, Ju-ae, would make great targets.”
Kirk noted: “In one fell swoop the Americans could wipe out the dynasty that Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, founded when the Soviet Union installed him as leader of the northern half of the divided Korean peninsula after the Japanese surrender in 1945.”
To carry out such an operation in North Korea would require the U.S. “to marshal more than the 150 or so aircraft, and a few hundred troops, including the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force, that were needed to grab Maduro, but Kim is well aware his family and entourage could be hustled aboard a helicopter bound for an American warship long before the Russians and Chinese could respond in support of North Korea’s military establishment, ill-fed, ill-trained and not at all ready to leap to their leader’s instant defense,” Kirk wrote.
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