“He can tell his people that he met with the world’s most powerful leaders and take that propaganda and use it to justify his policies,” said Jean H. Lee, a former Associated Press reporter who served as bureau chief in Pyongyang from 2008 to 2013. “That makes it very hard to challenge him or raise any criticism and allows him to maintain very tough policies on his people.”

Speaking about the embassy raid, Jean H Lee, a former AP news agency bureau chief in Pyongyang who now works at the Wilson Center thinktank, told me that she believes “these actions have jeopardised lives on all sides: their own, those of defectors they have extracted, and those in the embassy”.

“I can’t see Kim giving up his nuclear weapons entirely,” said Jean H. Lee, a Korea expert at the Wilson Center in Washington. “They are his ‘treasured sword’ and all that he has to give him leverage. But he is willing to barter some dismantling of his nuclear program in exchange for concessions.”

Jean H. Lee, a Korea expert at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based research organization, said of Mr. Kim that “he does want a changed relationship with the United States, and to improve his country’s shattered economy.”

“But we need to remember that he sacrificed his people’s well-being, making decisions that deprived them of food, clean water, electricity, heat and medicine, in order to build nuclear weapons,” Ms. Lee added. “He won’t be willing to give his weapons up readily, and may be prepared to sacrifice his people again if things don’t go his way.”