Recommended: Kim 101: How well do you know North Korea’s leaders? “The reality is that Kim is increasingly opening up the country to private enterprise and building up the loyalties of the new elites by allowing them access to the cash and foreign products they need to live their comfortable lifestyles and to make more money,” says Melanie Hart, director of China policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington. Already high tensions between North Korea and the United States and its allies in the region were sent skyward over the weekend as Pyongyang carried out its sixth and by far most powerful nuclear test Saturday.
