What the Kim regime has done already is startling.

Such open, angry criticism of the Kim regime is something you would not have heard a few years ago.

The obituary also referred incompletely to comments by Hwang Jang-yop, a former aide to the Kim regime, who was quoted describing Mr. Kim's rise to power.

Many people in North Korea were imprisoned or killed for speaking out against the Kim regime.

Mass defections from North Korea strike at the heart of the Kim regime, giving the lie to the myths upon which North Korean rule is based.

"We see no indications that the Kim regime will change the policies of military first, brinkmanship and missile proliferation throughout the world," he said.

"The Kim Jong-un regime will not last long," Kim Jong-nam is said to have written, forecasting a power struggle.

"So the problem," they write, "is this: the kind of rewards that might reduce the Kim regime's hostility will strengthen that regime and will therefore prove unpopular among democratic donor states."

Your "five things" that North Korea wants all boil down to two things: a guarantee that the Kim regime will be allowed to stay in absolute power (forever, essentially), and bags of cash.

The Kim regime is heavily invested in an avowed military-first policy, and in continuity - despite marching down a cul-de-sac.