TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

As you’ve heard, Kim Jong-il died this weekend, and there’s nothing wrong with being happy that the world is without one less tyrannical dictator who’s set his country back decades. Nothing wrong at all.

His death doesn’t mean, however, that North Korea’s condition will improve, or that their relations with the rest of the world will improve, either. There’s no reason to think their economy will suddenly be able to feed their people, or their government will dismantle their nuclear program and end hostilities with South Korea and stop threatening Japan.

In fact, there’s more risk now than there’s been since 1994, when Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, passed away. North Korea’s government is not only a totalitarian state, but it is a dictatorship with no defined process for transferring power from one leader to the next. Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il created a cult of personality for themselves to maintain their power, and so when they die, the country inherently becomes less stable. The government is very brittle in that way—one crack can demolish the entire structure.

This is compounded by North Korea’s constant feeling that South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. view them as inferior, and thus they have to prove how powerful they are both as a sense of pride and for their survival. This is dangerous enough when North Korea’s power structure is stable, and manifests itself as missile and nuclear tests and acts of aggression against South Korea, but it’s even more dangerous now. North Korea’s next leader, or the military, may find it necessary to show their strength by conducting more tests or threatening the South.

Worse, too, is Kim Jong-il’s son and apparent designated successor, Kim Jong-un, is a twenty-something year old four-star general with no military experience. Tension is almost guaranteed, between Kim Jong-un and the military, and possibly his family as well. In the worst case, a power struggle could ensue, and North Korea’s government could collapse.

There’s no telling what that would lead to, and that’s why this is so dangerous: there’s so many things that could go wrong. The world may be better off with Kim Jong-il gone, but in the short-term, it’s also a more dangerous world.