This book is predominantly about foreign policy with North Korea. The reason is because the North Korean nation is so secretive. Nothing is known of the culture, or day to day lives of the North Korean people. Very little is known of the governing elite either or the decision making processes. As a result, this book by Oberdorfer, is mainly about how South Korea, the United States and to an extent China and Russia, have interacted with North Korea.

Both South Korea and North Korea are apparitions of the cold war. They became a divided nation after World War II when the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea upon the Japanese surrender as two administrative zones with the 38th Parallel the dividing point. Oberdorfer writes:

Korea has been a country of the wrong size in the wrong place: large enough and well located enough to be of substantial value to those around it and this worth fighting and scheming over, yet too small to merit priority attention by more powerful nations on all but a few occasions.

In 1948 the administrative lines became nation states as neither the Soviet Union or the United States were prepared to give the zones up. The Soviets installed a former guerrilla leader as the North Korean leader; Kim Il Sung. The Soviets propped up the North Koreans until Gorbachev's Glasnost meant a change in policy until the Soviet Union collapsed.

Without that monetary support, the North Korean economy collapsed to half its subsidized output. North Korea was unable to feed its people they were surviving on less than 1,000 calories a day. As a result North Korea did crazy destabilizing military stunts in the hope of getting fertilizer to stop doing them. The obvious answer is open the economy, South Koreans have obesity issues.

Another facet of the North Korean system is how heavily the propaganda of the great leader is entrenched into the social and education system. Oberdorfer notes of Kim Il Sung's juche philosophy of martial nationalism:

In an explicity analogy to the human body, in juche the Great Leader is the brain that makes decisions and commands action, the Workers Party is the nerve system that mediates and maintains equilibrium between the brain and the body, and the people are the bone and muscle that implement the decisions and channel feedback to the Leader.

However bizarre this belief system seems to outsiders, North Koreans are systematically instructed in it and walled off from contrary views. The great unanswered question is how many North Koreans are true believers and how many have their private doubts.

Another crazy aspect of North Korea is that - as a political system - it believes the Korean War is not over despite evidence to the contrary. North Korea is permanently on a war footing. They are constantly building tunnels, more recently firing (or not firing) missiles over Japan, even one incident where US servicemen were killed in the DMZ while trimming a tree. North Korea also sends over submarines with spies in them that occasionally are discovered. Given the wealth and might of the United States and South Korea it defies common sense.

I have no doubt there is an internal logic to it all. The Kim Il Sung and his two sons have managed to hold power on the nations for approximately 60 years. They lived a life of luxury, importing high end liquors and Harley Davidson's while the people they are supposed to be leading starve. For a small extractive governing elite, even life in a crappy, bleak, run down and dumb downed nation is probably not that bad.

I don't know what will happen with North Korea. The gap in prosperity between the North and South is now so great that it would bankrupt South Korea if they took on a unification project like West Germany did with East Germany at the end of the Cold War. North Korea is going to have to get out of this on its own and it will most likely require the destruction of the Kim's and the elite that have run this part of Korea into a backward humanitarian nightmare.

More Reading on Book

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• Two Koreas: Children of the Cold War Stand Off