North Korea today is by all accounts a fairly unpleasant place to live; short on food, big on tyranny, and with a psychotic musical marionette for a leader.  Amongst the political class, however, it is like a soothing aromatherapeutic balm of gravitas and consensus.  North Korea is a rogue state run by evil men with nuclear weapons.  Everyone agrees, which is why a recent essay by Bruce Cumings in the London Review of Books is so refreshing.

It's a scholarly tour of the recent history of the nation, that reminds the reader how entangled the US already was on the Korean peninsula leading up to the Korean War.  Unlike say Kuwait, or Somalia, where the US inserted itself as a white knight, in Korea the US was already there in the wake of the Japanese defeat in WWII.

The American role since 1945 raises another enormous problem of balance and bias, beginning with the simple fact that Rhee, Park and the KCIA's Kim would not have come to power without American backing, and continuing with the common assumption that the US has been an innocent bystander for the past sixty years, having nothing to do with the nature of either Korean regime. Rhee was 70 in 1945, a patriot of the old school who would have been a leading politician in a right-wing regime, perhaps, but had no real political base in the country. In August 1945, the State Department recommended to the American occupation command that Park and Kim be purged for their servile collaboration with Japan (Park got a gold watch from the puppet [Chinese] emperor P'u Yi). Five years later, the US joined the Korean War and carpet-bombed the North until every man, woman and child was living in a tunnel or a cave. Five years after that war ended, the US installed nuclear weapons in the South and kept them there until 1991. Any rudimentary attempt at balance must account for these well-known facts.

This is accompanied by a partisanship more usually associated with another much talked about expeditionary force: he considers Clinton to be the only US President with a worthwhile Korea policy.

There are a few disappointing moments where partisanship disintegrates into boorish culture war - one would think that an academic at the University of Chicago would be able to look up the meaning of "defeat in detail" rather than dismiss it parenthetically - but I still found it a good read.  His similarly partisan 2003 breakdown of the North's nuclear capability is also interesting.

War is bad for business. When India and Pakistan were sabre rattling at each other Indian business made their government aware that American companies were canceling contracts because of concerns of stability in the region. Considering that America's lead in technology would not exist without India to a large extent that is not a good thing for either country.

More recently with North Korea shelling South Korea and causing deaths China has finally made some public intimations that it's support for North Korea is not certain.

In what could be a crucial development, state-owned newspapers in China have blamed North Korea for this week's attack; one even editorialised that North Korea could be a country without a future.

There are historical reasons for China supporting North Korea on the world stage. A lot of Chinese blood was spilt during the Korean War in pushing the UN back to the 48th parallel after the United States effectively made it to the Chinese border.

Additionally there was political and ideological reasons for the support. Both were supposedly communist though they were more along crazy dictator lines and policy of similarly poorly thought out and arbitrary forms. North Korea is a basket case for it, on a satellite map only Pyongyang has the electric light foot print of a modern nation.

China has been making the steps toward a liberalized economy and trade is becoming increasingly important for prosperity and political stability. South Korea is first world and like any first world nation imports and exports a lot of stuff. Especially with neighbors like China. What does North Korea have? Nothing really. It is propped up by China.

Why would anyone support North Korea? The history between North Korea and China has diverged by the policy path China has taken to liberalize their economy. Politically the market reforms mean China is closer to South Korea in rationality than North Korea.

The best hope North Korea has is to adopt similar policies that China and Vietnam have done and least trade its way to some semblance of prosperity. It is a pitiful nation at the moment.

North Korean motivation; "Bottom line is that North Korea seeks survival as its core interest, but we don't know quite what the regime is willing to do to achieve survival. Recent provocations help gauge the levels of vulnerability felt by the North Korean regime and are indicative of how far the regime will go."

I don't think anyone wants the North and South to merge. It would put a huge amount of pressure on South Korea and the disparities in North and South Korea are far greater than between West and East Germany. North Korea is a hopeless backwater of a nation, I wonder how it will ever transition to prosperity for its citizens.