North Korea seems impenetrable to outsiders, a bizarre, Stalinist sideshow and relic guerilla state that defies explanation.
For Washington, North Korea is now public enemy number one, a fully paid-up member of George W Bush's "axis of evil", and involved in a game of nuclear brinkmanship since last October, when the regime admitted having a clandestine nuclear program. North Korea has since stepped up its nuclear program and expelled UN inspectors. The US believes North Korea already has one or two nuclear weapons, and could develop more.
As terrifying as North Korea's posture is, Gavan McCormack, one of the world's leading experts on the peninsula, claims the Bush administration's belligerent stance toward North Korea could be as dangerous as North Korea's. In fact Bush's gambit could undo over a decade's worth of patient diplomacy by South Korea, who are striving to bring their northern neighbour back in from the cold.
In this elegant, heartfelt and timely book, McCormack shows how decisive the founding myths and national identity forged through Korea's armed resistance to a brutal Japanese colonialism is, and how hardened North Korea has become over half a century of Cold War since it fought the US to a standstill in 1953. He also shows that at the heart of the Korean crisis - and seldom explored in the West - is the role of Japan.
In Japan the North Korean admission of having abducted Japanese citizens has created something of a right-wing nationalist backlash, in a country which itself once abducted tens of thousands of Koreans and almost sixty years later has yet to fully apologise for its acts. Long a foreign policy satellite of the US, Japan is now showing signs of becoming more militarily independent, wanting to reassert its old role as a regional leader.
So, North Korea - paranoid, insecure and ravaged by famine - finds itself in a vice. Permeated by xenophobia and leader-worship North Korea has few cards in its pack. But the nuclear one has been its joker for at least a decade.
