In another world, it would be reasonable to expect North Korea to rank among the strongest and wealthiest countries across the dimensions of national power, just like its neighbor, South Korea. After all, the North Korean people are in many ways similar to their South Korean counterparts in terms of talent, capability, determination, resourcefulness, and so forth. It’s hard to believe now, but fifty to sixty years ago, North Korea was the industrial powerhouse of the peninsula. Even today, the North reportedly possesses roughly $8 trillion of untapped mineral deposits.

It is, therefore, one of the world’s serious anomalies that North Korea is, at best, a third-world country. It is unable to provide adequate food and healthcare for its people or reliable electrical power for its economy.

Why? The failure of the Kim regime to provide for its people lies in its insatiable appetite for nuclear arms. The regime does not seek prosperity and a good life for its people, conditions which would allow the North Korean people wide access to outside information and resources to elude regime control. Instead, the regime seeks survival through brutal and pervasive population control and repression. It also seeks dominance over the ROK. Achieving such dominance would not be an easy task for the North as few ROK citizens would want to be immersed in the poverty and misery suffered by the North Korean people.

How does the North Korean regime explain this misery to its people? It claims that it is in part the fault of their inveterately hostile enemy, the United States. The regime even argues that the United States........

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