Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992

If North Korea scares you (and it should), then this vivid and cogent book is for you. Armstrong (Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, Columbia Univ.) asks how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), poor, stagnant, and isolated, has continually been able to play international allies, patrons, and enemies against one another to get what it has wanted. Founder Kim Il-sung manipulated Stalin and Mao Zedong to start the Korean War in 1950, then extorted their help to subsidize Juche (self-reliance) and support his hopes of Third World socialist leadership. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989, Russia demanded that the "tail stop telling the dog what to do," as Armstrong puts it, and recognized capitalist South Korea. China was stuck with the DPRK but joined Japan and the United States in trading with prosperous South Korea. Yet famine and isolation in the DPRK led to ideological petrification and elite self-perpetuation, not Chinese-style reform. Even so, as Armstrong points out in his epilog, Kim Jong-il, who succeeded Kim Il-sung, got what he wanted by alternating fierce negotiation and the blackmail power of his atomic bomb. Kim Jung-un, the current young leader, understands the benefits of seeming crazy but may not be in control.