[T]here has been little, if any, doubt that nothing short of a massive regime collapse, or (even more violent and bloody) full-scale war, will ever p… - Andrei Lankov

North Korea is a problem, not only because of its fast advancing nuclear and missile program but also because of the sorry state of the country’s economy and its abysmal human rights record. It is a problem for us outsiders, but it is an even greater problem for the North Korean people themselves. As people are fond of saying in such situations that "something has to be done." But what exactly?

The North Korean elite does have some sources of hope. The elite itself remains, on the surface at least, remarkably united. The lack of a civil society and very strong social control makes the emergence of resistance difficult.

Objectively speaking, the history of North Korean state has been one of an ambitious social if brutal experiment that ended in a very ugly disaster. Essentially, the 70 years of the Kim Family's rule have been the wasted years. The Kim family did not merely build one of the world’s most “perfect” Stalinist dictatorships, but also managed to transform into a basket case what once, in the 1940s, was the most advanced industrial economy of East Asia outside Japan. However, one should not expect that such a pessimistic, if honest, view of North Korea’s past, is going to be enthusiastically embraced by those North Koreans who bother to care about such matters.