Kim watched in horror as people on both banks poked the corpses with poles until they burst and sank beneath its waters, rather than bother to retrieve them. Then came the pivotal event in his life. A stick-thin child — a boy of about seven, malnourished and driven by grinding hunger to cross the swirling river despite the bodies — begged him for help. “I fell to my knees, crying so many tears, and promised God to devote my life to helping these people,” said Kim.

The nightmare he witnessed on his volunteer church mission at the turn of the century could not be more different from the portrait painted by his grandfather. Growing up in a small South Korean fishing village, Kim was frequently regaled with tales of the beautiful mountains, rivers and women seen in the north before their country was sliced in half following the Second World War. Three decades later, this romantic image had been shattered.

After his epiphany, Kim became a Christian pastor and devoted himself and his Caleb Mission to saving North Korean citizens from the clutches of the Hermit Kingdom. When we met earlier this year, I asked how many people he has helped to flee using his clandestine routes that rely on bribery, smugglers, subterfuge and safe houses. “1,008,” he replied with a smile.

This, despite the fact that anyone caught escaping North Korea risks torture, public execution or being sent to a slave labour camp for life with their entire family. Now his work is being highlighted in Beyond Utopia, a gripping new documentary that features astonishing footage of one family’s flight to freedom shot on their mobile phones. At one point, the mother, hiding beside her weeping young daughters after crossing a border river, is shown on a video call pleading for salvation. “Please help us live,” she begs him. Later, this family of five, which includes a grandmother aged 83, are seen dodging officials and wearily scrambling through the mountains, rivers and jungles of four nations to safety in South Korea. They all carried suicide pills to swallow if caught.

During our conversation, Kim described the people he is still trying to save. These include one woman in her 20s who crossed the border five years ago, but was traded to a Chinese man who twice made her pregnant, then sold both the babies. He has also been told of bounty hunters murdering North Koreans hiding in China to harvest body parts, such as kidneys and hearts, for sale to hospitals. Six years ago, he rescued two teenage girls whos a broker was threatening to sell into the organ market, taking them into his own home to raise them alongside his own daughter. Other rescues include a teenage girl sold to a Chinese man in his sixties and a woman raped every night by a father and his two sons.  “I’ve heard so many horrible stories,” said Kim, 58. “When you hear such things your mind collapses.”

He started his underground railroad in 2000, after falling in love with Park Esther, an early defector who he met shortly after she crossed into China. A former army officer, she fled after her parents died from starvation. “It was through loving and talking to my wife that I discovered how hard life was for North Koreans and how difficult it was for them to find freedom,” said Kim.

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He spent months seeking out possible escape routes, eventually marrying her after  buying identity papers from a dead Chinese woman. Now, both are pastors, their dedication to the cause boosted by the tragic death of their son. “He passed away when he was seven,” he said. “We were distraught, crying all the time and even questioning God. But then we realised that our son was in heaven and we should dedicate our lives to making him proud by giving more love to defectors.”

Kim, whose rescues have taken him deep into sweltering jungles and on daring boat missions on the seas, stopped travelling to China 14 years ago due to the dangers of detection as state surveillance systems improved and his reputation grew. Incredibly, Kim claims just two of his group’s escape attempts have failed. The first followed a tip-off to Chinese police following a domestic argument in a safe house as they were rescuing seven orphans. Fortunately, the children were young enough to avoid serious trouble when they returned to North Korea. The second involved two women defectors with children born in China who were captured by Chinese officials after being detected by facial recognition technology while travelling across the country in 2019. “We do not know exactly what happened. Probably the kids were sent back to their fathers and the women sent back to North Korea. They might well have been sent to the gulag as punishment.”

This is a grim fate. One former guard told me how both officials and prisoners in a gulag had to watch two brothers being beheaded after they were caught in China as a warning not to flee — then all inmates were ordered to throw stones at the decapitated corpses. Even a short sentence in the slave labour camps that holds an estimated 200,000 people can be fatal. During her seven years working in a camp, the same guard witnessed routine killings, torture and rape of political prisoners. Former inmates have told me injured people being dumped to die in snow and rotting corpses left in piles beside their huts over winter.

The pandemic staunched the flow of those managing to escape, as Beijing’s “Zero Covid” policies heavily restricted movement in the country. Then, six months ago, new anti-spying laws made it harder for groups to operate in border regions. Meanwhile, North Korea responded to the virus by ramping up security in border areas. As a result, only 67 defectors made it to South Korea last year, compared with 1,047 in 2019 — and many are thought to be hiding in China, where activists fear up to 30,000 defectors may be stuck.

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Since the lifting of Beijing’s anti-Covid policies, Pastor Kim has restarted his underground railroad. Today, he is focusing his efforts on defectors trapped in China, such as one woman who had been sold aged 17 to a man nearly two decades her senior. “It is almost impossible to get people out of North Korea now,” he said. “We used to be able to bribe guards but now they put different departments there to watch over each other. On the Chinese side, there is military as well as police to keep guard.”

Hundreds of miles of new fortifications have also been built along the North Korean borders with China and Russia to stop smugglers, and guards have been ordered to shoot dead anyone entering security zones. Night-time bans have been imposed on road and rail travel near barbed-wire fencing or security facilities. One market trader told the BBC in June that even approaching the border river could now lead to harsh punishment, “so almost nobody is crossing”. Another man spoke of a spate of executions of people trying to defect. “We are stuck here waiting to die,” he said.

Beyond Utopia also shows the bid by another defector called Lee So-Yeon to help her son escape, an attempt that ends badly and leaves her looking broken. I found this deeply disturbing, having first met the same woman seven years ago in Seoul. She had shown me how she smuggled computer memory sticks into North Korea containing footage of female defectors accusing named high-ranking officials of sexual abuse and rape. This was her revenge for the widespread rape she witnessed while serving in the army — including by her own commander, who assaulted 30 women in her unit. “The videos tell them they will be subjected to punishment after reunification,” she told me. Although the government has cracked down on the illicit use of mobile phones, the pastor said they can still make contact with sources inside North Korea using Chinese smartphones close to the border. (I agreed not to disclose their methods.)

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Despite the difficulties and surging costs of escape — which have risen almost tenfold since the pandemic — Kim recently dispatched an aide to the border region, who sent up a drone mounted with cameras to search for any weak spots along the fences on both sides of the river. This aide told me that he had spent 10 years hiding in China after leaving his home town near the border. “I looked out to the place where I grew up but cannot go there and they cannot leave. It is so hard. It is impossible to describe such feelings,” he said. He then described how he is motivated by the hope of one day finding his young sister. “She crossed the border into China but I can’t find her. She may have been sold. I know that she is hiding or suffering somewhere in China.”

I have met many North Korean defectors over the past decade. Most have similar tales of tragedy and torn families. One man told me how his fiancé was beaten so badly by government goons after his escape that she was left unrecognisable, two of his uncles were tortured to death, and his teenage cousins were reduced to street begging. Small wonder many defectors are left traumatised — yet such is the indoctrination that, even as she flees, that family’s grandmother in Beyond Utopia is heard praising the ruling dynasty that dominated her eight decades on earth.

The Hermit Kingdom is a country that crushes humanity. “In North Korea you have no dreams, no hopes, no life,” said Timmy Kang, a restaurant owner who escaped in 2005. “Everything is controlled — it is horrible. Then in China our mothers, our fathers, our sisters and our brothers are hunted down like animals. This is why Pastor Kim is a hero to us.”Or, as one British film reviewer was moved to call him after seeing his exploits on celluloid, “the greatest man who ever lived”.

It is not entirely for want of international pressure. In the spring of 2019, for instance, a new design for a 10,000-yen note featuring a portrait of Japan’s pioneering industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was announced, provoking a harsh reaction from South Korea — where Shibusawa’s portrait had been briefly used on the currency imposed by Japanese colonial rulers. The nation’s objections were duly reported in Japan, yet little public debate followed. The banknote will be released, as originally planned, in 2024.

This response echoes the better-known controversy over “comfort women”,  a euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Chinese and Korean women forced to become sex slaves to Japan’s imperial army during the Second World War. Japan’s apparent resistance to engaging fully and sincerely with these historic crimes  has inspired much international criticism, including demonstrations outside Japanese embassies in Seoul and Manila.

To understand why Japan is so guarded about its empire, it is necessary to understand how exactly that empire came about. After all, the nation had only narrowly escaped being colonised itself in the mid-19th century, when the industrialised Western powers set their sights on Asian territories. In the 20th, as the first and only non-Western country playing the game of great power politics, Japan tried to adopt the role of the anti-colonial colonialist, predestined to liberate other Asians from Western imperialism and to lead them on the road to progress. Japan’s stated aim was to create “an Asia for Asians”, a slogan it used to justify its own aggressive invasions. China had to be freed from the Western-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek; Malaya and Burma from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French; the Philippines from the Americans. According to this view, Japan’s imperialism was not self-interested — and acted in opposition to Western colonialism.

Race was at the heart of Japan’s Pan-Asianism. Writing in late 1918, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who would later become prime minister, urged Japan to “reject the Anglo-American Peace” to be proposed at Versailles. Shortly after attending the conference, he wrote: “That the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor coloured people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black people.” And his suspicions were arguably vindicated when Japanese delegates tried to have a clause in favour of racial equality included in the League’s charter — and failed.

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After the worldwide depression, as the Great Powers became inward-looking — putting up protectionist trade barriers and, in some cases, introducing laws against Asian immigration — Japan’s rhetoric became focused on economic security. The nation insisted that each of its expansionist steps was part of a grand project — to build a “New East Asia Order” or the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The official goal of Japan’s war with the West was declared, in late 1941, to be the establishment of Asian “stability”. Just as the Japanese were taught to believe in their emperor’s divinity, they were also taught that their nation had a sacred mission in Asia — especially in colonial South-East Asia, where the dissatisfaction in European colonies justified Japan’s involvement, for some. For others, it had the opposite effect: in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew, who was then Singapore’s Prime Minister, identified Japan’s military occupation from early 1942 as a wake-up call. Japanese occupation made his generation of young people “determined that no one — neither the Japanese nor the British — had the right to push and kick us around”.

To this day, the belief that ousting the predatory West from Japan’s backyard was morally legitimate persists. In the Nineties, one best-selling manga by the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, claiming to be a “philosophical comic book”, painted Japanese imperialism in a shamelessly self-glorifying light. The Japanese army, it argued, “bravely fought the white imperialists, who arrogantly regarded coloured peoples as lowly primates”. More recently, the hawkish former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s success was partly down to his effective deployment of neo-nationalist rhetoric, which has remained present since his death.

But whatever the present-day Japanese would like to believe, in practice Japanese occupiers used anti-colonial rhetoric while behaving very much like colonial masters themselves. This led the historian Grant Goodman to observe in 1991 that Japan “out-colonialed” Westerners in terms of brutality and exploitation. In reality, it would be misguided to dismiss Japan’s “Asia for Asians” claim as purely disingenuous, a post facto excuse for its aggressive expansionism. The philosophical underpinnings for it preceded Japan’s empire.

In the late-19th century, Asian intellectuals — often writing in English — sought to reject the colonial view of Asia as an entity that was racially inferior. The Japanese art historian Tenshin Okakura, an associate of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, emerged as one of the most influential Pan-Asianist voices. Despite its comparative material and military weakness, Okakura asserted, Asia was a civilisation par excellence. In the preamble of The Ideals of the East, he wrote:

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal.”

And yet, Japan’s quest to reach the status of the white nations that ruled the world was conducted not in spiritual terms but old-fashioned military ones. With Japan’s victory in the war against Tsarist Russia in 1905, it became the first non-white power to defeat a white one in a modern war. Unsurprisingly, this stoked anti-colonial sentiments beyond the Japanese archipelago. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1939, recalled the excitement he felt as a boy: “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm … Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.”

A string of anti-colonialists started to seek refuge in Japan — including Indo-Chinese nationalists Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, Indian independence fighter Rash Behari Bose, and, most famously, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism. Many of them were morally and financially supported by Japan’s Pan-Asianists. The movie studio tycoon Umeya Shokichi, for example, drew on his fortune to help finance Sun’s nationalist movement, as did Torazo Miyazaki, a philosopher who actively collaborated with the Chinese nationalists by volunteering to be their publicist and supplier of arms, and even a combatant.

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Meanwhile, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Japanese literature, the novelist Masuji Ibuse, worked in Malaya and Singapore, writing editorials for the local newspaper. He emphasised the importance of propagating the Japanese language. In February 1942, he wrote, ironically in English:

“The substitution of Nipponese (Japanese) for English as the lingua franca in Malaya is but the natural recognition of a nation which has stood up for things Asia [sic] and which is now in the process of saving Asians from continuing to be the victims of the British strategy to squeeze the wealth and culture of Asians.”

Ibuse was convinced that learning Japanese would elevate other Asians. To him, and many others, Asia was not only one, as Okakura had proclaimed; rather, “Asia was Japan”.

Despite Japan’s utter defeat in the Second World War, this narcissistic self-image persisted. That the emperor was never held responsible for Japan’s imperialism did much to hinder the development of an honest debate: his throne was spared by General Douglas MacArthur out of fear of Japanese rebellion, which would have stifled efforts to rebuild post-war Japan as a fortress against communism. A lingering reverence for the imperial institution has also made Japanese colonialism something of a sensitive — if not a taboo — subject in post-war Japan. The emperor, moreover, has become a symbol of peace in a nation that now hasn’t seen war for a lifetime.

All this partly explains why the West’s post-colonial reckoning has so far elicited no discernible reaction in Japan. There is always a slight time lag before Japan absorbs any social and intellectual movements coming from the outside world. Advocacy for LGBTQ rights, for instance, took some years for college students to embrace. Yet there is a bigger reason why Japan has not reckoned with its colonial past. Whereas in Britain the ideologies used to justify colonialism, including Social Darwinism, have been thoroughly debunked, the imperial Japanese claim that Asia had to be liberated from the West is, in theory, morally unobjectionable. None of this excuses the atrocities committed by Japan in practice. And while most Japanese today are indifferent to the topic of the empire, it’s still a subject that gets conservatives riled up. They stick to the classic narrative of Asian solidarity, in which Japan stood up to the imperial bullies, instead of emulating them.

It is a story that stars Radhaninod Pal, an Indian judge beloved by the Japanese Right. Sitting on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, he became famous for arguing that all the Japanese defendants, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, should be acquitted. He insisted that Japan’s crimes were hardly unprecedented, that one only had to look at Western imperialism to find equal brutality. He also pointed to America’s nuclear bombings as war crimes, and accused the victorious powers of moral relativism and racial prejudice. Because of such statements, Pal is to this day memorialised in Japan as a brave nationalist who sided with an Asian ally in the face of Western arrogance.

Japan’s pose as the anti-colonial colonialist will persist so long as it continues to think of itself as having fought a selfless, civilisational war for the good of Asia. All the while, an uncomfortable truth will remain ignored: that, in its execution of the Pan-Asianist dream, Japan fell far too short of delivering its grand promises.

It’s no coincidence that Star Wars’ first prominent east Asian performer is Korean. Americans in particular have by now come to regard South Koreans as what I call “the Westerners of Easterners”, a people more culturally relatable than the Japanese and less geopolitically threatening than the Chinese. This distinction results in large part from the West’s years of exposure to Korean popular culture, thanks to the likes of the Billboard-chart dominating BTS, Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winning Parasite, and of course Squid Game.

This pop-cultural “Korean wave” — or hallyu — began sweeping Asia around the turn of the millennium and reached Western shores in earnest a decade ago, with the surprise global phenomenon that was Psy’s Gangnam Style. A satire of the garish lifestyles led by Seoul’s nouveau riche, that song — and even more so its strenuously absurd music video — showed the Korean entertainment industry that, one way or the other, the West could be won over. Ten years on, it has nearly 4.5 billion views on YouTube and features in the Victoria and Albert museum’s “Hallyu! The Korean Wave” exhibition, which opens next week.

The popular culture exported by Korea today doesn’t much resemble its output in the early days of hallyu. The farther outward the Korean wave spreads, the more its content reflects the pressure to meet the common expectations of ever-wider and more diverse audiences. Squid Game, which tells the story of a life-or-death battle royale between hundreds of down-and-outs for an enormous cash prize, functions with great effectiveness as a delivery system for suspense, intrigue, and ultra-violence: a spectacle cast in the modern Western mould, down to Lee’s scruffily appealing working-class hero.

The show is a cultural hybrid in the manner of many Korean productions lately successful in the West, whose consumers have shown a taste for entertainment foreign on the surface but familiar beneath it. So is Parasite, despite its ostensible dearth of reference to anyone or anything outside Korean society. It does mount an incisive critique of that society, drawing its rich and poor families into a complicatedly duplicitous relationship of mutual dependence that culminates in a bloody denouement. But it also offers a safely displaced means for Westerners, and especially Americans, to consider the grievous socioeconomic troubles of their own societies.

Much the same also occurs, on a smaller scale, in Korean literature, translations of which have drawn more interest from major Western publishers since Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, which in Deborah Smith’s English translation won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. The English writer and translator Tim Parks frames The Vegetarian as an example of “global fiction” suited to the current tastes of Western literary-prize committees. “Ideologically, it champions the individual (woman) against an oppressive society (about which we know nothing, except that it seems ‘worse’ than our own),” he writes. “Emotionally, it allows us to feel intense sympathy for a helpless victim, which is always encouraging for our self-esteem.”

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More Korean novels have since been published in English with an apparent intent to hit this same mark. The most obvious example, Cho Nam-Joo’s bestseller Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (whose translation came out in 2020), is as much a novel — an essentially alien literary form here in Korea, less established than the short story and much less established than poetry — as a tract about the difficulties that beset modern-day Korean women.

Even in the Nineties, Korean studios were attempting to engineer films with international appeal. The most expensive production to date in Korea, Kang Jae-gyu’s Shiri, essayed the Korean version of the Eighties-style Hollywood action blockbuster, complete with communist enemy agents (North Korean, of course) and red-digited time bombs. The movie executed all the tropes of its genre somewhat slavishly but with consummate professionalism, resulting in impressive box-office returns both domestically and elsewhere in Asia. But Shiri ultimately constituted a model less for the global success of Korean cinema than for the global success of Korean consumer products, exuding as they still do a kind of generically respectable placelessness.

The Korean automobile industry, for example, has built up world-beating marques such as Kia and Hyundai with comfortable and affordable cars that look and feel designed and built nowhere in particular. They sound that way too: Daewoo’s Maepsy, the last Korean car with a Korean name, went out of production in the Eighties. And alongside all those Elantras, Sonatas, Fortes, and Velosters stand Bigbang, EXO, Blackpink, Girls’ Generation, and the other reigning boy bands and girl groups of “K-pop” who have ascended, to one degree or another, into the floating world of international stardom. Not even the mighty BTS are impervious to the pressures of deracination, the letters that constitute their name having at some point been detached from the Korean words (bangtan sonyeondang, literally “bulletproof boy scouts”) for which they originally stood.

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Apart from its lyrics, little about BTS’s music is identifiably Korean. The popularity of their Korean-language songs in the West towards the end of the past decade struck me as a welcome development. Alas, the expectation that BTS would always sing in Korean didn’t survive the release of their first English-language single, Dynamite. Composed by British songwriters David Stewart and Jessica Agombar, that song did its bit to enliven the otherwise unusually dreary summer of 2020. It was also a sign of things to come: BTS’s even catchier English-language follow-up Butter appeared the following spring, written by a team of no fewer than six Westerners with additional contributions by band member RM, formerly known as Rap Monster.

A rapper whose public image rests on such elements as his proficiency in English and sometimes bleach-blonde hair, RM would seem to invite consideration of the concept now fashionably labelled cultural appropriation. (Imagine how much tolerance would be granted to a white American with an image built around adopting the Korean language, musical styles, and physical traits.) But cultural appropriation has also been one of the animating forces of hallyu, whose time has seen Korean culture both popularised abroad and internationalised at home. This aligns with a developmental ideology that emphasises the imitation of other countries, often absurdly remote ones: not long ago, Korean tastemakers got it in their heads that the way to long-elusive happiness lay in hygge, the Danish concept of domestic coziness.

Securing the favour of more powerful foreign lands is hardly a novel concept in Korea. Traces of the Japanese cultural forms adopted during its decades as a colony of that country in the early 20th century remain visible today. (Even the Korean words for such everyday items as bags, shoes, motorcycles, and electrical outlets come by way of the Japanese language, itself often influenced by English.) For hundreds of years before that, the Korean elite took their cues straight from China, writing only in classical Chinese and adopting Confucian social practices more rigorous than those observed in the Middle Kingdom.

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Upon its foundation after the Second World War, the Republic of Korea arguably wasn’t far removed from being an American colony. Later in the century it focused on making exports geared to the demands of richer countries — textiles, white goods, ships, semiconductors — and so became rich itself. That same mindset is reflected in the sphere of cultural production, where domestic tastes haven’t just begun losing ground to foreign ones, but more troublingly, also begun to resemble them.

To Westerners, South Korea now exudes more vitality — in music, film, television, and also fields like fashion and graphic design — than most countries. But much of its output also feels curiously un-foreign, as if imported forms had merely been outfitted with a Korean veneer. Whether the “authentically” Korean can be recovered, whatever form it takes, remains a question clouded by decades, even centuries, of unhealthy relations with the outside world. Lee Jung-jae’s Star Wars debut counts as a bold step for Korean popular culture. Next, perhaps, comes the even bolder one of being wholly Korean — whatever that may turn out to mean.

The pivot point of Squid Game, the captivating South Korean miniseries that has become Netflix’s most popular series at launch, is its second episode. By now the premise has been vividly established: 456 financially desperate people have been transported to a private island to compete in a series of homicidally souped-up children’s games to win a jackpot of 45.6 billion won (£29 million). The winner takes all; the losers die.

It’s not hard to track the DNA of this death-game concept through The Hunger Games and Purge franchises, the 2000 Japanese smash Battle Royale, and the 1970s Stephen King novellas The Running Man and The Long Walk, all the way back to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. Usually, though, such contests are conducted by the state in a near-future dystopia. While the island resembles the micro-dystopia seen in the Sixties TV show The Prisoner — with which Squid Game shares a playground colour scheme, tone of sinister courtesy and replacement of names with numbers — the world it inhabits is present-day South Korea.

Another traditional premise that showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk rejects is the idea that there is no escape. According to the rules, contestants are free to abandon the game and return to society if a simple majority votes to do so, which is what happens in episode two. Game over? Of course not. The show then explains how the characters’ everyday lives are so brutally, intolerably restricted that even near-certain death seems like the better option. During the vote, one character says: “Will it be any different if we leave? Life out there is hell anyway, damn it.” Another agrees: “I’d rather stay here and die trying than die out there like a dog.” Ultimately, 93% of the contestants choose to rejoin the game. The episode is called “Hell”.

These scenes of lives under hideous financial pressure are not a world away from the work of Bong Joon-ho, whose 2019 film Parasite, the most successful South Korean movie ever, won four Academy Awards. Whether he’s working in a realist mode (Mother), science fiction (Snowpiercer) or a hybrid of the two (Okja, The Host), Bong is obsessed with inequality and injustice, although his conclusions, especially when it comes to solidarity among the have-nots, are diverse and contradictory. He is not alone: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 arthouse hit Burning also depicts the human cost of economic desperation.

Squid Game may not have the thematic complexity of Parasite but both are thrilling class-war allegories with mass appeal. (It has received the ultimate phenomenon-confirming accolade of a ridiculous moral panic about schoolchildren mimicking games which are, minus the fatalities, simply old-fashioned children’s games.) But even though inequality has recently become a common undercurrent in Hollywood movies, from Nomadland to Joker to Us, there’s no equivalently popular explicit satire in the US, which raises two questions: Why are these stories coming out of South Korea? And why are they sweeping the world?

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“Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology,” Bong told the Guardian last year, “but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”

Starting in the Sixties, South Korea experienced a hyper-accelerated version of capitalism which pulled tens of millions out of poverty. In recent decades, GDP growth has only dipped once, during the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis. But this frantic expansion also introduced an unfamiliar dog-eat-dog mentality to Korean society. “Korea achieved economic development in a short span of time, which is why competition can be more intense here than in other countries,” says Jung Ho-Yeon, who plays the sullen North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok. The net worth of the country’s top 20% of earners is 166 times that of the bottom 20% and rising fast. The birth rate is falling because many young people feel unable to afford a family.

Hwang, who conceived Squid Game in 2008 when his own family was struggling with debt, believes that inequality in South Korea had to get worse before anyone would commission it. “Sadly, the world has changed in that direction,” he recently told Korea Times. “The series’ games that participants go crazy over align with people’s desires to hit the jackpot with things like cryptocurrency, real estate and stocks.”

South Koreans work some of the longest hours in the world but that is not always enough to stay on top of rocketing house prices, inflation and medical bills, so many workers turn to get-rich-quick schemes. South Korea is the world’s third largest market for cryptocurrencies, some of which are fraudulent. When Squid Game’s main character, the shambolic gambling addict Seong Gi-Hun, is first invited to join the game, his initial response is scepticism: “Is this some sort of new pyramid scheme?” He’s not wrong.

The other option for the so-called “dirt spoon” is debt. Squid Game incorporates a real TV news clip reporting that the GDP to household debt ratio has risen to 96.9%, but it is already out of date: by the end of 2020 that figure was 103.8%. The average debt equals 171.5% of annual disposable income, rising to 270% for millennials in their 30s. It’s no surprise that debt is the leading cause of suicide in South Korea — or that it is debt, rather than poverty, which plagues most of Squid Game’s players.

South Korea is at a stage where social pressure to succeed no longer aligns with the chances of success. Squid Game, then, is an extreme example of a common malaise: what happens when people who have been told they can thrive as long as they work hard and play by the rules discover that the game is broken and they cannot win after all?

But the show also combines this economic reality with Korea’s long tradition of satire, to which the concept of han is fundamental. Dating back to the 1910-45 Japanese occupation of Korea, the meaning of han is so fluid and contested that it is effectively untranslatable, though the scholar Suh Nam-dong gives a taste of its complexity and inadvertently captures what it’s like to watch Squid Game: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong — all these combined.” This version of han breeds a potent satirical blend of black comedy, violence, protest and despair.

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Squid Game may not be strictly concerned with class — some players never had anything; some had it and lost it — but they have all encountered more snakes than ladders. Debt and desperation are the great levellers. Key characters symbolise different fractures in Korean society. Kang Sae-byeok speaks to the lasting trauma of a country split in half in 1945. Player 244, a corrupt pastor, represents the evangelical megachurches that sprang up in the Eighties and Nineties. Abdul Ali is an undocumented Pakistani migrant trapped by an employer who refuses to pay him. The embezzling banker Cho Sang-woo shows that even overachievers can be destroyed by their aspirations. One of the show’s many tragedies is that nobody really needs 45.6 billion won. After a certain point, the survivors could split the pot and all escape their financial abyss, but sharing the spoils is antithetical to the rules of the game.

The black-masked “Front Man”, who runs the game for its unseen creator, insists, in an episode called “A Fair World”, that it is more just than capitalism: “Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, the players get to play a fair game under the same conditions. Those people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we’re giving them the last chance to fight fair and win.” Even before we discover that this is complete bullshit, we see how the game breeds its own inequalities, whether by fomenting division between the players or requiring them to make choices without understanding the consequences. In the second game, players must choose one of four shapes before learning that they must carve it out of thin honeycomb with a needle. “What kind of a sick game is this?” protests one doomed player. “Why do some get an easy shape when others are stuck with difficult ones?”

Squid Game’s most hateful characters are the cold-eyed realists who understand that morality is a fatal luxury in this game. Empathy and collaboration occasionally pay dividends but the gangster Jang Deok-su finds that violence and ruthlessness are just as useful in the game as they are in real life, while the canny Sang-woo proves adept at abusing the letter of the rules. Inside and outside the game, fairness and equality of opportunity are perfomatively celebrated but not practised. There is no relief from han.

The show’s only serious blunder is the introduction of some super-rich VIPs whose cartoon villainy reminded me of a line from The Simpsons episode “Kamp Krusty”: “Gentlemen, to evil!” Hwang says that they represent “the power elite, the global CEOs” but a sustained metaphor for structural injustice does not benefit from a gilded clique of irredeemable bastards. Unlike Parasite, which is smart enough to make clear that the solution to an unjust system is not simply nicer rich people, Squid Game threatens to squander its satirical momentum.

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Fortunately, the finale is a suitable downer, confirming that the game is not just a sham but so corrupting and brutalising that victory cannot be enjoyed by anyone with a conscience. (Its bitterly ironic title, “One Lucky Day”, references a classic 1924 Korean novel about backfiring aspiration.) For all the memes and merchandising opportunities, Squid Game is so shatteringly bleak that I find it hard to agree with Jung Ho-yeon that it teaches viewers “to have faith in humanity”.

But even if you frown on its spectacular violence and relatively broad strokes, you have to acknowledge that this savage allegory for a splintering society is reaching exponentially more people than Burning, or even Parasite, and you have to ask why. For ultimately, the sense that the game is rigged is not just South Korea’s problem. Squid Game has the power to fill anyone with han.

Since then, while there have been proxy wars (notably Vietnam) and local conflicts, no big, powerful countries have gone to war with one another. But there are still tensions, and if you were betting on a war between two great powers now, China and the US would again be the most likely.

The Korean peninsula is probably not where you’d bet on it starting, though. Instead, you might look to Taiwan, the self-governing island off the south-east coast of China. Just this week, a Chinese magazine published a video showing a simulation of a ballistic missile attack on Taiwan, disabling its defences ahead of an invasion. A week before, China sent 28 warplanes, including nuclear-capable bombers, into the air defence zone around Taiwan. At the same time, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping gave a speech promising to “utterly defeat any attempt toward ‘Taiwan independence’.”

The US is an ally of Taiwan’s; it would be expected to defend it, should China attempt to invade. But just as in Korea, two-thirds of a century ago, the question is: would it? And will China invade?

Recently, a group of anonymous superforecasters have tried to answer that question, and shared their work with me. They previously had a go at forecasting the outcomes of the rise of various Covid variants; now, they are interested in whether we ought to worry about Chinese aggression over Taiwan.

Most people are rubbish at actual, falsifiable forecasts. If you ask questions like “Will there be a conflict between China and Taiwan in which at least 100 people are killed before 2026?” or “Will the US defend Taiwan in the event of a conflict between Taiwan and China?”, and ask them to give percentage likelihoods of each eventuality (60%, 20%, 99%), then most people do no better than random guessing. But some people do a bit better, and superforecasters do exceptionally well.

My six forecasters who were considering what would happen with Taiwan were asking several questions, but the key one is probably the one I mentioned above: how likely is it that we will see a conflict between China and Taiwan in which at least 100 people are killed?

The first thing they do is to look at base rates. This is also known as taking the “outside view” on a problem, as opposed to the “inside view”. In a classic example: you’re at a wedding and you’re asked whether the marriage will be a lifelong one. If you look at the couple and think “they look very much in love” and base your answer on that, then you’re taking the inside view.

If, instead, you look at how many marriages in general end in divorce – about 40%, in the UK – and start from there, you’re using the outside view. You then use the inside view to adjust from there: if you know that the couple are well-suited to each other, you adjust your estimate up; if you think they’re not, you might adjust it down.

Regarding Taiwan, one wrote: “An elementary application of base rate thinking means that we have to put the probability of China going for Taiwan within the next five years at below 50 percent.” Since 1949, when the nationalist government was defeated in the Chinese civil war and its leaders fled to Taiwan, mainland China has never invaded the island. If the odds of an invasion in any given five-year period were above 50%, then the chance of making it to 70 years without one would be about one in 16,000.

But, then, they take inside-view considerations into account. For instance: China is catching up on the US in terms of military might. It “is serious about taking control of Taiwan”, which it sees as a threat, and is making more aggressive noises. 

Taiwan itself is very badly defended and the defence it does have is ill-suited to the task (its military has “pursued a suicidal procurement strategy of expensive boutique US kit that will be no use in the crisis, like fighter jets that will be killed on the ground by the opening Chinese missile barrage”). The US military is aimed at fighting the War on Terror, not defending overseas territories against invasion. US public opinion might not support shedding blood over defending Taiwan. 

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On the other hand: a war would be a huge risk for China; “every Chinese leader has an incentive to leave such a risky endeavour to his successor,” another forecaster writes. In the short term, the balance of power is still with the Americans, and China can afford to be patient and wait until the middle of the century. The forecasters use facts like these to adjust their initial base-rate estimate. 

The six forecasters estimate the likelihood of a significant China-Taiwan conflict at between 8% and 23% in the next five years, with a median estimate of 14%. That doesn’t sound all that bad, but it’s worth adding something.

If we’ve learnt anything from Covid, it should be that preparing for the most likely outcome is not enough. The odds of a global pandemic in any given year is probably only about 1%. But if one happens, it turns out, it’s really bad, and it would have been worth investing a significant amount of resources to avoid or mitigate it. One of the superforecasters told me that  “a 14% chance of a proper conflict by 2026 is quite a big deal. If someone says there’s a 10% chance of a really bad outcome, the expected value [the impact multiplied by the probability] is still really bad.” So you might not think a particular bad outcome is very likely, but if it’s bad enough, then you ought to prepare for it anyway.

In the case of Covid, it’s understandable that the UK government didn’t foresee in February that a global pandemic was coming in March. Lots of people were saying it was, others were saying it wasn’t. But they should have foreseen that a global pandemic was highly plausible, that there was a non-trivial chance of complete disaster, and that quite drastic early steps to prevent it would have been justified.

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And a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has the potential to be really bad. The superforecasters put together some conditional forecasts as well – that is, predictions of the form “How likely is event X if event Y happens?” So, for instance, if there is a conflict between China and Taiwan, how likely is the US to come to Taiwan’s defence, and how likely would China be to preemptively attack US forces?

The median estimate for how likely the US is to come to Taiwan’s aid if there were an invasion is 83%. So we are talking about a very high probability that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would lead to armed conflict between the world’s two superpowers. They also think it’s about 75% likely that the US would try to sink Chinese invasion ships, and say it’s reasonably likely that China would preemptively attack the US forces in the region if they did attack.

What might the knock-on effects be, if the world’s largest economies end up in a shooting war? Well: the US imports about $470 billion’s worth of goods from China a year. The superforecasters’ median estimate is that that would drop by 20%, or, roughly speaking, $100 billion. That’s the equivalent of the entire economy of Ecuador or Kenya. It would mean a huge blow to the world economy and probably push millions of people back into poverty. Huge US firms such as Nike or Apple would most probably stop manufacturing goods in China, again undoing decades of economic growth that has driven the rise of the Chinese middle class.

And what’s more, it’s very far from obvious that the US would win. If a war were to break out over Taiwan before 2026, the median estimate is that there’s a 57% chance of Chinese victory; if the war were to break out between 2031 and 2035, when China has had another decade to build up its military relative to the US, the estimate is 66%. “Once committed, China would need to prevail in order to save face and not have their government topple,” writes one. “I don’t believe China will start a hopeless war, so the likelihood of winning is over 50% if they start it, says another. 

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I asked the forecaster I spoke to if they’d talked about how likely it would be that a US-China conflict might escalate to a full-scale war or even nuclear war, and they hadn’t; they may readdress the question in future. 

The Korean War started because great powers misjudged other powers’ willingness to defend allies and honour their treaty obligations: China and North Korea didn’t think the US would defend South Korea; the US didn’t think China would enter the war directly if the 8th Army crossed the 38th Parallel. It could easily happen again.

And the experience of that war shows that even a limited conflict between two great powers can be terrible – millions dead, years wasted, a country devastated for decades. Taiwan probably won’t spark a US-China war in the next five years, but it might, and if it does it would be a disaster.

Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.

So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”

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His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.

Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was,  at least in the bilateral form it then took?

The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.

How different became apparent when I took part in a discussion at the annual debating festival, the Battle of Ideas last weekend, entitled “Can we stop World War III?”.  Our panel put forward a range of views, but almost entirely absent — either from the presentations or from questions — were the following: any suggestion that World War Three would be waged between East and West in the old Cold War sense; arms control treaties, including nuclear weapons treaties; and even — strange though it might seem in the light of Washington’s recent preoccupations — Russia.

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The biggest difference between then and now is the focus on China, and the prospect of an eventual conflict with the United States, as the one power rises and the other — perhaps — declines. Thirty years ago, China was nowhere as a global player. It was isolated after after its leaders had crushed the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square; it was not projecting its power any further afield. Even now, it is reasonable to question how sure and steady China’s continued rise will be. It faces economic and demographic difficulties, the Communist Party has not relinquished — or been forced to relinquish — power. Internal turmoil cannot be excluded.

But the US and its neighbours are already uneasy about possible plans Beijing may have to control the South China Sea, and there is a fresh interest in maritime power. Perhaps those two British aircraft carriers some dismissed as a vanity project are not such an irrelevance after all. There is also much about China, from mass surveillance to the treatment of its non-Han ethnic groups, to the way it acquires other people’s technology, that could spell dangers, even confrontation, ahead. Hong Kong today has become a front-line of sorts, where one system is confronting another, but the imbalance in power between the two sides suggest that, if it escalates further, it will be settled only one way.

Then again, the whole nature of warfare is changing. There is no sign that regional conflicts will cease but whether they could escalate into a world war, however, is another matter. If you consider the existing or likely flashpoints of today — the greater Middle East, Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula — only Syria has come near to becoming a proxy conflict on the Cold War model and it is winding down. US self-sufficiency in energy has radically altered its calculation of risk when considering military engagement, even of a relatively limited kind.

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Will the next world war — if there is one — even be about territory at all, or control? Will it entail physical combat? It is not necessary to make prophecies about Artificial Intelligence to conceive of conflicts conducted remotedly, wars waged by cyber threats to critical infrastructure and weapon systems that require no human intervention.

This is why Mikhail Gorbachev sounds as though he lives in another world when he calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide as his prescription for world peace. Nuclear weapons still pose an existential threat, but the nuclear threat is now one among others, and deterrence may no longer be the only answer. If the US has the capability to sabotage other countries’ nuclear research and perhaps even their tests, that “smart” technological approach might achieve the same effect as developing your own nuclear weapon at vastly less cost.

International arms control treaties might not have completely outlived their usefulness. After all, they were never just about counting missiles and warheads. They were about establishing a framework of trust — which is one reason why they were seen as a useful start to trying to improve US-Russia relations whenever those relations soured. But the age of bilateral arms control has to be over. New arms negotiations might just foster a US-Russia rapprochement (though this looks unlikely before the next US election), but — as both the US and Russia quietly acknowledge, any serious arms control in future must include China.

In 30 years the world of international security has changed beyond all compare: geographically with the rise of China and the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states; technologically with the advent of cyber warfare, and philosophically with the evisceration of Soviet communism and threat from climate change. None of this was on the horizon when the Berlin Wall fell. A hero of his time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s anniversary call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons offers a salutary reminder of how far and fast the world has moved on.

A malign and disruptive force

The Korean peninsula is divided precisely because in 1945 Stalin made a grab for it. Two days after the United States Army Air Force dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Russia declared war on Japan. Although Manchuria was Stalin’s principal objective, to occupy, or at least to plunder, Korea looked ripe for the picking too. The Japanese had annexed Korea in 1910, and in August 1945 there were large numbers of Japanese troops there as well as in China.

There were, however, no western allied troops near the Korean peninsula that month, when the Japanese surrendered. There were Russians in Vladivostock, though. And there were, of course, the Chinese. Except that there were two Chinas – that of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, the official ally of the United States and Britain, and that of Mao Tse-tung’s Communists.

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The Communists were demanding that the Japanese surrender to them, while Chiang Kai-shek expected the Americans to insist they surrender only to him. Meanwhile, the US ambassador in China warned President Truman that if the Communists acquired surrendered Japanese ordnance, the country would dissolve into “fratricidal civil war”, and communist revolution.

The US State Department concluded “our forces should occupy quickly as much of the industrial areas of Korea and Manchuria as we can”. Consequently Truman ordered US forces to “occupy the Port of Dairen [formerly Port Arthur, in Manchurian China] and a port in Korea… if those ports have not at that time been taken over by Soviet forces.”

Stalin frustrated these objectives, principally by naval blockade of several Chinese ports, including Dairen, except below the 38th Parallel in Korea, the Americans beating him to it. And so the Japanese north of the 38th Parallel surrendered to the Soviets, while those to the south surrendered to the Americans, which is why the peninsula has been divided since 1945.

Russia’s “malign and disruptive force”, to use a phrase applied by the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, to President Putin’s recent activity, has been at the root of the Korean problem ever since.

The opening of the Soviet archives revealed that this malign disruptiveness was behind the North’s invasion of the South in June 1950, rather than that of Chairman Mao. Although the invasion was very much Kim il-sung’s own initiative, by the logic of the Cold War, the unification of the peninsula under a communist government was clearly in the interests of Stalin’s Russia. Likewise, by the logic of Marxism, so it was to China, but Mao appears to have been more circumspect.

Soviet intelligence, through its penetration of government and intelligence agencies in Washington and London, had concluded that US atomic bomb stockpiles were not as great as feared, and that the continuing defence cuts in both countries meant that President Truman would not intervene in Korea.[1.  Stalin was wrong about Truman. The president took a stand, with United Nations backing, and sent in troops. So did the British prime minister, Clement Attlee.] The archive also shows that China acquiesced only reluctantly after Kim il-sung told Mao that Stalin had approved the invasion.

Chinese involvement was initially much less than that of the Russians, until the US-led counter-offensive began to come close to the Yalu River, the border with China. At that point the Russians stepped up their material support and the Chinese sent in ground troops.

The war came to a negotiated halt in July 1953, with a “demilitarised zone” close to the 38th Parallel under United Nations supervision, with the headquarters of the UN mission at Panmunjom. The Korean peninsula has thereby been preserved, so to speak, in light-blue aspic ever since – underwritten by 30,000 US troops in the South, with another 40,000 in reserve in Japan.

The North’s next steps

Soon after the fighting ended, Kim Il-Sung began laying the foundations for the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme. After his death, his son, Kim Jong-Il, continued the programme, producing weapons-grade material through uranium enrichment.

With the death of Kim Jong-Il in 2011, and the succession of his son Kim Jong-un, the “weaponisation” programme was intensified, as well as the rhetoric; but to what end?

Sources suggest that Kim Jong-un is less interested in unification than regime survival. Clearly, the former isn’t possible without the latter, though the former might be the guarantee of the latter – though only at impossible cost if unification were attempted by force. Accordingly, Kim Jong-un made a key change in national policy: domestic economic development was to have equal priority with the armed forces. Otherwise popular materialism might undermine the regime as it did in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact. It is significant that in President Moon’s and Kim Jong-un’s joint “Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification on the Korean Peninsula” the word “prosperity” is centre-stage.

And here, perhaps, has been the opportunity. A defensive rather than expansionist policy in Pyongyang means that both sides – the DPRK (plus China) and the US (plus the Republic of South Korea) – have more room to manoeuvre. And, China, arguably, has just as much, if not more, to fear from a nuclear-armed DPRK than the US.

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But the problem to date has been China’s indifference to the problem. Five years ago, I spoke at length about Korea with a Cambridge-educated Chinese general. He deplored the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme and acknowledged that the only peaceful future lay in China’s taking a lead. “But we don’t want to own the problem,” he said.

My reply was that China had no choice, and had to start seeing the problem as an immediate one. Anyone standing within 20 yards of General Mark Milley, the US Army’s chief of staff, at a conference in London last year would have heard him making the same point with the insistent emphasis that five years down the line and the recent ICBM tests required.

It would appear that the message – conveyed not least in President Trump’s tweets – has at last sunk in in Beijing, for something “tectonic” evidently happened during Kim Jong-un’s visit with President Xi in March.

So where are the Russians now – who also have much to fear from a nuclear-armed DPRK – in this mess of their original making? It would appear that they are non-players. Perhaps President Putin has surrendered strategic influence in the Far East through his malign disruption in Syria and Ukraine (and, indeed, Salisbury).

Perhaps he has become strategically fixed.

This would be entirely consistent with an alternative reading of his “malign and disruptive force”: that he is not a master strategian, but an opportunist tactician.

And in that respect he has a great deal in common with Stalin in 1945.

Further Reading: Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War, Sergei Goncharov and John Lewis (Stanford University Press, 1993)

Tomorrow the jury will reassemble to answer the question, “What “event” of 2017 will in the long-run prove far MORE consequential than currently supposed; and why?” (Added: Here are their answers).

ELIOT COHEN: TRUMP’S JERUSALEM DECISION

President Trump’s decision to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital produced the expected quotient of gasps, head-shaking, and finger-waving from the establishment. Even for those of us who loathe the man and are inclined to oppose anything he does simply because he does it, it has already turned out to be a forgettable moment. In so doing it is a reminder that is only when an absurd policy collapses that we can see just how silly it was all along.

Behind the unwillingness to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital lay not the unresolved issues of Israeli-Palestinian peace and sovereignty over territories occupied and administered by Jordan until the Six Day War in 1967. Rather, it originated in the original, and very dead, partition plan of 1947 which proposed an international status for the Holy City. Since Israel’s parliament, foreign ministry and prime minister’s office are all in the western part of the city – which everyone assumes will stay Israeli no matter what – the policy was senseless.

Indeed, what was striking was just how indifferent Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi (among other Arab capitals) were to what happened to Jerusalem. Perhaps what was important, though not consequential, was the manifestation of a simple reality: other conflicts and developments in the Middle East matter a lot more than whether external powers recognise a seventy year old fact.

PAUL LAY: BREXIT

Brexit will be of less consequence than one might expect from Britain’s obsessive media coverage, made worse by the Manichaean world of social media, where recriminatory wishful thinking marks the extremes on both sides. The UK and the 27 EU nations are friends, allies and – most importantly –trading partners, and will remain so.

The negotiations will be fraught, even unpleasant on occasion – that is democratic politics – but both sides have a fundamental interest in reaching a relatively amicable and reasonable solution. Once that is achieved, one hopes that the UK will finally address its deep-rooted problems: a poor technical education system and a crass public sphere. Similarly, the EU should concentrate on the challenges of immigration and the rise of far-right ideologies among the Vysegrad countries (and, to a lesser extent, in France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands). Germany faces an existential challenge, too: how does it transform itself – urgently – from a manufacturing powerhouse of hardware into one fit for the Fourth Revolution? It is a long way behind Silicon Valley, Israel and the other software pioneers, and it is not helped by the instability following Merkel’s unmasking.

If anyone will be harmed by Brexit, it is most likely to be the Republic of Ireland, though even that, in the long term, may result in a united island, which will be largely welcomed in Britain, but create anxieties, not least economic ones, in Ireland. Those six counties are expensive.

VICTORIA SCHOFIELD: MUGABE’S ‘END’

The fall of President Robert Mugabe will prove less momentous for the twenty million Zimbabweans (including four million exiles living in South Africa and the UK ) than at first anticipated.

For decades Africa watchers have lamented the iron hold which the 93-year old Mugabe retained on Zimbabwe since independence in 1980; supported by the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), he ran the country as a one-party state.  When news  broke in November 2017 of his forced retirement, brokered by the same military who had sustained his authority,  Zimbabwean politics appeared to be at a turning-point. There were high expectations that the people could look forward to a more democratic form of government, with checks and balances on presidential authority and a more harmonious relationship with the minority white population. The symbolic return of the  Zimbabwean white farmer, Robert Smart, one of several  thousand evicted from their lands during the Mugabe regime,  was indicative of a more benign approach.

But it now appears that the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who also depends on the support of the ZNA, will replace one style of dictatorial rule by another (Presidential ‘elections’ next September notwithstanding). There is to be no truth and reconciliation and no accountability for Mugabe’s excesses. Instead while the former President enjoys a generous retirement package at state expense, the same autocracy, nepotism and human rights abuses will continue.

ALLAN MALLINSON: NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

A historian’s business is the past, not the future. That said, if journalism is the first rough draft of history, it’s perhaps legitimate to comment on how that draft is written.

“In the long-run we’re all dead” (Keynes), but let’s define the long-run as the next ten years. And in that time, despite the advances in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear weapons technology (specifically, miniaturisation of a nuclear detonator) this year, and testing of an “intercontinental” ballistic missile, I do not believe, as some fear, we shall see war on the Korean Peninsula. (I’d prefer to say “should not”, but the question to the jury isn’t phrased in the conditional).

Here’s why I don’t envisage a war. First, it’s not in China’s and Russia’s interests that the DPRK develops a credible capability, since that would change respective relationships with the DPRK to their disadvantage. Equally, it’s not in their interests that the US resorts to arms to prevent the DPRK developing that capability, for besides the law of unintended consequences, it would mean the ultra-long-term intrusion of the US into East Asia, and the border of an enlarged Republic of Korea on the Yalu River.

Above all, war isn’t in the DPRK’s – and specifically Kim Jong-un’s – interests. The DPRK’s forces are equipped and trained for conventional, not guerrilla, warfare, and would be as roundly defeated as were Saddam’s in the Gulf War. (And I do not think that, given the purpose for which the US would go to war, the US would shrink from using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary). Kim is not irrational. His nuclear programme is almost certainly based on the same logic as Nato’s during the Cold War: if conventional forces are too expensive, rely on nuclear. He has a growing middle class, and the universal vice – or virtue – of the middle class is materialism. Kim’s long-term aim is regime survival. He will probably not have much Latin, but he will know the import of “Sic semper tyrannis.” Certainly, friends in China will be able to tell him about the fall of the unassailable Robert Mugabe after Zimbabwe’s General Chiwenga visited Beijing for “consultations.”

I don’t rule out pre-emptive strikes, or some very nasty surrogate bloodletting, but regional war? No.

Perhaps only that voters in those countries believe their national security and prosperity no longer depends on their own leaders. In other words that it doesn’t much matter who is titular premier. Austria’s defence and security strategy seems anyway to be one of hopeful ambiguity. Since regaining sovereignty in 1955, the country has been constitutionally “permanently neutral.” Yet while Austria is not in Nato therefore, as a member of the EU she is associated with the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the aspirations for an EU army. As a member of the Eurozone, her prosperity is effectively managed by the ECB in Frankfurt, while the wealth itself is created smoothly by the Austrians’ own modified Germanic work ethic (It is no coincidence that their kaffe und kuchen is better than that of their larger neighbour, or that the Vienna Philharmonic’s playing is more pleasing than that of Berlin’s).

Chancellor of Austria? Anyone could do it.

New Zealand may be a far away country of which we directly know comparatively little, but is the challenge of leadership that great? There’s little more that anyone could do to weaken New Zealand’s national security anyway, since Helen Clark, the then prime minister, effectively scrapped the air force in 2001. (The first “courtesy visit” by the new Chinese aircraft carriers will no doubt generate anxious telephone calls to Canberra and Washington). As for the economy, the OECD’s recent forecast suggests that “a strong recovery in business investment, ongoing strength in tourism and the recent increase in dairy prices should support growth.”

Prime Minister of New Zealand? No big deal.

But leader of big neighbour Australia, or in Austria’s case, Germany? That’s a different matter. And what suggests it’s a different matter is the age of their present leaders: Malcolm Turnbull, 63 yesterday [his birthday is Tue 24 Oct], and Angela Merkel, also 63.

Hearing truth spoken unto power

Perhaps that’s why, at 39, President Macron is so troubling, even though his wife is older than both Turnbull and Merkel. Within months of becoming president he managed to lose his chief of defence, Général d’armée Pierre de Villiers (61). Aristocracy and generalship have not always been a good combination – in France as well as Britain; but aristocracy has often proved more prepared to speak truth unto power. The former French chief’s full name is Pierre Le Jolis de Villiers de Saintignon. A French general with a particule speaking his mind to a president young enough to be his son: it must have been an interesting occasion.

Tony Blair’s former speech writer, Philip Collins, wrote a thoughtful piece in The Times on Saturday under the headline “Youth is no substitute for wisdom of age”. Although focusing on political leadership, Collins included some non-political reminders of youthful prodigy – men and women who did great things in their early thirties, including Claude Monet, Alan Turing and Marie Curie (though not, interestingly, Jesus Christ, crucified c. 33). Nor did he include any military leaders, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, who commanded the Army of Italy at 26 and became First Consul at 30, though in fairness, in recent times there have been few successful military leaders who were not in their late 40s or 50s.

Of Général de Villiers’ antagonist Collins writes:

“The really notable thing about Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! is not the age of its leader. It is the novelty of the movement. Macron has managed the perfect combination of experience and freshness. His movement can therefore do both politics and anti-politics at the same time.”

The lessons of history

Can you really fool enough of the people for long enough this way? We’ll just have to see if the Janus approach is ultimately any more successful in France than it was in Britain under Blair. But Collins’ central proposition is that “it takes more than an energetic prodigy to run a country.” He does of course point out that “Mr Corbyn is not a man of experience or wisdom, in spite of his age” (68). However, he is wrong when he says that “the youthful John F Kennedy had, in part through his impetuosity, led the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe [while at] the height of the Cold War, three politicians — Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher, all of whom had had long careers — found a way through their problems.”

He’s right about the second bit – or rather, that Reagan and Thatcher led (forcefully) Gorbachev through his problems – but not that JFK (45), contrary to older, wiser counsels, impelled the world towards war during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In fact, if anything, the opposite is true.

A nuclear catastrophe certainly looked in the making: when on October 27 an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and as a result an invasion force was stood-to in Florida. The US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, just a year older than JFK, said:

“I thought it was the last Saturday I would ever see.”

However, it was the military advice that was hawkish, and Kennedy had some difficulty controlling it. The chief of the air staff, Curtis LeMay (56), the great WW2 advocate and practitioner of strategic air power, had wanted to destroy the missile sites, with their Russian personnel, as soon as the aerial reconnaissance had located them.

One of the reasons for Kennedy’s determination not to rush to arms was that he had just read Barbara Tuchman’s recently published The Guns of August, an indictment of the mechanistic march to war in 1914 after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.[1.  Barbara Tuchman (1912–89) was an American journalist and historian, a lecturer at Harvard and the US Navy War College. Kennedy had a high regard for The Guns of August, published in Britain with the title August 1914, which he sent to senior officers and Washington staff.]

“Youth is no substitute for wisdom of age” Collins writes, but the “wisdom of the ages” is a different thing, and that wisdom is not reserved solely for the aged. Kennedy was not just applying personal experience, but wisdom garnered by others – from history.

There was a telling intervention during the Royal United Services Institute’s annual conference in June this year, held jointly with the British and American armies. The theme of change, innovation and futurism was becoming so dominant at one point that the chief of the US Army, General Mark Milley, ex-Special Forces and Ivy League graduate, warned of “the arrogance, the conceit, of the present”, cautioning against making too much of immediate personal experience and too little of the longer view and its hard-won understanding. That way, he said, in trying to anticipate the changing character of war you were less likely to lose sight of its enduring nature.

A rather remarkable book to be published next month shows why. The Bramall Papers: Reflections on War and Peace – a collection of essays, lectures and speeches going back fifty years and ranging over several centuries – is a coda to a long lifetime’s thinking and practising the strategic art by Field Marshal the Lord Bramall of Rushfield (93). Having the Military Cross pinned on one’s chest by Field Marshal Montgomery in 1945 is not in itself a warrant of integrity and judgement (the late Robert Maxwell of infamous memory was similarly decorated), but a career ending with the appointment of Chief of the Defence Staff when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister certainly is, especially when followed by continuous engagement with defence matters in the House of Lords (including opposition to the Iraq invasion on strategic grounds) and a number of heavyweight publications. The Bramall Papers were therefore never going to be of merely historical interest; the value of their distilled wisdom is in their enduring relevance. Here is the field marshal (writing in 1970 as a brigadier at the Imperial Defence College) on “The Application of Force in the Future”, in particular on “Threatened Violence” (added emphasis):

“A deterrent may take the form of a credible or at least plausible defensive capability… or it may be more appropriate and cheaper to base it on a nuclear counter threat. Precisely what constitutes a credible deterrent, and how much a potential aggressor is deterred by it, as opposed to being held back by other constraints, must remain a matter of speculation. A deterrent is clearly all the more credible if the vital interests of the deterring state and its capacity and will to defend them are seen to be clearly linked; but its effectiveness will also depend on the potential aggressor’ intentions and resolve as well as his capabilities. The self confidence which a deterrent gives one’s own side that it can exact an unacceptable toll from any potential aggressor is, in reality, just as important as the effect it has over an opponent.”

In his Times article, Philip Collins lists ten world leaders under 40, including Kim Jong-un (33), Supreme Leader of North Korea. [2.  TEN UNDER 40: THE WORLD’S YOUNGEST LEADERS Jacinda Ardern 37, Prime minister of New Zealand (from Oct 2017) Sebastian Kurz 31, Chancellor of Austria (Oct 2017) Leo Varadkar 38, Prime minister of Ireland (June 2017) Emmanuel Macron 39, President of France (May 2017) Volodymyr Groysman 39, Prime minister of Ukraine (2016) Jüri Ratas 39, Prime minister of Estonia (2016) Saleh Ali al-Sammad 38, Houthi, leader, president of the supreme political council of Yemen (2016) Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck 37, King of Bhutan (2006) Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani 37, Emir of Qatar (2013) Kim Jong-un 33, Supreme Leader of North Korea (2011)]As I suggested in a piece for UnHerd in August, Kim Jong-un’s drive for nuclear weapons is probably as much if not more to do with securing the regime internally as it is from deterring an almost entirely illusory threat of American invasion. Kim needs to deliver greater living standards, not least to North Korea’s nascent middle class, to avoid the fate of many former Communist regimes, and to do this he has to find money from defence. Nuclear weapons are the cheaper option.

War – or the avoidance of war – has often been made with bribes. It’s not nice, it’s not ethical, and it’s not always effective (as payment of the Danegeld showed). But war, said one of its smartest practitioners, General James Wolfe (who on his death, at the victory over the French at Quebec, was just 33), is “an option of difficulties.”

Who knows what counsels the strange but perfectly rational Kim Jong-un takes. President Trump (71) is, however, advised by a Defense Secretary and National Security Adviser who not only have the wisdom of age (67 and 55 respectively) but of the ages, since both are famously well read. They will certainly know the subtleties of President Kennedy’s strategy in the Cuban missile crisis – a credible non-nuclear threat of invasion, a frightening arsenal of nuclear weapons, a willingness to withdraw local military advantage in Turkey, and “back channels of communication.” There really is no need for President Trump to get this wrong.

But I wonder: would Jacinda Ardern or Sebastian Kurz have anything useful to say if either Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un asked their advice?

Of course you had to click on the piece to discover that Trump’s UN speech had not been described as ‘Hate speech’ by any international arbiter of hate-speech (whether or not any such entity is imaginable or desirable).  Instead the clicker would learn that it had only been described as such by ‘some of the member nations he [Trump] singled out for criticism’.  Specifically it had been criticised by the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who said, “Trump’s ignorant hate speech belongs in medieval times, and not the UN.”  To which one might only reply, as Mandy Rice-Davies immortally put it, “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

The BBC’s reporting (they subsequently thought better and chose “Trump’s first UN speech met with criticism from some leaders” as the headline) was not an aberration.  It was in fact the perfect embodiment of a central problem – a problem which sits not with the BBC but with the UN and simply seeps out from there.  There should be a term for it.  UN-itis, or UN-thinking perhaps.  Because it is a specifically UN-centred thought-disease.

The problem that the UN suffers from today is the same problem it has suffered from since its inception in 1945.  In principle it is a very good thing to have a place where the world’s leaders can meet: a physical embodiment of the concept of the ‘community of nations’.  In reality a problem emerges from the first time they meet.  On the one hand you have, say, the elected President of the United States and the other governments of the world’s democracies.  And then you have the other countries: the states led by countries which have meaningless, engineered or rigged elections (Iran, for instance), and the governments of countries which don’t even bother to go through with that charade (e.g. North Korea).

What are the world’s democracies to do in this chamber when they meet the world’s dictators?  Are they to regard themselves as a cut above the others – as indeed they are?  Or would this be terribly impolitic?  The consensus forever is that it is impolitic.  If the delegates of the world’s democracies at the United Nations were to regularly turn to the world’s despots and remind them of their true moral and representative standing then the business of the UN would break down daily.  Instead a form of diplomatic politesse exists, where people listen thoughtfully to the latest eruption from the noble representative of some satrapy or other and grants its emissions a similar weight and judgement as it would accord to representatives who are elected by and accountable to their people.

Throughout its history the UN has occasionally hit obstacles so grotesque that the world has paid attention to this inbuilt problem.  The most striking was in 1975 when the UN passed the infamous Resolution 3379 which declared that ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’ which was ‘a threat to world peace.’  This motion – supported by a panoply of racist and dictatorial regimes across the Middle East and Africa – was led by the genocidal wife-eater Idi Amin.  The night after it was passed there was a party to celebrate the motion, thrown in Idi Amin’s honour, by the then UN Secretary General – formerly SS Oberleutnant – Kurt Waldheim.  And so the old racism met the new.

It was the UN’s usefulness as a mouthpiece for the world’s dictators that led a growing distaste for the institution in the country which gave it a berth on 1st Avenue New York.  One low point in relations was reached in 1983 when the then deputy chief to the UN mission, Charles Lichtenstein, responded to a proposal to move the UN from New York by saying, “We will put no impediment in your way, and we will be down at the dock bidding you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.”

As President Trump found out this week, all these now almost ancient problems continue.  The Iranian regime – which has regularly called for the destruction of one UN-member state in particular, and has even done so from the podium of the UN itself – gets to present itself as some kind of arbiter of moral judgements.  And it is presented as such in the world’s press.  Only in UN-world can the American President condemn the Iranian and North Korean regimes only for those same regimes to be given equal or greater weight to sit in judgement on the American President.  And the effect of this seeps out.  After Trump’s UN speech the distinguished British journalist Michael Crick asked ‘When was the last time a world leader threatened to destroy an entire country?’ Only for his Twitter timeline to fill up with reminders of the various threats from the Ayatollahs among others.

But that is one of the things the UN’s strange moral universe propels.  It begins by embedding the idea that the world’s governments are effectively on a moral equilibrium.  And then in time people forget that the pretence is just that and judge the democracies worse than they judge the autocracies and dictatorships.  Nobody expects the Iranian regime to behave well and so they forget that it behaves badly.  Everybody expects the democracies to be better than they are and ends up judging them to be worse than they imagined.

The resulting 1st Avenue cocktail was appropriately summed-up some years ago by the writer Mark Steyn: “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former.”  Indeed it does.

The UN tastes more of North Korea and Iran than it does of the country in which its headquarters sit.  All of which is an ongoing irritation for the world’s democracies but a tragedy for the community of nations.

***

Donald Trump’s UN speech was discussed in UnHerd’s new weekly podcast.

In Korea they date back to the early 20th century, and the shadows have been lengthening ever since.

The collective psyche of North Korea today can only be understood in terms of its dark past, artificially preserved by a totalitarian regime without equal.

For 35 years, from the pseudo-treaty of annexation in 1910 to Emperor Hirohito’s surrender in 1945, the Korean peninsula was subject to brutal Japanese rule.

During the Second World War, over five million Koreans were pressed into forced labour, in which one in ten died.

Many tens of thousands of Korean women were conscripted for sex work for the Japanese military as “comfort women.”

Rehabilitation of such a country was never going to be easy… and it hasn’t been.

Birth of a Nation (Two Nations)

The first problem when war ended was forming an administration. Unlike other liberated countries of East Asia, there was no former colonial power or exiled government to retake control. At the Allies’ Moscow Conference in October 1944, the Russians agreed to declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. Stalin fulfilled his pledge on 8 August 1945, two days after the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Japan surrendered on 15 August (which North Korea celebrates as its national liberation day), and the Soviet Union, with troops nearest the peninsula, would quickly move into the vacuum. As an interim measure to disarm the Japanese occupation forces and repatriate 700,000 or so Japanese civilians, Moscow and Washington agreed to divide the peninsula along the 38th Parallel and administer their respective zones under United Nations trusteeship – Russia to the north, the US to the south.

The Korean candidates for leadership when sovereignty was devolved fell into two categories: Communists, who had fought against the Japanese in Manchuria and China with Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and ‘Nationalists’ in exile in the West, mainly the US. Of the Communists, the Russian-trained guerrilla leader Kim Il-Sung (Kim “one star”) soon emerged pre-eminent. Of the Nationalists, Syngman Rhee, a political refugee in America since 1904, emerged the strongest. Paradoxically, while Kim Il-Sung had been born into a Presbyterian family in the north, before abandoning his faith, Syngman Rhee had had a traditional Confucian education in the south, converting to Christianity in his late teens through the influence of American medical missionaries.

By the end of the three-year UN trusteeship, a third of the North’s population (around three million) had migrated to the South despite the North’s advantage in industry and raw materials (the South was largely agrarian, much poorer, and generally considered to be backward). The North therefore boycotted what were intended to be nationwide parliamentary elections, and consequently in August 1948 the South formed the Republic of Korea (ROK) with Syngman Rhee as president. The following month the North formed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) with Kim Il-Sung as “Eternal Leader”.

Encouraged by the DPRK, communists in the South began an insurgency which led to sporadic fighting along the border between the newly formed ROK Army and the DPRK’s Korean People’s Army (KPA). Atrocities on both sides were common. Nevertheless, in December 1948 the UN established a commission for the unification of Korea and the withdrawal of the occupation forces. While the commission oversaw the withdrawal of almost all US and Soviet forces in 1949, it made no progress towards unification.

The First of the Cold War’s Wars

On 25 June 1950, with the encouragement of Stalin and Mao, the KPA launched a massive offensive across the 38th Parallel – a full-blown invasion the South. The UN Security Council (UNSC) promptly passed a resolution calling for immediate cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of North Korean forces. Two days later, with no response from the DPRK, the UNSC passed an additional resolution calling on “Members of the United Nations [to] furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and restore international peace and security in the area.”

The ROK Army, which had no tanks or heavy artillery, was no match for the KPA, who were well equipped and organised along Soviet lines, and swelled by Korean guerrillas recently returned from the PLA’s war with Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Chinese. Seoul, the capital, fell within days.

The US sent what troops it could from Japan while other UN members (especially from the Commonwealth) began mustering their forces, but by September the KPA had largely overrun the South, with ROK Army and US forces falling back to the south-east corner around the port of Pusan.

General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the war in the Pacific, US commander-in-chief in Japan and now of UN forces in Korea (UN Command – UNC), at once made one of the boldest moves in all military history: an amphibious landing by two divisions – one Marines and one US Army, together with ROK units – at Inchon, just south-west of Seoul, quickly recapturing the capital. A shaken KPA began withdrawing north, taking with them many thousands of civilian hostages and forced labour, and executing many more. The summary execution by both sides of large numbers of political prisoners made for scenes reminiscent of the Second World War in Germany and Eastern Europe.

As UNC forces crossed the 38th Parallel, Kim Il-Sung appealed to both the Russians and Chinese for direct help. Stalin responded by sending more and better arms, including aircraft – and pilots – while in late October Mao sent men from the PLA under the banner of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Force (CPVF).

As the tide now turned against UNC, MacArthur loosed his Far East Air Forces (FEAF) to halt the advance of the Chinese and reinvigorated KPA, and to destroy potential shelter for the coming winter. As a result North Korean cities were devastated, including the capital, Pyongyang.

The images of devastation play a major part in the DPRK’s anti-American propaganda today. Despite the FEAF’s fire and fury, however, Chinese and KPA troops pushed the UNC back across the 38th Parallel, in January taking Seoul again.

And so throughout 1951 the fighting continued – push and return push – with mounting casualties, both military and civilian, and the country both sides of the border increasingly laid waste.

Talks of Peace 

Thoughts turned to a negotiated settlement, though Mao planned to negotiate while still fighting. When this proved too costly, however, he settled for an armistice of sorts along the ‘contact line’, just north of the 38th Parallel. By the end of the year, talks got under way at Panmunjom (which remains today the official location of the continuing ceasefire ‘negotiations’), although guerrilla fighting continued in large parts of the south.

The talks dragged on with little progress, the North Koreans’ thoughts increasingly those of Chairman Mao. In September 1952, fighting flared up again when the Chinese launched an offensive in the east to push back the UNC to the 38th Parallel, though it met with little success. Nevertheless, with the change of US presidents in January 1953, Dwight D Eisenhower succeeding Harry S Truman, the impetus for resolution increased (Eisenhower wanted to focus on the Cold War in Europe). Stalin’s death in March greatly helped: the Politburo was determined to see an end to the war and told Mao that they would withdraw material support.

Yet Mao was still reluctant to give up, seeing Korea (as well as French Indo-China) as his opportunity to export the revolution. In May he launched one last offensive, which the UNC brought to a halt after Chinese gains of around twenty miles closer to Seoul. In late July, the shooting war was more or less over, and peace negotiations under the auspices of the UN began again.

Peace: a Continuation of War by Other Means

And there – the demilitarised zone close to the 38th Parallel – and then – July 1953 – the Korean peninsula has continued ever since, preserved in light-blue aspic. Except that today the South is a prosperous and sophisticated polity, while the North remains the last Stalinist state surviving from the Cold War, and for the most part grindingly poor. And US troops remain in the South – 30,000 of them, with another 40,000 in reserve in Japan.

Soon after the fighting ended, however, Kim Il-Sung began laying the foundations for the DPRK’s nuclear weapons programme, which precipitated the first US-North Korean nuclear crisis in the early 1990s. In 1994, the subsequent Clinton administration devised an ‘Agreed Framework’ which almost literally defused the crisis by halting the programme (which would have produced enough plutonium for a significant number of bombs) in exchange for a normalisation of political and economic relations.

The game was not up, though. Kim Il-Sung died in 1994 not long after concluding the agreement. His son, Kim Jong-Il, long groomed for the succession, took over the leadership and began an alternative approach to producing weapons-grade material: uranium enrichment. In October 2002, the DPRK finally announced that they had such a programme, violating the framework agreement. The DPRK withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Thus began the second North Korean nuclear crisis. For a while it seemed that UN sanctions were containing the programme, until developments of late – principally an effective long-range ballistic missile and miniaturisation of the nuclear explosive initiator – have made the programme a clear and present danger.

But why now?

The death of Kim Jong-Il in December 2011, and the succession of his son Kim Jong-Un, seemed to accelerate both the “weaponisation” programme and the rhetoric. But to what end, exactly?

The general assessment was that Kim Jong-Il was interested solely in regime survival – as was his father, Kim Il-Sung, especially towards the end of his life when his rhetoric turned away from expansionism. Kim Jong-Un, however, has made an important change in national policy, albeit barely perceptible: domestic economic development now has equal priority with building up the armed forces. Beyond any genuine altruism, the regime’s leadership could not have been blind to the popular materialism which undermined Communism in the former Warsaw Pact. It is possible, therefore, that he regards nuclear weapons basically as a far cheaper way of preserving the regime from external threat, allowing him to put more resources into improving living standards (not least those of a nascent ‘middle class’), thereby preserving the regime from internal threat – however remote such a threat might seem at present.

This is conjecture, and does not wholly explain Kim Jong-Un’s increasing bombast. Yet herein, perhaps, lies a line of exploitation for both the US and for China – and  China, arguably, has just as much, if not more, to fear from a nuclear-armed DPRK than does the US.

Whatever the truth, for the time being the people of North Korea are prisoners of their history – or rather, the regime’s version of that history.