BBC News has a great article on N. Korea's anniversary, in which Professor Andrei Lankov from Seoul's Gukmin University argues that N. Korea stays a dictatorial quasi-communist regime because of the international community:
"The outside is terrified of collapse, so no-one is pushing North Korea hard enough," he says.The very economic disparity that makes life so miserable for North Korea's citizens would also mean an economic crisis for North Korea's neighbours if the borders came down.
For the same reason, he believes, nobody inside the country will risk a challenge to the autocratic stranglehold on power exercised by its dynastic ruler, Kim Jong-il.
Remember how leading up to the Iraq War, some people were making the argument that N. Korea was a bigger military threat and should be dealt with first? (There was a great Onion piece with the headline "Bush on North Korea: We Must Invade Iraq".)
Lankov shows that with N. Korea, the central issue isn't really about military threat. If N. Korea is trying to flex its nuclear muscles, it's only trying to finagle more aid from the outside to keep itself propped up.
When it comes to sustaining the economic prosperity of our allies (and, in turn, our own), it appears that issues like democracy, human rights and famine are not priorities.
For more on what's happened to Kim Jong-il, click here.
XTV, thanks for your comment. For me, convenient comparisons between the Iraq War and the Korean War implicitly argue for total isolationism; a position that no major political figure on national stage can afford to take seriously.
Many people argue that the U.S. should never have gone into Vietnam, but the Korean War, being the "Forgotten War" is rarely discussed in those terms. If the U.S. hadn't gone into the Korean War, South Korea simply would not exist, and all the prosperity it boasts today would never have become a reality. Does this "justify" the war? I don't know. But most youths in South Korea would absolutely agree that they're happy that U.S. intervened when North Korea began that war fifty years ago.
Of course, the conditions that began the Korean War are very different from those that began the Iraq War (starting from who initiated it) so perhaps an analogy should just be dropped.
FYI: After the Korean War, General MacArthur wanted to bomb "a necklace" of nuclear bombs above the Korean peninsula so that China would never think about crossing that border, and to ensure that the Korea "problem" is dealt with.