Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World

North Korea is a small country caught between China, to the north, and South Korea. Run as “a dynasty shared by one family and one party” (210), North Korea is a Communist dictatorship that rules over an impoverished nation of about 25 million with “arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials, internment camps, censorship, rule of fear, corruption, and a litany of horrors” (210). Isolated, playing regional powers against one another, and acting “the crazed, powerful weakling to good effect” (210), North Korea constitutes an ongoing, dangerous problem that no one has been able to solve.

Divided from China by the Yalu River, the Korean peninsula has often fallen victim to outside forces, including Mongol, Chinese, and Japanese empires. At the end of World War II, Korea was freed from Japanese control but divided along the 38th parallel between a Communist north, guarded by Russian troops, and a pro-American south. In 1950, after the US and Russia removed their forces, North Korea invaded South Korea, and, moving across the western coastal plain, “raced down the country almost to the tip of the southern coast” (213). Although the US didn’t need South Korea strategically, it also didn’t want its Asian allies to lose faith and “hedge their bets or go over to the Communist side” (214).