The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (also known as the DPRK, and North Korea) is a special case in the annals of modern economic development, and not a good one: for it is an economy that once achieved a relatively advanced level of modernization, but then proceeded into prolonged, even catastrophic decline.

Barack Obama’s presidency has had profoundly negative consequences for our national security. From debilitating cuts in defense budgets, to gutting national missile defense efforts, to his unwillingness to acknowledge a continuing war against terrorism, to his inability to stem the nuclear proliferation threats posed by North Korea and Iran....the picture is bleak.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

Nicholas Eberstadt explains the state of the North Korean economy in response to a series of seven questions.

Press release/summary for The North Korean Economy, by Nicholas Eberstadt.

North Korea presents a troubling paradox in modern development: it is one of the dwindling number of countries continually on the verge of famine, but it also the newest member of the select club of states to possess both nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic rocketry. This marriage of economic privation...

There is a grim coherence to North Korea's political economy, and a ruthless logic undergirding it--one that unreservedly subordinates economic welfare to augmentation of political power.

For America and her allies, dealing with the North Korean regime (to borrow a phrase from the current administration’s own Samantha Power) is a “problem from hell.”