The credibility of the US government is so much in doubt in the context of the Iraq War and the public discourse about the threats to individual liberty that have come about in the context of the so-called war on terrorism that it is hard to credit anything coming out of an organization that was created and is funded by that government. Nevertheless, Andrew S. Natsios's account of the famine that was experienced in North Korea in the 1990s, published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was created and is funded by Congress, gives a wide range of information about multiple causes of the food shortages that North Koreans suffered and the multiple motives of their and other governments' response to them. Natsios deals with the reasons that the famine could have occurred and how North Korea and the international community responded to it. A key argument is that North Korea's political environment and leadership were most responsible for the impact of the famine and that this fact, together with the profound reluctance of the resident regime to change its approach to economic management and public administration, is the principal reason that the future of North Korea's infrastructure--thus the well-being of North Koreans--continues to be in doubt.
The question that Natsios says his report raises for American public policy is "how to balance moral values against political, diplomatic, and geostrategic interests" (2000, p. xi). He says that is problematic because "what may seem to be the correct moral course may in fact lead one into deeper and darker moral dilemmas while achieving little or nothing of substance" (p. xi). What that comes down to, once the message is decoded, is that with a country like North Korea, which the author basically says cannot take care of itself, the US has to measure the political costs of providing practical aid to a "troglodytic government" that is bound to be ungrateful in any case. On the other hand, Nats...