The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future
by Victor Cha

Much discussed and often maligned, precious little is known or understood about North Korea, the world’s most controversial and isolated country. In The Impossible State Victor Cha pulls back the curtain, providing an unprecedented insight into North Korea’s history, the rise of the Kim family dynasty, and the obsessive personality cult that surrounds them. He illuminates the repressive regime’s complex economy and culture, its appalling record of human-rights abuses, its belligerent relationship with its neighbours and the United States, and analyzes the regime’s major security issues – from the seemingly endless war with its southern counterpart to its terrifying nuclear ambitions – all in the light of the destabilizing effects of Kim Jong-il’s recent death. How has this enigmatic nation-state continued to survive when it regularly violates its own citizens’ inalienable rights and has suffered severe famine, global economic sanctions, a collapsed economy, and near-total isolation from the rest of the world? Cha reveals a land facing a pivotal and disquieting transition of power from tyrannical father to inexperienced son, and delves into the ideology that leads an oppressed, starving populace to cling so fiercely to its failed leadership.With rare personal anecdotes from the author’s time in Pyongyang and his tenure as a White House adviser, this engagingly written, authoritative, and highly accessible account offers much-needed answers to the most pressing questions about North Korea and ultimately warns of a regime that might be closer to its end than many might think – a political collapse for which the Western world may be woefully unprepared.

Reviews

This scrupulously researched account provides an alarming insight into how a long-running nightmare for North Koreans could soon become a geopolitical crisis for the rest of us
Stephen Robinson (Sunday Times)

Provocative, frightening, and never more relevant than today as an untested new leader takes charge of the world’s most unpredictable nuclear power
Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent 

Engrossing... It offers perhaps the best recent one-volume account of North Korea’s history, economics and foreign relations
 (The Economist)

Cha demonstrates an intimate familiarity with the regime’s contradictions... The thesis is clear: the world’s most closed-off state needs to open up to survive, but breaking its hermetic seal may well precipitate its demise
 (The New Yorker)

He uses his first-hand and often surreal experiences of dealing with North Korean officialdom to telling effect in the book. But Cha is also a scholar of Korean and Asian affairs, so can take a historical view of the North Korean problem and set it in its wider international context… [An] impressive analysis
Richard Cockett (Literary Review)

An up-close, insightful portrait... The Impossible State is a clearheaded, bold examination of North Korea and its future
 (Washington Post)

A powerful portrait of one of the world’s most troubled and troublesome countries [and] a fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of recent American foreign policy by a leading official. . . . A must-read combination for anybody interested in Korea, east Asia, or global security more generally
Gideon Rose, Editor, Foreign Affairs 

[This] excellent, comprehensive book explains as much as it is possible to explain the nature of this ‘impossible state’, how it has developed under the Kim dynasty and why it endures as a major thorn in the side of the global community
Jonathan Fenby (The Times)