"'Credible military menace is now at the heart of North Korea's economic strategy--and of its very strategy for state survival,' Eberstadt wrote in a remarkably prescient 1999 book titled The End of North Korea."

--Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, October 23, 2003

The political partition of the Korean nation, to which the modern world has grown so accustomed, will not last indefinitely. The permanent two-state system in Korea is, asserts Nicholas Eberstadt, an unsustainable proposition. In this volume he demonstrates how the events unfolding in the Korean peninsula over the past decade have been signaling, with mounting pitch and power, that the division of Korea has already reached the limits of its viability. At some point in the years ahead, he avers, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which rules North Korea, will likely disappear from the political stage, and Korea will then reenter the international community as a united nation.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Harry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.