North Korea. How we got here.

Reflecting on the North Korean summit, I realized how little I actually know about North Korea and how we got here. Here's a brief summary to help put things into perspective.

Contrary to what many folks believe, the division between the Koreas didn’t happen as a result of the Korean War. The schism occurred years before that. In 1910, Japan moved into the Korean peninsula as part of its colonization efforts and ruled the country for decades. Japan formally annexed the Korean Peninsula, which it had occupied five years earlier following the Russo-Japanese War. Over the next 35 years of colonial rule, the country modernized and industrialized significantly, but many Koreans suffered brutal repression at the hands of Japan’s military regime.

During World War II, Japan sent many Korean men to the front as soldiers or forced them to work in wartime factories, while thousands of young Korean women became “comfort women,” providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the United States and the then Soviet Union divvied the peninsula up into north and south factions. The divide was at 38 degrees north latitude, better known as the 38th parallel.

In 1948, the pro-U.S. Republic of Korea (or South Korea) was established in Seoul, led by the strongly anti-communist Syngman Rhee. In the northern industrial center of Pyongyang, the Soviets installed the dynamic young communist guerrilla Kim Il Sung, who became the first premier of the DPRK.

One problem remained: The new governments each believed that they should control the peninsula. With both leaders claiming jurisdiction over the entire Korean Peninsula, tensions soon reached a breaking point. In 1950, with the backing of the Soviet Union and China, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, setting off the Korean War. The United States came to the South’s aid, leading an army of some 340,000 United Nations troops in opposing the invasion. After three years of bitter fighting and more than 2.5 million military and civilian casualties, both sides signed an armistice in the Korean War in July 1953.

The agreement left the borders of North and South Korea essentially unchanged, with a heavily guarded demilitarized zone about 2.5 miles wide running roughly along the 38th parallel. A formal peace treaty, however, was never signed. Eventually, the two Koreas reached an agreement with borders that largely mirrored their previous stance along the 38th parallel.

After the war, North Korea was ruled by Kim Il Sung, the same leader that the Soviets had installed in the 1940s. Under Kim Il Sung, North Korea became increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. The government kept a tight leash on its people, restricting travel and press, and regulating the economy.

After the Korean War, Kim Il Sung shaped his country according to the ideology of “Juche” (self-reliance). The state assumed tight control over the economy, collectivized agricultural land and effectively asserted ownership over all private property. Communist state-controlled media and restrictions on all travel into or out of the country helped preserve the veil of secrecy around North Korea’s political and economic operations and maintain its isolation from most of the international community. The country’s population would remain almost entirely Korean, except for a small number of Chinese transplants.

Thanks to investment in mining, steel production and other heavy industries, North Korea’s civilian and military economy initially outpaced its southern rival. With Soviet backing, Kim built his military into one of the world’s strongest, even as many ordinary civilians grew poorer. By the 1980s, however, South Korea’s economy boomed, while growth in the north stagnated.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc hurt North Korea's economy and left the Kim regine with Communist China as its only remaining ally. In 1994, Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Il.

The new leader instituted a new policy of “Songun Chong’chi,” or military first, establishing the Korean People’s Army as the leading political and economic force in the nation. The new emphasis widened existing inequalities between the military and elite classes and the vast majority of ordinary North Korean citizens.

Over the course of the 1990s, widespread flooding, poor agricultural policies and economic mismanagement led to a period of extended famine, with hundreds of thousands of people dying of starvation and many more crippled by malnutrition. The emergence of a robust black market to meet such shortages would force the government to take measures to liberalize the Communist state-run economy.

North Korea’s economic woes let up a bit due to improved relations with South Korea, which adopted a “sunshine policy” of unconditional aid towards its northern neighbor in the early 2000s. Around the same time, North Korea came closer than ever before to forging peace with the United States, even hosting U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Pyongyang in 2000.

But relations between the two Koreas, and between North Korea and the West, soon deteriorated, due to North Korea’s aggressive efforts to become a nuclear power. Though Kim Jong Il had pledged to abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) signed in 1995, in the early 2000s reports began to surface of underground nuclear facilities and ongoing research into the production of highly enriched uranium.

By 2003, North Korea had withdrawn from the NPT, expelled international weapons inspectors and resumed nuclear research at a facility in Yongbyon. Three years later, Kim’s government announced it had carried out its first underground nuclear test.

After Kim Jong Il died after a heart attack in December 2011, the job of supreme leader went to the second youngest of his seven children, then-27-year-old Kim Jong Un.

State-run media reports Kim Jong Un was born January 8, 1982. He is the son of Kim Jong-Il and the grandson of Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Un is his father’s third and youngest son, and was born to his father’s third wife, Ko Young Hee. In the 1990s, he attended two private schools in Switzerland, the International School of Berne in Gümligen and the Liebefeld Steinhölzli school near Bern. He later returned to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, where he attended the Kim Il-Sung Military University.

Kim Jong Nam was the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. From roughly 1994 to 2001, he was considered the heir apparent to his father. He was thought to have fallen out of favor after embarrassing the regime in 2001 with a failed attempt to visit Tokyo Disneyland with a false passport, although Kim Jong Nam said his loss of favor was due to advocating reform. The incident caused his father to cancel a planned visit to China due to the embarrassment it caused him. Kim Jong Nam was exiled from North Korea in 2003, becoming an occasional critic of his family's regime.

In 2009, Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam's younger half-brother, was appointed to the state’s National Defense Commission. The next year, he was promoted to the rank of four-star general and was named vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and of the Central Military Commission. Kim Jong Un, was named heir apparent in September 2010.

When Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, Kim Jong Un was placed at the head of the party, the state and the army within a matter of weeks. Kim Jong Nam died on February 13, 2017 in Malaysia as the result of what the US Department of State eventually determined was an assassination conducted by North Korea using VX nerve agent. It was believed that Kim Jong-Nam had friendly ties to China. Outside analysts considered him as a possible candidate to replace Kim Jong Un if the North Korean leadership imploded and China, traditionally an ally, sought a replacement in its Communist state.

In 2012, state media reported that Kim was married to Ri Sol-Ju and has a daughter named Ju-Ae. The same year, Kim assumed the title of marshal of the North Korean army, the highest military rank in the country. He briefly disappeared from the public eye in 2014 and later reappeared with a cane.

In 2006, Kim Jong Un's father, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and his generals, started using nuclear weapons tests as a show of strength to force the Americans to the negotiating table. The goal was a peace treaty, followed by the withdrawal of US-troops from the Korean peninsula and a generous economic aid package for the starving rogue state.

Back then, the fact that a paranoid and secretive regime in Pyongyang acquired the bomb was highly troubling to China. A nuclear-armed North Korea upset the balance of power in East Asia and beyond. The relationship between China and North Korea, who in a 1961 treaty swore to each other eternal loyalty, has long since cooled off.

Kim Jong Il provoked the Chinese in the fall of 2005 when he decided to boycott the six party talks, which China had organized. The talks were to involve China, North and South Korea, the United States, Russia and Japan. The talks were originally designed to dissuade North Korea's leadership from pursuing its nuclear ambitions. With the bomb in hand, North Korea's military would hardly allow it to be negotiated back out of its arsenal.

Politically, the Chinese lost FACE in those talks. All diplomatic, financial and rhetorical attempts to dissuade North Korean from pursuing its nuclear ambitions utterly failed. The Americans, too, failed and stood before the ruins of their failed strategy. Since then they have repeatedly rejected direct talks with Kim because they don't trust him. The six party talks were supposed to help integrate North Korea into the international community, alas to no avail.

As a result, Washington's rhetoric became increasingly more bellicose:

"The United States condemns this provocative act. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for consequences of such action" was the typical bluster from Bush and Obama.

Perhaps North Korea's nuclear armament could have been avoided had Washington engaged in direct talks with North Korea from the start, thereby granting them the international recognition they crave. For years, North Korea has rattled its saber for attention and help. It looks like President Donald J. Trump listened when no one else would. What's next? The future has not yet been written.