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Americans back. The fighting reached a stalemate roughly around the 38th parallel, where
it had all begun, and in 1953 the North Koreans, Chinese, and UN representatives (but not
South Korea) signed an armistice agreement ending hostilities and making the 38th paral-
lel a de facto border. The move separated thousands of families, and it remains one of the
more tragic outcomes of the Cold War. While both Koreas claim to aspire to reunification,
infrequent talks on the issue have made little progress.
BLUFFING AND BOMBS
If one were to believe the bellicose rhetoric that pours out of North Korea, the Korean
Peninsula is teetering constantly on the brink of war. Dire threats are de rigueur for
the North's state media, which regularly promises to reduce the South to a “sea of
fire” and overthrow its government of “puppets” and “stooges.” Worse, this bluster-
ing is sometimes punctuated by real action, such as North Korea's shelling of an is-
land off South Korea's west coast in late 2010, which drove tensions to heights not
seen since the Korean War. The death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in 2011
and the transfer of power to his young son, Kim Jong-un, added to worries about sta-
bility in the North and what it may do next. Some have justifiable concerns about
living next to such a prickly neighbor, especially with South Korea's largest city and
nearly half the population less than an hour's drive from the border.
Predicting the moves of a country as seemingly irrational as North Korea is a job
for experts and analysts, and even they regularly get it wrong. Nonetheless, pretty
much everyone is in agreement that the North's posturing is more bark than bite, cal-
culated at squeezing concessions out of its negotiating partners. The sad fact is that
stripped of all credibility, genuine allies, or diplomatic clout, periodic tantrums are
about the only tactic the North has left at its disposal.
With around two million troops clustered around the border (including almost
30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea), the possibility of a full-scale conflict can never
be completely ruled out, but it's worth remembering in the five decades since the
Korean War not once has there been a return to serious conflict, even after other ap-
parent tipping points like a North Korean bomb attack in Myanmar in 1983 that killed
much of South Korea's cabinet or fatal naval clashes in the West Sea in 2002. The
North has frequently demonstrated a healthy pragmatic streak, and many believe its
