Rare praise and rare company indeed. Cumings’s work may not be familiar to some ABR readers, but he is perhaps the foremost US academic apologist for the appalling thugs who continue to rule that unhappy country. He doesn’t think that North Korea invaded the South in 1950. He whitewashes the North Korean gulag and puts the blame for the current confrontation on – you guessed it – the United States. To call his work ‘enlightened’ raises the question: by what? The radiance emanating from the Young Leader, perhaps?

To what extent Broinowski shares these views is unclear: it might be more honest if he declared his own position rather than offering a flip reference to Cumings’s works.

Alan N. Cowan, Yarralumla, ACT

Richard Broinowski replies:

Alan Cowan appears neither to have read Paul French’s North Korea, nor my review of his book, with any thoroughness. French is no apologist for what is, by any measure, a dysfunctional régime, with chronic food shortages and gulags. But, rare among Western observers, French tries, and mainly succeeds, in analysing the reasons for the régime’s hostility towards its external environment. Inescapably, much of this is due to US actions – in dividing the country at the 38th parallel in 1945 without consulting the Koreans; in bombing North Korea flat during the Korean War; in imposing trade embargoes; and threatening invasion, régime change, and nuclear strikes if they don’t behave.

Nor, to my knowledge, did Bruce Cumings (the Korea historian with whom I compared French) ever suggest, as Dr Cowan asserts, that North Korea did not invade South Korea in June 1950. But Cumings showed how provocations occurred on either side, and how Syngman Ree would have invaded North Korea first if John Foster Dulles had let him off the US leash.

Dr Cowan appears to be stuck in a Cold War mentality. The sooner this mindset can be abandoned in favour of the more positive initiatives that brokered the 1994 Framework Arrangements and the Six Party Talks in 2003, the quicker will North Korea paranoia and regional tensions diminish.