One can't help feeling sorry for North Koreans. In addition to what, by all accounts, is a pretty rough life, short on political freedoms and Michelin-starred restaurants, they have a dearth of television channels. Pyongyang keeps trying to launch a satellite – which the US and Japan perversely insist is some kind of long-range missile – but it has not managed to get one into orbit. It tried in 2006 but, far from reaching Alaska as the Americans claim it can, it disintegrated 35-40 seconds after launch, plopping harmlessly into the sea. That mishap has deprived the isolated country's 23m people of the range of viewing options they deserve. For the moment, at least, they must do without Pyongyang, 90210 and North Korean Idol.
Perhaps it is lack of anything to do in the evenings that is making Pyongyang's leaders particularly short-tempered these days. This week, they cut the military hotline to Seoul and put their million-man army on war-readiness in protest at South Korea's joint military exercise with the US. They have wheeled out standard language threatening to reduce their southern neighbour to “a sea of fire” and have said they can no longer guarantee the safety of civilian airliners overflying their territory.
Kim Jong-il and his merry men appear to be upset at the harder line being adopted by the South Korean government of Lee Myung-bak, which has replaced its predecessors' “sunshine policy” with something rather more blustery. The North Korean regime may also be going through some kind of internal adjustment after the reported stroke of Mr Kim last year, although recent footage suggests he has recovered. After this week's elections, in which Mr Kim happily scored 100 per cent – though there was no political-junkie channel on which to watch the results come in live – moderates dealing with Seoul have been sidelined.
More important still may be the change of administration in Washington and Barack Obama's suggestion that he stands ready to engage even the roguest of nations. North Korea had been talking to the administration of George W. Bush on and off from 2003 but generally in the context of six-party talks, not bilaterally as it craves. Perversely, Pyongyang's show of recent hostility could be a signal that it wants to take up Mr Obama's implied offer. Seasoned observers of North Korean antics note that it tends to ramp up tensions as an entrée to negotiations.
Mike Chinoy, whose recent book Meltdown charts North Korea's slide during the Bush years to nuclear statehood, says that, in trying to interpret North Korea, it is not helpful to think of it as an “eccentric communist state”. Better to regard it as a “religious camp grafted on to a very conservative, inward-looking society steeped in Confucian tradition, where the purpose of life is to glorify the reigning deity”.
Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader and first absolute ruler, “brainwashed his countrymen into worshipping him as a god”, Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state, writes in her memoirs. His son, today's Dear Leader, has carried on that personality cult. North Koreans still wear “Eternal Leader” badges, sing songs in praise of Kim Jong-il, and even tend to their Kimjongilia, a hybrid begonia created by a doting botanist. State propaganda plays on Confucian traditions, alluding to his “mandate of heaven”.
No analogy is perfect but that view of North Korea as Confucian cult, not communist state, might shed some light on its behaviour. Rather than seeking to project power, Pyongyang appears to want weapons principally for self-preservation. To the regime, nothing is more important than maintaining power. Mr Kim is said to have taken a morbid interest in the fate of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian leader who in 1989 was shot after a two-hour trial. Not only does possessing weapons – or possibly possessing them – make an attack less likely, Pyongyang can sell them for precious foreign currency, something else it desperately needs.
Seeing North Korea less as Upper Volta with nukes and more as Branch Davidians with nukes may not seem all that comforting, especially if one remembers how the Waco siege of 1993 ended. But if North Korea can be convinced its security is guaranteed, that the west does not aspire to regime change and that there is food, technology and cash to be had if it puts down its weapons, there must be a slim chance it will hand them in.
Of course, furnishing all those guarantees would not be easy even if the US could agree with South Korea, China, Japan and Russia – the other members of six-party talks – to take the distasteful step of rewarding a country for threatening to go nuclear. Yet there is a precedent: only this week, the new US ambassador to Libya raised the possibility of one day selling arms to that formerly renegade state. Perhaps Washington could even sell Pyongyang some satellites. Then North Koreans might finally get to watch Big Brother.