The US government has nuclear weapons pointed at North Korea, a fleet of Navy vessels permanently positioned off its coast, and close to 100,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea and Japan.
Successive US administrations have reneged on promises made over two decades to provide humanitarian aid to the north's impoverished population.
But you wouldn't know any of that from the international response when the North Korean regime carried out a nuclear bomb test on May 25.
Instead, US and international political leaders, cheered on by the media, all heaped blame on North Korea alone for the escalating threat of war.
The nuclear test was North Korea's second. This bomb, set off underground, was far more powerful, estimated at between 10 and 20 kilotons — approximately the same destructive power of each of the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
The North Korean military announced the same day that it had test-fired three short-range missiles. It also reportedly restarted a nuclear reactor it had promised to dismantle as part of an aid-for-disarmament agreement reached two years ago.
The US and ally South Korea, in turn, put their military forces on a state of high alert — and US officials pressed the United Nations Security Council for sanctions.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised North Korea would face "consequences" for its "provocative and belligerent actions".
The idea that North Korea represents a military threat to the US is absurd. The country is desperately poor, with a per capita income of less than US$2 a day.
Its military is years away from developing a long-range missile that could reliably reach the continental US, much less a nuclear device that could be carried on such a missile.
But on the Korean peninsula, the threat is far more immediate. North Korea has an estimated 750 missiles and 13,000 artillery tubes pointed toward South Korea.
And US and South Korean forces have a far more destructive arsenal. A war could leave 1 million civilians dead in a matter of days.
The North Korean regime's militaristic rhetoric makes it easy for the media to dismiss its leaders as crazed fanatics. But when North Korean officials say attempts to develop nuclear weapons have helped deter a US attack, they're right.
The Bush administration named North Korea in its "axis of evil" list of potential targets after Afghanistan was conquered.
A few weeks after the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq, a North Korean official drew the conclusion: "The Iraqi war taught the lesson that ... the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force."
Behind the conflict between the US and North Korea lies more than a century of colonial occupation and imperialist domination.
Before the 20th century, rulers of China and Japan had fought over who would control the Korean peninsula. After defeating Russia in a 1905 war, Japan made Korea into its colony. It was ruthlessly exploited, with help from US investors.
After Japan's defeat in World War II, the peninsula was "temporarily" partitioned.
Communist forces in the north, backed by the USSR, launched an offensive with the aim of reuniting Korea in 1950. The US responded with a wholesale slaughter.
With the authority of the United Nations as a cover, the US used napalm to firebomb every northern city, reducing them to ruins.
Four years of war ended in a stalemate, at a cost of some 3 million dead; the previous partition line was reconfirmed.
After the war, South Korea was run by its military, backed up by the US. Only after more than three decades of dictatorship did this regime finally crack, in the face of a mass democracy movement fuelled by workers' struggles.
North Korea adopted the repressive Stalinist system of its patrons in Russia and China. The state apparatus directs the economy and society with an iron hand, and the regime promotes a cult of personality — first around Kim Il-sung, and now his son Kim Jong-il.
North Korea is highly militarised. It has also faced half a century of military threats from the US and its clients in the south.
The US introduced nuclear weapons to the peninsula in the late 1950s, in violation of the armistice that ended the war.
It also maintains a huge military force stationed in South Korea and nearby Japan as a constant threat against the north.
No sane person wants to see the spread of nuclear weapons. But when it comes to the arms race and war threats in East Asia, the driving force is the US government. Real disarmament would start with the American soldiers and weapons that have been pointed at North Korea for more than half a century.
[Abridged from US Socialist Worker.]