The danger is that the United States will decide to respond in kind.

Democratic political leaders, as demonstrated most recently in Iraq, are hardly immune to the perception that "those people" (whoever those people of the moment are) understand and respond only to force and threats of force. It is hardly surprising that the dictator of a country that has purposely isolated itself from the rest of the world would have a similar perception - that the only way to get the attention of the sole superpower is by threat and bluster.

Does this mean another war, or a confrontation fraught with risk and violence, is inevitable? Perhaps not, if Americans can step back and see the situation in a larger context.

The United States assumed the role of guarantor of South Korea's security after the Korean war, which ended in 1953 with Korea divided between a communist North and a U.S.-friendly South along the 38th Parallel. That demarcation began in 1947 after the Soviet Union and the United States accepted separate surrenders from Japanese troops in Korea after World War II and each supported separate governments. Japan had ruled Korea since 1910.

Since 1953 the "capitalist road" (though not purely capitalist) South has prospered while the North has stagnated - except when it comes to military forces and nasty weapons, which ruthless dictators often find a way to amass. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has lost a trading and subsidy partner, and China now has more trade with the South than with the North. Thus North Korea is the most notable communist basket case in the world today.

HISTORICAL LINKS TO CHINA, JAPAN

Historically, although the peninsula has often been under pressure from China or Japan, it is relatively homogeneous ethnically and has generally been united. A unified government was formally established in 668 AD. The name comes from the Koryo dynasty, which ruled from 668 to 1392. The Yi dynasty ruled from 1392 until 1910. From the 1590s, when the Japanese tried unsuccessful invasions, until the 1870s, Korea isolated itself from the rest of the world, earning the nickname "the Hermit Kingdom."

Korea was essentially a pawn during the unrest sparked by the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1894, the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese war (won by the Japanese) and the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese war, also a Japanese victory. Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and tried to stamp out Korean culture, sparking resistance that preserved the culture but didn't throw off Japanese rule until the Allies defeated Japan in 1945.

The peninsula is home to 60 million people, about 40 million in the South and 20 million in the North. The gross domestic product of the South is 40 times greater than that of the North, and it enjoys a huge technological edge.

EFFECT OF U.S. PRESENCE

Thus the presence of 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea serves more as a tripwire (the title of Doug Bandow's 1996 book on Korea) to ensure U.S. casualties and intense involvement in any hostilities than as a necessary defense for South Korea. South Korea can defend itself, although a war could well involve heavy civilian casualties, since the South Korean capital of Seoul is within 30 miles of the heavily militarized "demilitarized zone" that divides the two countries.

Seoul could be reached with heavy artillery and non-nuclear missiles, and it would be difficult, even for the United States, to take out all of the North's offensive capacity in one massive first strike.

Former UC political science professor Chalmers Johnson, one of the country's foremost authorities on Asia, told me he believes that North Korea's saber-rattling is designed to get the attention of the United States so the North (without admitting openly it was wrong all this time) can work out an accommodation and enter the world trading system. The fifth chapter of his 2000 book, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire," provides a concise summary of Korean developments in the last decade or so.

The North rattled nuclear sabers in 1994 and the Clinton administration, after coming close to military action, signed the oddly named Agreed Framework, under which the North would dismantle its nuclear weapons program and the United States would provide two light-water reactors incapable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material, 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil (while North Korea has some mineral resources it has no power-generating capacity, not even rivers to dam), and relax economic sanctions.

Neither country, it is now clear, lived up to the bargain. North Korea demobilized its reactor and admitted international inspectors but before long began a clandestine program to produce weapons-grade plutonium. After getting South Korea and Japan to pledge money for the new reactor, the United States still dragged its feet, apparently convinced the regime in Pyongyang would soon collapse.

NEIGHBORS'  SELF-INTEREST

But an outright collapse is not in the interest of North Korea's principal neighbors, South Korea and China, and both of them know it. They envision hundreds of thousands of starving refugees with few marketable skills streaming across their borders.

So the South, beginning tentatively in 1990 and increasingly since, has pursued what it calls a "Sunshine Policy" with the North, beginning with family reunification and moving to economic investment and limited political cooperation. The South no longer sees the North as a threat, is becoming impatient with the presence of U.S. troops, and is exploring ways to bring the North into the modern world. It studied the reunification of Germany closely, concluded it was expensive for West Germany and doesn't see that as an option just now.

In the face of all this, most policymakers in the United States continue to view North Korea through Cold War lenses, as a potentially threatening regime with whom compromise would be tantamount to submitting to blackmail. There is little inclination to view the increasingly desperate situation in the North as one more example of the failure of communism and act as the gracious victor, helping to introduce North Korea to the wondrous ways of the world economy and beaming as yet another failing communist economy turns to a relatively free market to rescue itself.

Instead, we see bluster approaching provocation - non-negotiable demands, moving aircraft carriers, even repositioning U.S. troops away from the DMZ, where they would catch the brunt of any attack or counter-attack by the North, talk of stiffer sanctions - and the attitude that any concession to North Korea is a sellout.

A miscalculation on either side could lead to bloody conflict. The smartest course for the U.S. would be to announce the pullout of troops from South Korea and a formal handoff of the North Korean problem to its neighbors, principally South Korea and China but also Japan and Russia. But it may be viewed, in administration circles, as too personal, too much a test of "resolve," for such a sensible step even to be considered.