Korea has been such a huge and intractable problem for so many decades now that it is easy to think of it as just an unpleasant fact of life, like drizzle or midges or the aches and pains of age. There it lies on the far side of the world; we know something's wrong over there, but we can't always remember what.
The Korean War was the one that our grandfathers were too old for, and our fathers too young. They make cars and stereos like the Japanese, and there's nutty dictator with bad hair. And then, every few years, like a large but lethargic Komodo dragon dozing in the corner, Korea opens its eyes, lumbers into action and bites us.
It happened recently, with a literal bang, when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test. Next came a barrage of short-range missiles, followed by what sounded alarmingly like a declaration of war by the Communist dictatorship in the North against the democratic South.
The present Korean crisis is a by-product of the complex of instincts, prejudices and vested interests best identified by a single name: former US president George W Bush.
The North, deprived of the support of its Cold War sponsors, China and the Soviet Union, struggled to feed its people and maintain its immense army. Then during the presidency of Bill Clinton, it turned out that it had a secret weapon - a nuclear reactor capable of generating weapons-grade plutonium.
President Bill Clinton took this seriously - at one point, he was within hours of ordering an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor. But at the last minute, war was averted and, after prolonged and difficult negotiations, a complicated, fragile and unwieldy deal was agreed between North Korea and a conglomerate of concerned nations. Fuel oil and "safe" reactors, without the potential to fuel nuclear bombs would be provided in exchange for freezing and eventually dismantling Yongbyon.
At the tail end of the Clinton presidency, Kim Jong II received a cordial visit from none less than the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. So one can imagine his confusion when Bush came to power. The new administration was not just cool towards North Korea, but grossly insulting to an extent rare even between countries at war.
Kim, according to Bush, was a "pygmy", and "spoilt child". "I loathe Kim Jong II," he told the journalist Bob Woodward, who described the president "waving his finger in the air". North Korea was lumped in with Iraq and Iran as the third member of the Axis of Evil. In 2003 Iraq was invaded. What North Korean dictator with his wits about him would fail to conclude that he might be next?
Bush was, of course, quite right to dislike Kim, a ludicrous character who personally runs perhaps the cruellest regime on Earth. But anyone can "loathe" a vicious dictator - the difficult thing is working out what to do about it. With noses held high, unwilling to sully their hands by dealing with the North, Bush and his people effectively chose to do nothing.
Left to his own devices, and bathed in the passive hostility of the world's only superpower, Kim took the only practical step available to his broke and friendless regime - he got back to work on his nuclear weapons programme. The Yongbyon reactor was opened, and the spent fuel rods removed and reprocessed.
The nightmare that even a despised liberal such as Clinton had regarded as intolerable had come to pass. North Korea has nuclear weapons, derived directly from the plant at Yongbyon. Kim's is a wily and mendacious regime; it might, of course, have secretly pursued them anyway. But a covert nuclear programme would have taken years to come to fruition. As it turned out, Kim was able to do it at speed, in full view, because the leader of the free world was too proud and stubborn to sit down and talk.
US President Barack Obama has made it clear that, in principal, he will talk to anyone. But in eight years North Korea has become a different regime. Its politics are murkier still with rumours that Kim is ill and planning his succession. And it is a nuclear power, with the potential to destroy Seoul and Tokyo. Bush's pygmy has become a monster, and it will be the work of years to bring him back down to size.
