something wicked this way comes

North Korea is not an independent country under the rulership of Kim Jong Il.
North Korea is a province of China.
That is to say, the Chinese Communist Party is maintaining North Korea as a feudal dependancy which effectively makes it a province of China.
The Chinese Communist Party bankrolls, provisions and fuels North Korea's communist dictatorship.
This dictatorship could not exist otherwise.
The Chinese Communist Party uses North Korea to distract, disrupt and destabilise peaceful democratic nations on China's borders, namely Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
The Chinese Communist Party uses North Korea as a means of creating ongoing disruptive vexations to the United States, and also quite possibly, and indeed somewhat pardoxically, as a means of unsettling the Russians.
North Korea has no independent political, economic or cultural life of its own.

(Copies to: CNN, the BBC, Channel Four, and all the usual half wits who are cheerily steering us into the Apocalypse.)