Sometime last summer, I was talking to my old friend and libertarian colleague, the historian Joe Peden, about where, against what "Hitler," would the crazed William Jefferson Clinton strike next? Which of dozens of possible Bad Guys, "aggressors," or "non-democrats," would be next on the receiving end of American sanctions, bombs, missiles, or troops? I went down the list: would it be Bosnia, Somalia, Colonel Khaddafy, Saddam, the Iranian mullahs, etc.? "Nah," said Joe, who is very perceptive in these matters. "It's going to be North Korea."

I was startled, but as I mulled it over, the prospect became ever more likely. And so I was not totally bewildered when I turned on the tube and had the bad luck to catch that beefy face and that hoarse Arkansas voice I detest so much: "North Korea will cease to exist as a nation." Ye gods! What better way for Willie to put together the pieces of his shattered and incoherent foreign policy: the image of weakness, the Bosnian, Somalian, Haitian disasters? North Korea! The very name reeks of the Golden Age of the Cold War. The "last good war" that united both liberals and conservatives was not World War II, but Korea, in which the U.S. got the United Nations to mobilize "the free world" against the Commie aggression by the North. And here was a war that was never really finished, was it? By harping on Korea, Slick Willie might sucker conservatives into reviving Cold War memories and rallying behind his foreign policy. North Korea, after all, is indisputably Commie as well as indisputably a dictatorship. And they're supposedly working on a possible nuclear weapon. Ye gods! Time for the U.S.A., which only has nuclear weapons strong enough to destroy the old Soviet Union many times over, to go into its old fear-and-trembling act. We cannot allow it! Nuclear strike!

The hope is that this is largely hot air and hype. On the part of the U.S., that is. For the new North Korean threat is, as usual, totally bogus. I refer the reader to a man who is probably the foremost expert on the Korean War, author of the massive two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press). This man, University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings, is admittedly a leftist, but his analysis of the current phony "crisis" makes a great deal of sense. (Bruce Cumings, "Crazy Kim," the Nation; Nov. 29)

Cumings points out that the latest "crisis" began with stories on the weekend of November 5-7, coinciding with the visit of our defense secretary, the klutz Les Aspin, to Seoul. Suddenly a spate of U.S. stories descended upon us: crazed North Koreans were readying a nuclear bomb, they were forbidding access to international inspectors, and they were massing a full 70 percent of their troops on the South Korean border. All this, of course, was heavy with the implication that North Korea was imminently going to attack our beloved South; hence Clinton's "cease to exist as a nation," supposedly a warning that the U.S. would retaliate massively against a North Korean attack on the South, presumed to be coming at any moment. Major source of these stories: Pentagon officials flying home from Seoul along with Aspin.

The truth, as Cumings reveals, presents us with a very different picture. First: more than 75 percent of North Korean troops have been "massed" near the South Korean border ever since the late 1970s, in response to new and threatening U.S. nuclear strategies! Second: North Korea has allowed numerous international inspections of its nuclear facility at Yongbyon, and is only balking at "special inspections" of a supposed nuclear waste dump for various technical and minor reasons. Aspin himself admitted that there is "no evidence that North Korea is now producing or reprocessing plutonium." A third aspect of this supposed crisis is that the North Korean forces would be led either by the "dying" despot Kim II Sung or, even worse, by his "unstable" and "possible psychotic" son, Kim Jong II.

But here again, the story about the younger Kim's alleged psychosis has been put about by South Korean intelligence for the last quarter century, and the guy has apparently not flipped as yet.

The real story, Cumings shows, is that hysterical alarms about imminent North Korean attacks have been trumped up for the past four decades, usually accompanying one of two periodic events: the annual Congressional debates on defense appropriations; and talks between the secretary of defense and South Korean defense officials. This last scare is in the glorious U.S.-South Korean talk-crisis tradition. The last time a U.S. defense secretary visited South Korea was in November 1991, when Secretary Dick Cheney went to Seoul, and an anonymous U.S. defense official rattled the missiles: asserting that if North Korea "missed Desert Storm, this is a chance to catch a rerun."

Professor Cumings concludes his dash of realistic cold water on the latest hysteria on Korea: "No one knows the state of Kim Jong II's mind, but if I were Kim I'd be a bit paranoid too, since on any given day there is someone in Washington willing to say that we might wipe his country off the face of the earth – and sometimes it's the president himself."