On April 25th, NK Net’s third lecture in their North Korea Human Rights speaker series featured the well-known North Korea watcher and commentator, Dr. Andrei Lankov. Begining his lecture, Lankov explained that if someone were to look up “North Korea” on the Internet, they would immediately learn that the country is an “irrational, unpredictable, idealistically driven Stalinist dictatorship.” He took issue with this description, pointing outthat the country’s leadership as being actually “highly rational, generally predictable, hardly Stalinist,” summizing that in general, “they basically know what they are doing.”

Lankov continued by talking about the North Korean leadership’s ultimate goal,