North Korea is a hard place for most Americans to understand. Kim Jung-un and his inner circle keep a tight grip on information, and what the North Korean government does share with outsiders can be hard to decipher. What is clear though, is that the current state of relations between Washington DC and the regime in Pyongyang is growing colder every day, and North Korea's pursuit of long-range nuclear weapons makes resolving this conflict an urgent matter in US foreign policy today.

How did the standoff between the US and North Korea begin, and who is to blame for the conflict? How has the Kim family, now in its third generation of leadership, managed to stay in power this long, and what are the prospects of removing them from power? And how has our policy toward North Korea been shaped by its geographic proximity to China and Russia?

In this episode of The Road to Now, we get the answer to these questions and more in our interview with North Korea expert, Dr. Sheena Greitens.

Sheena Greitens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for East Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

For more on this episode and our podcast, please visit our website: www.TheRoadToNow.com