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Goodbye sunshine policy. Welcome back, dictator Kim. After a decade that many spent looking for the sunny side of North Korea, two new books — one conventional and one refreshingly unorthodox — offer a return to a hard-line interpretation. In the wake of the North's torpedoing of a South Korean corvette, it's a good time for a rethink.

In the late 1990s, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung tried to lure Pyongyang with aid and under-the-table cash. Successor Roh Moo Hyun tried similar policies. The warmth didn't pay off. Neither did the "axis of evil" line taken in the Bush years, during which the North fired missiles toward Japan (2005 and 2006) and tested its first nuclear bomb (2006). And since South Korean President Lee Myung Bak took power two years ago, the North has shot dead a South Korean tourist, moved to shut down two investment projects designed to showcase North-South cooperation and now taken the lives of 46 South Korean sailors. These are signs of a desperate regime.

In The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom, longtime Korea watchers Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh cover topics from the ruling Kims down to the struggles of ordinary North Koreans. In their view, buttressed by interviews with some 200 defectors, the state is fraying. A "silent rebellion" — from malingering at work and lying to bosses to more serious activities like stripping factories of equipment and even engaging in sabotage and arson — is pitting the impoverished masses against a demoralized ruling elite. Citizens are "daytime socialists and nighttime capitalists" and increasingly open in their grumbling.

B.R. Myers, an international-studies professor at Dongseo University, Pusan, also senses the onset of ideological crisis. An increased flow of information from the South, in the form of easily smuggled DVDs and USB sticks, is slowly undermining the North's ideology of permanent war — a fascinating elucidation of which forms the heart of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.

Based on extensive readings of North Korean propaganda texts, many of them written for domestic consumption, Myers' contention is that the Kim dynasty owes its biggest ideological debt to Japanese fascism of the 1930s. At its heart, this is a xenophobic regime that proudly flaunts its defiance of international norms. The North Korean people, in the North's telling, are uniquely pure, but their naiveté in a cruel world means that they need the protection of a strong leader. (Kim Jong Il's tug at a sort of Korean racial mysticism also goes some way toward explaining why the North commands a bizarre fascination and respect among many younger South Koreans.)

As with all extreme nationalist ideologies, passions are at their most acute when directed against an external enemy, which in North Korea's case is, above all, the U.S. At the same time, the state has far less justification for existence if it is not a hermetically sealed entity at war with American imperialism. In 1999, when the U.S. was North Korea's largest foreign aid donor, a poster showed a missionary in colonial Korea murdering a child by injection and called for "revenge against Yankee vampires."

According to Pyongyang's propaganda machine, from the "defeat" of the U.S. in 1953, through the capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo in 1968 to nearly 20 years of nuclear talks and Bill Clinton's mission to free two journalists last August, the U.S. has been "kneeling down" and "waving the white flag." It has been one "shining victory" after another for the North. Russia, despite decades of support, is mocked for surrendering "without firing a shot." Only the Chinese, the North's steadfast — and yet, now, probably reluctant — allies, emerge unscathed.

Experts have been predicting the endgame for the Kim regime for decades. These books — both of them important additions to the North Korea canon — suggest that the moment of change is approaching. The aging and weakened Kim doesn't seem to have many options. But during 16 years in power he has proved a master at playing a weak hand with remarkable success. As long as the Chinese continue to find North Korea a useful buffer state, Kim and his dynasty are likely to limp along, practicing a statecraft based on begging, bluster and bullying, and ruling over the supposedly cleanest race with the dirtiest tricks at a dictator's disposal.

Clifford is the author of Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea and the executive director of the Asia Business Council

• Mark L. Clifford
• Two new studies suggest that the North Korean state is slowly starting to unravel