system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: The motivation behind North Korea's difficult behavior.

Usually when you hear about a nation being violent and obstinate it is because many of them have a completely different philosophy than the rest of the world. And they don't like that everyone feels differently than they do.

I never hear of any big speeches about how the world "should be" from Kim or their leaders though.  

I loosely am aware that they are a communist country but so is China and they are worried about their economy growing and becoming powerful.

NK is like the opposite. They seem to want the least growth possible. Let's have no food or electricity. 

What is the driving force behind their odd behavior?
gpt
Korea used to be a single country, that had a lot of communists. The communists wanted to take over and for whatever reason this particular country became a weird proxy for the west and the US and the soviets so the US put a ton of money into stopping the communists taking over and the soviets up a ton of money into making sure they took over. After a terrible war it basically dead locked into all the communists living in the north and all the capitalists living in the south. 

For a long time the soviets gave the north a ton of stuff and they were the richer country than the south, and the US and friends set up a super strict "no body talk to these guys or trade with them" rule. The the USSR vanished and so it didn't give them stuff but the US still had it's super harsh embargos that didn't go away so they have slowly just become more and more crazy living in a country no one will trade with. And for a while china sorta kinda kept trading with them but as they became more friendly with the US even that has changed mostly, so more or less it's a totally isolated country. They aren't exactly choosing to starve to death specifically.