In Grid News, Sue Mi Terry has a piece asking how North Korea managed to become “the world’s most successful failed state.”

There are plenty of interesting questions surrounding Kim Jong-un’s reign in North Korea, but situating the regime among “failed states” is an intellectual dog’s breakfast. That is because the whole concept of “failed states” is twaddle.

Allow me to mount up on a tired old hobbyhorse: The first scholarly paper I wrote at Cato was with Chris Preble pouring cold water on the concept of state failure and the plan to stand up an office inside the State Department for fixing failed states. Back in 2006, Preble and I wrote that “In fact, the overwhelming majority of failed states have posed no security threat to the United States. The blanket characterization that failed states represent anything monolithic is misleading.” The problem was that in every list of or selection criteria for failed states, there were countries that varied with one another, wildly, on almost every measure. Categories that lump together units that differ in almost every way rarely help us understand the world.

To be sure: None of these countries were garden spots. But to say that North Korea belongs on a list with Afghanistan and Somalia because they have all “failed” obscures more than it reveals.

In truth, North Korea is very identifiable as a state: it savagely pursues power and survival, it pervades North Korean society, it abides no challenges, and it places its leaders’ own interests at the center of North Korean raison d’état. Examining Kim’s hold on power is a worthwhile exercise. But North Korea isn’t a failed state. It is an evil state. Failed states, by contrast, is a failed concept. Let’s stop using it.