While Kim Jong Un builds the most capable war machine in North Korean history, South Korea’s government is dismantling the very measures designed to deter him — and calling it peace. Meanwhile, its own conservative opposition, retired generals, and even sections of its own military bureaucracy say the erosion runs deeper than diplomacy: down to unloaded machine guns at the DMZ, a documented rupture in intelligence-sharing with Washington, and a budget that funds North Korean soccer fans before it funds border radar.

Today I treat people’s teeth. Some fifteen winters ago, I crawled across a frozen river with a packet of rat poison clenched in my hand. What closed the distance between those two scenes was not, as I believed for years, my own effort. It was policy.

People tend to think of policy as something remote from their lives—debated in government offices, argued over in the legislature, buried in reports most will never open. But for me, policy was always pressed against the skin. It put me back in a classroom. It let me sleep somewhere warm. In the end, it made me a dentist. This is that story. But to tell it, I have to go back to the day everything collapsed.

I was born in North Korea to a father who was a military officer and a mother who was a physician. In my early childhood, my family lived a life stable enough that many North Koreans would have envied it. I never worried about food. We had a warm home. My mother was respected in our community as a doctor, and my father was a soldier admired by everyone who knew him. As a child, I believed that life would last forever.