Frankly, as a non-American it always strikes me as weird how much attention US media and politics seem to pay to NK considering how irrelevant they are internat

Frankly, as a non-American it always strikes me as weird how much attention US media and politics seem to pay to NK considering how irrelevant they are internationally compared to other "evil" countries (as well as "friends" like Saudi Arabia). The only direct external threat NK poses is to South Korea and most of the posturing around nuclear weapons and such have for a long time simply been used as a bargaining chip (because NK has literally nothing else to offer than "not try to build nukes"). Obama has snubbed Putin by calling Russia a "regional power" but I think that label is far more adequate for NK than for anybody else. NK's only real ally is China and China would probably drop it the second NK tries to seriously do anything that would harm China's trade (like, say, launching an attack on the US). I guess NK is the only discernible obvious "bad guy" nation state we have left. China is a close trade partner, Russia is too well-spoken (though it's still good for the occasional Red Scare in the US) and nobody can really tell the desert countries apart anyway (plus "nations" like ISIS are making it hard to reason about individual countries and their political affiliations the way we like to).