As President Trump prepares to meet Kim Jong-un in Singapore, the focus is rightly on nuclear weapons. But let’s not forget something else: North Korea is by far the most totalitarian country in the world.

Trump should make clear to Kim that what makes a nation “modern” is not just McDonald’s franchises, but also an end to torture and a measure of freedom.

A United Nations report on North Korea in 2014 described “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” and added that in this respect North Korea “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”

North Koreans have told me how the police periodically turn off all the power in an apartment building, thus locking any video or DVD inside the machine playing it. Then the police search unit by unit to see what is in the machines — and if it is, say, a South Korean soap opera, then the entire family may be shuttled off to a labor camp.