When Barack Obama took over the US presidency in 2009, North Korea could barely muster one nuclear weapon and had just a handful of missiles that could reach Japan. Yet despite tight international sanctions, tough external pressure and on-again-off-again negotiations, barely a decade later Pyongyang had managed to develop advanced nuclear weapons capable of striking cities in the continental United States.
Joel Wit’s latest book, Fallout, explains how the world’s strongest superpower allowed North Korea, which still considers itself at war with the US, to develop a nuclear arsenal that threatens global stability. Wit does so by chronicling the policies and negotiating strategies of six US administrations to contain North Korea.
A well-known expert on Northeast Asia, Wit worked for the US State Department and several think tanks for two decades and participated in key negotiations with Pyongyang. He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Henry L Stimson Center.
As Wit sees it, the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W Bush missed several opportunities to curtail North Korea’s nuclear program. However, he points to Obama and Donald Trump as being most responsible for the US’s failed efforts. The Obama administration neglected to contain North Korea’s rapidly growing nuclear threat, and once it was there, the Trump administration failed to roll it back.
Based on more than 300 interviews with his contacts in Pyongyang and decision-makers in Washington, Beijing and Seoul, Wit provides a vivid account of the international discussions, internal debates and behind-the-scenes wrangling that shaped the US’s North Korea policy.
For eight years, the Obama administration adopted a policy of strategic patience, unrealistically assuming that international sanctions would suffice to contain North Korea’s weapons development. When Pyongyang in 2013 tested a miniaturised nuclear device and completed construction of a new uranium enrichment plant, Washington responded by tightening sanctions.
But North Korea was not a priority, and enforcement of sanctions was patchy.
The advent of the Trump administration marked a major shift. Trump wanted to step up pressure on Pyongyang but was also open to negotiations. The initial result was a heated public exchange of insults, with Trump famously referring to Kim Jong Un as the ‘little rocket man’ and Kim calling Trump a dotard.
However, behind the scenes a US advisor to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres sounded out whether Pyongyang was open to a meeting with Trump. This triggered a quick thaw in relations, with North Korea joining the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, and Trump and Kim meeting in Singapore the same year. But the summit in Hanoi that followed was a failure, and the parties walked away without even a joint communique.
Wit’s detailed post-mortem of the Hanoi summit provides valuable guidance for how future negotiations should—and should not—be conducted. He details the hurried pre-summit discussions and reminds us that even as Trump and Kim were travelling to Hanoi, the two key issues—denuclearisation and the lifting of sanctions—had not been resolved. The collapse of the talks should not have been a surprise.
In-fighting within Trump’s team, particularly between secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security advisor John Bolton, played a role. So too did Kim’s excessive confidence that Trump wanted a deal. Wit credits Trump’s unorthodox approach for setting the stage for the summit, but blames his short attention span for its breakdown. ‘The president couldn’t sit still long enough to close the deal.’ Most importantly, preparatory negotiations were woefully inadequate.
Since then, Pyongyang has strengthened its cooperation with Moscow, supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine and introducing a major new obstacle to the resumption of talks.
Looking ahead, Wit suggests that the US may need to recognise that North Korea is a nuclear state and shift from a policy focused on denuclearisation to one with two objectives: denuclearising North Korea in the long term; and reducing the threat of nuclear war in the short term. According to Wit, there are indications that Secretary of State Marco Rubio might support such an approach.
However, the US administration’s national security strategy is firmly focused on the western hemisphere, with new geopolitical hotspots emerging in Latin America, the Middle East and even Greenland. With less than three years to the next US presidential elections, the question is not when Trump and Rubio will shift their focus to Asia, but whether they will have the time and patience needed to address the security challenges of the Korean peninsula.
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