Taking All the Wrong Turns on North Korea

Hecker identifies six hinge points since the early Bush years, and at each point the U.S. made the wrong choice.

I reviewed Siegfried Hecker’s Hinge Points for Responsible Statecraft in my new column. The book is Hecker’s account of the development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the failures of U.S. policy in preventing North Korea from becoming a nuclear weapons state:

The key flaws of U.S. policy in Hecker’s view were in repeatedly failing to do technically informed risk/benefit analysis and failing to understand North Korea’s dual-track approach to diplomacy and to building up its nuclear program.

Reading through Hecker’s book sometimes gave me a feeling of déjà vu, as the fights between proponents of engagements and hardline saboteurs over North Korea policy share so many similarities with fights over Iran policy over the last decade. Every time, advocates of engagement argued that making limited gains were better than nothing and getting inspectors on site to monitor North Korean facilities was better than not having them there, but every time hardliners found a way to block new agreements or kill existing ones. Hecker identifies six hinge points since the early Bush years, and at each point the U.S. made the wrong choice. The hardliners’ position was then exposed as foolish and irresponsible as North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs advanced, but policymakers learned nothing from this and kept making similar mistakes. One would think that twenty years of failure would cause policymakers to stop listening to hardliners, but in a system without any accountability this doesn’t happen.

In some cases, the North Korea and Iran policies involve some of the same players. Any history of nonproliferation and arms control in the twenty-first century is sure to touch on John Bolton’s destructive role in both the Bush and Trump administrations, and he appears as the bête noire of Hecker’s book. On North Korea, Hecker makes clear that Bolton’s role in killing the Agreed Framework more than twenty years ago was the most significant of the many crucial moments when the U.S. had chances to limit North Korea’s nuclear capabilities: “The most fateful hinge point occurred in October 2002, when the Bush administration dealt a fatal blow to the 1994 Agreed Framework without either fully evaluating or properly appreciating the risks of walking away.”¹

I would add that the Bush administration’s failure with North Korea were arguably just as dangerous and consequential as any of their other failures, and possibly more so, but this one has been almost completely forgotten except among arms control and nonproliferation experts. One reason why U.S. North Korea policy has failed and continues to fail is that there are never any consequences for the people responsible for those failures, and instead some of the same people are recycled in different administrations to screw things up all over again. When there is no political or reputational price to be paid for colossal screwups, the short-term incentives of hawkish posturing will tend to win out. When that posturing ends up having serious costs for U.S. and allied interests down the road, the policymakers that made the mess will already be on their way out the door or comfortably settled in their post-government sinecures. If they are sufficiently shameless, some of the same people that made things worse will come out of the woodwork to complain about the current administration’s handling of the issue they botched.

I did not have space in the review to discuss Hecker’s comments about H.R. McMaster and North Korea policy, but they are worth mentioning briefly here. Hecker picks up on McMaster’s enthusiasm for talking about strategic narcissism and strategic empathy, and like many others he recognizes that McMaster doesn’t know the first thing about strategic empathy in practice:

He demonstrates some of his academic background in Battlegrounds, but he fails the strategic empathy test regarding North Korea. He doesn’t come close to meeting the definition of empathy—the capacity to understand or feel what another is experiencing from within their frame of reference—as he vilifies North Korea at every turn.²

As we have seen in McMaster’s writings about China, his idea of strategic empathy is to invent a fanatical hardline counterpart with the greatest ambitions and most aggressive intentions and then “respond” in kind with equal hostility. It is not possible to understand how other leaders perceive the world and U.S. actions when you have already chosen to see them as cartoonish villains. McMaster is an extreme example of this, but unfortunately he has lots of company in Washington. Attempting to understand why another government acts the way that it does is usually treated as an endorsement of their actions, and it is politically safer for people to accept the standard enemy image and make no effort at understanding. Our foreign policy debates reward hardliners for their aggressiveness and penalize those that attempt to make an informed analysis of why other states act as they do, so it is no surprise that the resulting policies so often fall flat and backfire.

Hecker gives Trump more credit for his summitry than I do, but he is also quite clear that Trump did not take diplomacy with North Korea very seriously. One anecdote will suffice to capture just how oblivious Trump was. Trump had appointed Steve Biegun to be the special envoy for North Korea, and Biegun was making an effort to keep diplomacy with North Korea going despite Bolton’s opposition. Hecker cites Bolton’s memoir that Trump didn’t even recognize Biegun, and then he comments: “That’s a sad testament of how well Trump was prepared for the summi [in Hanoi] if he apparently did not recognize his chief negotiator, who also happened to be the only one aligned with him to get a deal.”³

In the end, Trump was interested in the stagecraft of the summits rather than the statecraft needed to secure a meaningful nuclear agreement, and he proved that when he was so easily goaded into walking away without anything. The pernicious all-or-nothing approach that has plagued North Korea policy for decades struck again, and by going through the motions of what I would call pseudo-engagement Trump helped to undermine the case for the real thing. Trump not only gave the hardliners what they wanted, but he also did it in a way that strengthened their position in the future.

1. Hecker, Hinge Points: p.354.

2. Hecker, p. 290.

3. Hecker, p. 335.