The authors present a very readable and deeply informed history of Korea—its shared heritage until late 1945, followed by diverging paths in the South and the North and conflicts that have obscured millennia of shared experiences, Korea’s location—sandwiched between China, Russia, and Japan—plus its military, political, economic, and cultural capabilities make the entire peninsula a major factor in world affairs.

The authors show a deep understanding of the problems that have confronted the leaders and peoples of South and North in the nearly eighty years since their division. While fully aware of the cruelties of Japan’s occupation, the authors also note how the Japanese authorities built up Korea’s educational institutions (pp. 23–24)—for their own goals, of course. Korean became the second language after Japanese for the educated, but the number of schools grew from 2,000 in 1911 to over 5,000 in 1938, while the number of universities increased from 5 to 17.

The authors three times mention the Korean 24-letter alphabet hangeul sponsored in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great to facilitate literacy by serving as an alternative to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja. Hangeul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class. This book might have devoted more space to efforts to spread literacy and learning. In the late nineteenth century, Christian missionary schools fostered hangeul. Still, by 1912 literacy in Korea was only 20 percent. It rose to over 60 percent by 1940. Many Koreans north and south have shown a passion for learning.

What do the authors say about the US role in Korea’s history? Cha recalls his chagrin when a White House official showed visiting Koreans Theodore Roosevelt’s Nobel prize medal in 1905, perhaps ignorant of the contemporaneous Taft–Kasura agreement that handed Korea to Japan. The book notes the paternalism and perhaps racism in Franklin Roosevelt’s belief that Koreans would not be able to govern themselves when Japan’s occupation ended. For Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, Europe was the foreign policy priority, but when the North invaded south Korea, Truman took resolute action.

Jump to 2001 and the George W. Bush administration, where Cha served as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007. While this book addresses many issues in a balanced manner, it does not mention the very negative consequences of the inactions and actions by the second Bush White House: ignoring warning signs of the 9/11 attacks; withdrawal in 2002 from the antimissile treaty that served as lynchpin for strategic arms controls; falsifying the evidence to justify a counterproductive Middle East war that still persists; helping to kill the 1994 Interim Agreement with the Clinton administration that froze DPRK plutonium production. This book exaggerates and distorts by saying (p. 126) that the accord “committed North Korea to give up its nuclear program.”

After taking office in 2001, President George W. Bush did not seek an arms control accord or broader accommodation with North Korea. Unilateralist hard-liners controlled US policy toward North Korea and most other foreign issues in the George W. Bush administration—at least until its second term. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saw it, the United States had no options except “rhetoric” and “75 sledgehammers to beat that gnat into the ground” (Woodward Reference Woodward2004, 207). Vice President Dick Cheney argued that regime change in Pyongyang was the only way to end the nuclear threat from North Korea. Cheney and his staff demanded terms that they knew Pyongyang would refuse: “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” (CVID) of North Korea’s nuclear program before the United States made any material concessions (Chenoy Reference Chenoy2008, 208). By contrast, Secretary of State Colin Powell thought that negotiations with the DPRK could be useful (as did Condoleezza Rice, after she became Secretary of State in 2005); but Powell’s deputy on arms control, John R. Bolton, sought to block, and often succeeded in sabotaging, any movement toward an accord.

The president and his closest advisers disparaged the ROK “Sunshine Policy” to open up the North as naïve and misguided. The North Korean regime also resisted any external restraint. The DPRK felt encircled by hostile powers. For Pyongyang, the United States and the United Nations were one—North Korea’s foe in 1950–1953 and ever since. The DPRK did not trust even Moscow and Beijing. It suspected the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization set up under the Interim Agreement to be a Trojan horse meant to deceive North Korea.

Both the Bush administration and Kim Jong Il appeared to value weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as useful instruments of policy. The Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), submitted to Congress on December 31, 2001, proclaimed a new strategic triad composed of offensive strike systems, active and passive defenses, and a revitalized research and development base to update US forces.

In January 2002 President Bush assigned North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, to what he called an “axis of evil.” The CIA reported that North Korea was completing a uranium enrichment plant, using technology acquired from Pakistan—giving Pyongyang a second route to nuclear weapons. The Clinton administration had earlier detected signs of a uranium enrichment program but had opted to watch and wait, believing it wiser to improve relations and then deal with the problem quietly, when Pyongyang might believe it had more to lose from a confrontation.

As part of its “bold” new approach to North Korea, the White House sent James A. Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Pyongyang on October 3–5, 2002. His two-day meeting led to exchanges that soon killed the Agreed Framework. Following a tight script and with no authority to maneuver or explore nuances, Kelly told the North Koreans that Washington had evidence of their uranium enrichment plant. His allegation seemed to catch the North Koreans off guard. The following day, Kelly later reported, DPRK diplomats confirmed his accusation and claimed that their country had every right to this facility.

Seeking to keep Congress focused on Iraq, the Bush administration did not report these exchanges in Pyongyang for eleven days. DPRK representatives, however, soon denied they had admitted to having a uranium plant. Translation from Korean into English for Kelly may have led to a misunderstanding. Perhaps the DPRK diplomats meant only to tell Kelly that North Korea was entitled to have a uranium enrichment facility. Perhaps they had felt the need for a strong response to bad kibun—the insinuation their country had been cheating. But when a French official proposed taking the matter to the United Nations, Kelly replied, “The Security Council is for Iraq” (Gellman Reference Gellman2008, 209).

Had the 1994 accord masked a drive by one or both sides to cheat and continue a zero-sum struggle against the other? The evidence is muddy. The United States and its partners supplied fuel oil to the North, as promised, but were often behind schedule in doing so. Progress on the two light water reactors was so slow that Pyongyang asked whether the United States and its partners were trying to sabotage North Korea’s development.

Kim Jong Il introduced his “military first” priority not long after approving the Agreed Framework. Did he plan to exploit a more relaxed mood in Washington to develop a uranium facility on the sly? Noting Republicans’ disdain for the Agreed Framework, the DPRK regime may have felt that North Korea must be prepared for all contingencies. Kim Jong Il may also have wanted to appease his own country’s military or other hard-liners. He may have believed that the DPRK could hide its operation and, if it were discovered, deflect any criticism.

North Korea’s uranium enrichment program probably began in 1997–1998—several years after the Agreed Framework was signed and before Bush entered the White House. A clandestine operation of this kind surely ran contrary to the spirit of the 1994 accord. When the US intelligence community asserted its existence in 2002, the most hawkish US official, John Bolton, declared he would use the analysis “to go straight for the Agreed Framework’s jugular.” But one authority noted that the NPT permits signatories to have civilian enrichment operations under IAEA inspection. Pyongyang may have felt no obligation to declare its uranium plant until the United States and its partners had built the two light water reactors, as promised in 1994.

The impasse over uranium facilities, according to Condoleezza Rice, meant that “the United States had to respond forcefully.” Having informed its partners of “what we knew,” the United States halted heavy oil shipments in November 2002 (Kessler Reference Kessler2007, 65–87). Three days later the DPRK blamed the United States for collapse of the Agreed Framework. The DPRK then withdrew from the NPT and expelled the IAEA inspectors.

The ensuing confrontation led each side to terminate a deal that had halted the North’s plutonium production for eight years. Losing this constraint and permitting—perhaps provoking—North Korea to build its own nuclear arsenal marked a major failure of US policy.

The Agreed Framework appeared to have stopped DPRK plutonium production for eight years. It also brought promise of a new page in US relations with North Korea. Total outlays for work on the two light water reactors amounted to $1.5 billion by the time the last workers withdrew in 2006—the lion’s share paid by South Korea. This sum—spread over more than a decade—was a fraction of what the Pentagon spent every year for R&D on ballistic missile defenses (more than $8 billion requested for Fiscal Year 2016), rationalized in part as a way to cope with the future North Korean threat. Even if outlays for heavy oil delivered to North Korea by several countries under the Agreed Framework are included, the bills for halting DPRK plutonium reprocessing were trivial compared to the costs of coping with a nuclear-armed North Korea. The upshot: Despite these complexities, Cha and Pardo write them off by saying that “North Korea had cheated on its nuclear commitments” (p. 141).

Asked how to sum up US policy to North Korea in Bush’s first term, a Washington insider replied, “the failure of Condi Rice” (Kessler Reference Kessler2007, 65–87). Serving Bush as Special Assistant for National Security, she permitted Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to steer the president toward a belligerent unilateralism. She allowed hawks and moderates to produce an incoherent strategy. Allowing (or pressing) the Agreed Framework to evaporate constituted a major policy failure for both Pyongyang and Washington.

Neither the Bush nor the Kim Jong Il governments handled their relationship in a way that improved the security and well-being of their own citizens. The Bush team should have picked up where Clinton left off in 2000. Whatever its shortcomings, the 1994 Agreed Framework could probably have been saved. Besides aborting momentum toward arms control, Bush’s blend of bombast and malign neglect undercut any pressures on Pyongyang to pursue accommodation with Washington and its partners. Having resumed plutonium production at Yongbyon in 2003, the DPRK tested its first nuclear device in 2006 and another in 2009.

Cha took part in the subsequent Six-Party Talks with the North that took place 2003–2008. By then, however, the damage had been done. Trust could not be recovered—especially with a new and quite young leader in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un’s diplomats could not make a significant decision or discuss a sensitive issue without explicit permission from Pyongyang. Moreover, the DPRK diplomats were out of the loop. They did not know what the bomb and missile testers in the North were doing (pp. 157–158).

Cha and Pacheco Pardo have produced an excellent survey of Korea since the late nineteenth century, but they do little to explain how the United States ruined an opportunity to foster a peaceful coexistence with a DPRK that now appears evermore cavalier and dangerous.