Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland provide a valuable examination of the effects of economic sanctions on North Korea, and an analysis of why they often fail to have the desired political effects. Although their book is a detailed analysis of the case of North Korea, the authors are careful to set their work in a theoretical framework that provides insights into the utility of economic sanctions more generally. Thus, it is a useful companion to the more general literature on economic sanctions, such as Etel Solingen’s Sanctions, Statecraft and Nuclear Proliferation (2012) and Lisa Martin’s Coercive Cooperation: Explaining Multilateral Economic Sanctions (1992).

Hard Target is in many ways “one-stop shopping” on North Korea. With chapters dedicated to analyzing the political system, economic production and foreign relations, a nonspecialist reader can form a fairly comprehensive picture of contemporary North Korea and how it has changed since the 1990s. The tone of the book is consistently dispassionate and avoids discussion of the consistent and widespread abuse of the North Korean population by the state and its authorities. At the same time, the authors do not shy away from assigning responsibility to the government of North Korea for the suffering of the population, and they highlight the ability of the regime to transfer the costs of economic sanctions onto the general population while shielding the elite. They also document how economic inducements are often twisted by the regime to exploit the North Korean population for the narrow benefit of the ruling elite. China’s tolerance of the presence of North Korean workers, for example, is an economic inducement that provides revenue to the regime, yet reduces the actual North Korean working population in China to virtual slavery as their wages are confiscated by the North Korean state (p. 88).

As the authors note at the outset, North Korea is a “hard target” for behavioral transformation because its political system insulates the leadership from the economic pain that sanctions inflict on the country. It is a particularly authoritarian regime in which the ruling family, party, military, and security apparatus are highly intertwined: “In such a political system, key bases of political support either are indifferent to economic constraints and inducements or have strong material as well as policy interests in uncooperative foreign policies” (p. 29). The logic of economic sanctions is that economic pain will pressure groups within the target state to push for political changes that will end the sanctions. But the structure of the North Korean political system confounds the ability of external actors to inflict economic consequences that might lead to policy changes.

For these reasons, the authors are generally pessimistic about the approaches taken by the United States, South Korea, and international organizations to modify the behavior of North Korea through economic sanctions. Yet they also find that economic inducements are not successful in pushing North Korea in the desired direction. Haggard and Noland note: “When talks broke down in 2008, the incoming Obama administration shifted back toward ‘strategic patience.’ . . . Neither this approach, which might be called ‘prospective engagement,’ nor more direct inducements . . . had any more success in steering North Korea back to the bargaining table than the Bush administration approaches had. Nor did similar strategies of prospective engagement yield much fruit for the Lee Myung-bak or Park Geun-hye governments [of South Korea]” (p. 26). In addition, the humanitarian aid distributed to North Korea through international organizations raises a serious moral hazard. As the authors note, the regime generally uses humanitarian food shipments as a way to avoid actual reform and prop up the existing system, while conditioning the access of international aid workers to North Korea on the amount of food aid the regime receives.

Much of the book consists of detailed explanations for the failure of both economic sanctions and inducements to shift North Korean policy. Coordination problems are rife in the use of economic pressure in any situation, but the authors often draw out the particular lessons and causal logic in this case study. Economic pressure on North Korea must be coordinated by China, the United States, South Korea, and Japan at a minimum. Yet, as Haggard and Noland repeatedly demonstrate, the various parties are often at odds as to the goals of the economic sanctions or inducements, as well as the linkages between inducements and the specific expected behavioral changes on the part of North Korea. In addition, China often plays a spoiler role by making up for whatever losses North Korea incurs from interruptions in trade or inducements from South Korea.

A weakness of the book is its reluctance to offer policy-relevant solutions or a course of action. The authors do have some thoughts in this direction in the concluding chapter, but they are more about the prospects for internal reform in North Korea regardless of external pressure. Overall, the reader is left with a desire to know more about the potential solutions that might be pursued, after receiving a detailed litany of the problems with existing approaches. A work of this nature would also benefit from a more nuanced examination of China’s role in sustaining North Korea. As the authors note, “sanctions will not work as long as China is committed to sustaining North Korea and its ongoing weapons programs” (p. 243). There is a considerable amount of detail presented here on China’s economic relations with North Korea, but little about the strategic value of North Korea to China. North Korea’s behavior is a problem that occupies American resources and attention and is thus a strategic tool for China. But if the costs of this strategic relationship with North Korea begin to outweigh the benefits, China’s actions, and many of the most problematic coordination issues, may significantly change.

Recent events may, in fact, demonstrate this dynamic. The formal end of the Korean War signed by the leaders of both North and South Korea in April 2018, as well as North Korea’s announcement that it would consider a complete denuclearization of the peninsula, were stunning developments that the authors could not have predicted. But their work demonstrates that the economic pressure and inducements of the past 20 years likely had little to do with this outcome. Instead, it may have been more a function of the U.S. decision to increase military pressure on North Korea and also China’s calculation that their support for North Korea’s provocations could lead to a destabilizing conflict damaging to Chinese interests.

Several points stand out as particular strengths of Hard Target. The detail of the book is impressive, with firm-level surveys of Chinese companies operating in North Korea, as well as data from the World Food Program and other international organizations. At the same time, the book is organized in a manner that allows the reader to pick out the aspects of the North Korean situation that are most significant to their interests without getting lost in data. Overall, this is an excellent work that summarizes the current state of the use of economic pressure and inducements on North Korea. The methods employed and the analysis presented could be applied to other case studies that would give the academic and policy communities much better insight into the utility of economic power in containing and potentially resolving security issues.