As North Korea tops the headlines, and as political leaders, bureaucrats, and scholars alike seek to better understand this country and relevant policy options, Hard Target by Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Rival Reputations by Van Jackson, and North Korea and Nuclear Weapons edited by Sung Chull Kim and Michael Cohen stand out as noteworthy contributions. Rival Reputations is the most explicitly theoretical, as Jackson is a former Pentagon official and academic who bridges the scholarly-policy divide well. Concerned with the concept of reputation, he utilizes a detailed assessment of US-DPRK crisis behavior to show that each country's history with and perception of the other meaningfully affect decision making in crisis. Hard Target, by contrast, draws on political-economy theory to help explain North Korea's observed and projected behavior, but is more focused on deriving policy lessons than building theory. Haggard and Noland's approach yields multiple insights, such as that both sanctions and economic inducements are more likely to be effective if targeted at the country's elite. Kim and Cohen's edited volume North Korea and Nuclear Weapons, meanwhile, offers a diversity of viewpoints and research approaches that seek to explain North Korean actions and, in some chapters, to advocate for certain policies. The book derives lessons on dealing with North Korea from the premise that the country's denuclearization is impossible.
Rival Reputations is ambitious in scope and persuasively delivers on its promises. In the opening chapter, Jackson clearly lays out the questions that existing international relations scholarship does not fully explain. Why did the recurring crises in the US-DPRK relationship since the 1960s not spark war? Why did the weaker North Korea initiate violence repeatedly against the stronger United States? How did each side assess the threat of the other? To answer these questions, Jackson introduces the reader to the intuitive but underutilized concept of reputation. Since the United States did not find North Korea's many colorful verbal threats credible, Washington was surprised when Pyongyang followed through on its threats. While North Korea has a reputation in the United States for bluffing, the United States has a reputation in North Korea for “honesty.” Jackson notes that the United States developed a reputation in North Korea, in some instances, for backing down as well, which actually diminished its perceived resolve and encouraged future challenges. Reputation, not just relative military capabilities or relative national interests, helps explain these outcomes. Jackson thus argues that history works in a dyadic relationship, which previous international relations theories relevant to his study did not sufficiently embrace.
Jackson's book is methodologically rigorous. He lays out the criteria for his case selection to maximize the generalizability of theoretical claims while remaining careful not to overstate his conclusions based on the evidence from a single country. He evaluates those crises in the US-DPRK relationship that involved one side's or both sides’ top leader, a heightened military alert or casualty, and instances when at least one side threatened war or escalation. This yields four case studies: the Pueblo incident of 1968, the EC-121 shoot-down of 1969, the Panmunjom axe murders of 1976, and the first nuclear crisis of 1993–94.
These case studies are superb. Jackson follows a standard format for each empirical chapter, including background on each case, contemporary views from each side, and implications for theory. Each chapter also serves as a useful, self-contained history of the crisis in question, making it well-suited for the classroom. As one may expect, the evidence of American decision making is more direct and thorough than the North Korean views. Jackson triangulates North Korean positions based on a variety of North Korean and foreign sources.
An exceptional piece of scholarship, Rival Reputations leaves readers with additional questions for further research, including whether the reputations framework is applicable to the earliest interactions between two states that often had lasting effects. Jackson's timeframe begins in the 1960s and therefore excludes the Korean War, when Kim Il Sung decided to invade despite the presence of US forces as a signal of resolve. A cursory examination suggests that North Korea appeared to reject the idea of American commitment to come to South Korea's defense robustly, but the CIA's famous assessment days before the war's outbreak that North Korea would not invade seems to fit Jackson's framework that Washington dismissed Pyongyang's threats. Also, Jackson defines “threats” as verbal expressions such as warnings of consequences for violating a country's sovereignty, and “actions” as tangible deeds like shooting down another country's helicopter. Future research may consider extending this framework to nonverbal threats and signaling responses, such as moving significant military assets into a region or making displays of preparations for nuclear or missile tests.
States are the actors in this analysis. The study ascribes reputation by state rather than by leader. As a lesson for contemporary policy concerns, one may ask, then, whether today's leaders in the US-DPRK dyad deserve special attention. Does the United States still maintain its reputation for “honesty” in threat making, or are contemporary leaders in this relationship crafting new trends?
In the last empirical chapter, Jackson expands out from the US-DPRK dyad to “probe” the generalizability of his theory to the ROK-DPRK relationship. He explores North Korea's torpedo attack on the South Korean vessel the Cheonan and its artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island in 2010. The treatment is not meant to be comprehensive but raises useful questions on whether reputations carry over beyond the dyadic relationship. For example, does Seoul make judgments about Pyongyang's reputation by watching the US-DPRK diplomacy, or can Tehran take lessons from Washington's interactions with Pyongyang?
In Hard Target, Haggard and Noland retain an interest in the nuclear issue but depart from Jackson's assessment of militarized crises to focus on the tools of economic statecraft. Unlike Jackson, Haggard and Noland are not trying to validate a particular theoretical proposition, but rather are showing the complexity of utilizing economic tools. While Jackson's book may appeal primarily to political scientists with an interest in policy concerns, Hard Target is more likely to appeal to policy-focused North Korea specialists.
Hard Target provides a sophisticated, nuanced, and dispassionate assessment of a variety of sanctions and economic inducements. Readers looking for a simple endorsement or rejection of sanctions should look elsewhere. Haggard and Noland show how sanctions can deny a state access to economic gains or materials, signal political will, or change the behavior of the targeted state. Drawing on theoretical insights and the significant application of empirical data, the authors document effective outcomes of using various economic tools under different circumstances. They cast doubt on expectations of “transformational engagement” such as South Korea's Sunshine Policy, recognize the moral hazards of aid and humanitarian dilemmas, and stress the importance of coordinated approaches to economic statecraft.
Haggard and Noland sketch a thorough overview of North Korea's political and economic system, recognizing that the hard target's system helps determine the efficacy of particular actions. They paint a picture of North Korea's relatively narrow ruling coalition, social control efforts, and dangers from economic opening. They show how outside offers of macro-economic benefits are relatively unpersuasive in this environment and note the limits that the regime imposes on foreign investment.
In examining North Korea's external economic relations, Haggard and Noland show how various countries and the UN Security Council have regulated trade with North Korea, ranging from unilateral trade bans to multilateral luxury goods restrictions, and analyze the effects of trade and aid backfilling. They also estimate the values of North Korea's weapons and illicit trade to calculate North Korea's balance of payments. They conclude that multilateral sanctions have had a marginal effect and that limitations on bilateral trade have increased Pyongyang's reliance on Beijing. The authors present compelling evidence, then, of the moral hazard of aid, including North Korea's reduction of commercial food imports during the famine of the 1990s. “Outside donors cannot force the regime to prioritize the feeding of its population,” they proclaim (Haggard and Noland, p. 137).
The authors also provide new data from two firm-level surveys of South Korean and Chinese companies operating in North Korea in order to document shortcomings in the North Korean business environment. The final two empirical chapters show economic statecraft in action from 2001 to 2016, with a number of lessons like the perils of front-loaded concessions and the importance of international coordination.
The concluding chapter is forward-looking and more speculative, but I wish the authors could have devoted more attention in the conclusion to reinforcing the main takeaways. Haggard and Noland have a lot to say and continue to introduce new concepts through the closing pages, but some additional restraint in the final cut may have helped better focus the reader on the highly consequential and substantive contributions of this study. For example, their discussion of parallels to the Iran sanctions effort does a good job for the three paragraphs it is afforded, but does not wholly flow from the main text and leaves a number of areas for dispute. Still, Hard Target packs a lot of punch. It is a book to buy, not check out of the library; it will remain a core reference work on my shelf for some time.
The third book under review, North Korea and Nuclear Weapons, is an edited volume that takes as its premise North Korea's retention of nuclear weapons. It assesses the risks and opportunities of “deterrence” (dissuading a foreign power from invading by threatening nuclear retaliation), “compellence” (coercing a foreign power with nuclear threats to give up something), and “arms control” (mutual reductions in nuclear weapons). On page 13, editors Kim and Cohen call the volume a “first step” towards thinking about how to live with a nuclear North Korea, which is a fair description of this innovative book. It contains a number of excellent chapters, including Van Jackson's briefer foray into the wider lessons of his book discussed above. Indeed, the volume includes a variety of research approaches, and the editors avoid redundancy, as the chapters cover distinct and complementary questions.
However, the volume could have benefited from a heavier editorial hand and a more structured approach to create a more comprehensive volume. There is no subdivision to organize the nine essays, and the volume reads more as a collection of pieces than a coherent whole. It includes chapters (in some cases, multiple) on the interests and roles of the United States, South Korea, and China, but it excludes Japan and Russia. With some exceptions, discussions of North Korea's nuclear threat to the United States and South Korea take special pains to avoid acknowledging North Korea's threat to Japan. One early chapter offers a thinly referenced piece with questionable assertions that the North Korean threat to Seoul is “overrated” because it is “inconceivable” that the US-ROK alliance has not already addressed this problem in its military planning (Kim and Cohen, p. 27). Unfortunately, this may convince some to stop reading early, but readers should press on, as the volume contains many gems.
Kim's contribution on North Korea's nuclear doctrine is the best piece I have seen on the topic. Drawing on North Korean primary materials and his intimate understanding of the country, Kim shows how North Korea's 2013 Nuclear Weapons State Law provides an early indication of Kim Jong Un's nuclear doctrine. In assessing North Korea's no-first-use pledges, preemption, and second-strike capabilities, Kim explains North Korea's efforts to diversify in quantity and quality its nuclear and missile forces, its revisionist ambitions, and its quest for arms control negotiations. He outlines a chronology of events that conditioned North Korea's decision to adopt this nuclear posture and analyzes the future risks and consequences of this posture.
Terence Roehrig's chapter shows that nuclear weapons provide strategic stability but facilitate lower-level provocations, given that nuclear weapons serve as an insurance policy against strategic retaliation. He offers a concise and well-researched discussion of North Korea's conventional, nuclear, and nontraditional (e.g., cyber) capabilities, as well as of recent US-DPRK interactions, and various views on the best US approach to these problems. Given that the international community is increasingly treating North Korea as a de facto nuclear state, he urges the reinforcement of deterrence, including improving missile defense, checking DPRK proliferation, and maintaining sanctions.
In other chapters, Cohen shows the limits of compellence and seeks to derive initial lessons and predictions from social psychological research. Tristan Volpe claims that North Korea used its nuclear program as a bargaining chip in the 1990s, but that its mature nuclear program today makes it poorly suited for the same purpose. Chaesung Chun urges deterrence that can open the way for reconciliation and unification. Fei-Ling Wang criticizes Beijing's approach to North Korea as being caught up in the Sino-American rivalry and the Chinese Communist Party's own interests at the expense of China's national interest. And Yangmo Ku holds that the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) system did not constrain North Korea from going nuclear, and that North Korea has weakened the NPT.
