Three years of the Trump presidency have revealed a dramatic turn in the United States’ relations with North Korea from a possible nuclear collision course to the historic summit meetings with Kim Jong Un. In 2017 the United States and North Korea were dragged deep into a crash course heading for a possible nuclear exchange. In September of that year, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear weapons test, which was allegedly a hydrogen bomb; two months later, it test-fired a Hwasong-15, an ICBM that could reach North America. Meanwhile, a war of words between Trump and Kim further heightened a sense of imminent crisis, as the two leaders provoked each other with extreme rhetoric: “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime,” “a mentally deranged dotard,” “a lunatic old man,” and so on. North Korea’s provocation and the confrontation between the two idiosyncratic leaders took the world close to the danger of a nuclear war, a perilous moment that was comparable with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

In his book On the Brink, Van Jackson, previously a policy strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under the Obama administration and a current academic at Victoria University of Wellington, details the danger of the US–North Korean nuclear confrontation and examines its political and historical origins. In the past decade alone, numerous books on North Korea have been published, and On the Brink is the most recent and up-to-date version that focuses on Trump-era US policies toward North Korea. The first two chapters explain the historical origins and evolution of North Korea’s nuclear strategy and articulate how nuclear weapons fit into Pyongyang’s long-term strategic thinking. Ensuing chapters keep track of the United States’ North Korea policies since the early Obama administration, Trump’s strategy of maximum pressure, the escalating threat of a nuclear war, and how the crisis became quickly subdued in 2018. In this midst of this narrative chapter 4 offers a counterfactual analysis to argue that Hillary Clinton’s presidency would not have been much different from Trump’s with respect to North Korea policy. The concluding chapter critically evaluates Washington’s policy approach to denuclearizing North Korea and presents policy recommendations.

Van Jackson’s book is a first-rate research product that comprehensively analyzes both North Korea’s survival strategies and Washington’s responses and how the relationship almost resulted in a nuclear war. The author suggests that, although Pyongyang’s primary goal has always been self-preservation—both state and regime security—through nuclear weapons, Kim Jong Un’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program quickly became much more dangerous than those of most other nuclear weapon states when it was combined with North Korea’s long-lasting “reputational theory of victory,” a view built on coercion and the threat of force. North Korea believes that “showing strength and resolve prevents war, while showing weakness invites war” (p. 39). Jackson suggests that a nuclear North Korea would embolden its leader to go beyond mere regime survival and to pursue more aggressive policy goals on its own terms. Moreover, the nuclear crisis quickly escalated to the point of imminent nuclear war when Donald Trump put maximum pressure on North Korea and openly threatened military operations to dismantle nuclear and missile facilities—and when Kim Jong Un flatly defied the threat with more belligerent provocations; indeed, the Trump administration put all possible options on the table from total war to a “bloody nose.” A nuclear war could have been a possibility with a preemptive attack by the United States and North Korea’s response of meeting “pressure with pressure.” The highly elevated nuclear crisis suddenly cooled down after Kim Jong Un began to show restraint at the end of 2017 and expressed his desire for economic development and peace on the Korean peninsula. North Korean nuclear diplomacy quickly changed after Moon Jae-in, a progressive leader who pursued rapprochement with the North, became president of South Korea. President Moon’s initiatives made possible four inter-Korean summits, three summit meetings between Kim and Xi Jinping, and the historic Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, all of which happened in 2018.

Jackson’s analysis convincingly rejects the widely held belief among many scholars and policy makers that ever-tightening economic sanctions, nuclear deterrence, and the policy of maximum pressure will bring North Korea to the negotiating table and lead to ultimate denuclearization. On the contrary, he suggests that maximum pressure did not end the crisis, but indeed was the catalyst for the crisis. The author offers a realistic but politically indigestible policy recommendation that the United States abandon the unattainable short-term goal of comprehensive denuclearization and instead pursue a nuclear freeze, “arms control negotiations, diplomatic normalization, and the gradual repeal of sanctions” (p. 205). But this approach may be a politically unacceptable option for the United States, because it is unwilling to accept anything short of complete denuclearization of North Korea.

This is a rare research monograph that conducts in-depth analysis about the source of North Korea’s strategic thinking, the origins and development of its nuclear weapons programs, and resulting US–North Korean confrontations. Although the main audience of the book will be intellectuals and scholars of the Korean peninsula and international security, it should be accessible to broader audiences with limited knowledge about—but interest—in North Korea and its nuclear program.

At the same time, however, the book has one significant shortfall that requires stronger justification and additional empirical evidence: On the Brink does not endeavor to examine changes in Pyongyang’s domestic political settings, leadership figures, and policy priorities that occurred since the end of the Cold War; instead, it makes informed guesses about “what North Korea really wants” in vague terms. One prominent point of interest is whether the possession of nuclear weapons has made North Korea’s decision makers more confident and aggressive. The author argues that it has, that the bombs “embolden it to pursue revisionist foreign policy goals, including unification of the Korean peninsula” (p. 49). He even claims that there is a widely held belief among scholars and policy makers that Pyongyang will use the bombs for reunification of the peninsula and the withdrawal of US forces from the South. However, nothing in the book presents convincing evidence for such a claim; the author only provides three citations for this assertion, two of which are from media coverage.

North Korea has possessed nuclear weapons since 2005, and its self-proclaimed policy priorities have changed over this time—from Kim Jong Il’s Songun (military-first) policy, Kim Jong Un’s Byongjin (dual) policy in 2013, and the economy-first policy since 2018. Moreover, the book does not explain why the nuclear crash course between Washington and Pyongyang suddenly changed; the author lists multiple possible reasons, such as Kim Jong Un’s 2018 New Year’s speech, Moon Jae-in’s rapprochement, and the Winter Olympics in Pyongchang, South Korea. Yet, he misses the most important factor: the domestic political changes that transpired in Pyongyang since 2011. Despite this weakness of the book, however, readers will gain a substantive understanding of the nature and future of North Korea’s nuclear strategy and sound policy alternatives for the United States in the face of it.