If potential threat to world peace is used as a yardstick, North Korea is one of the most important states in the world today. The inordinate amount of attention it attracts from policymakers and scholars alike owes primarily to its propensity to precipitate crises and its presumed nuclear capability.
The product of two conferences, one held at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in 2006 and the other held at Columbia University in 2007, this anthology of articles by 12 scholars, aims to illuminate how one of the two contending approaches to coping with the North Korean threat—namely, engagement as opposed to coercion—has worked. In the introductory chapter, the editors begin by reviewing the theoretical basis of engagement. In their words, the “distinguishing feature of engagement is the idea that positive inducements and the extension of benefits, rather than the promise of harm or the imposition of current costs, can either produce a change in the adversary's actions or transform the target state by creating interests in the long run” (p. 5).
They go on to review whether engagement has worked. For the benefit of readers of this review who do not follow developments on the Korean Peninsula closely, it may be useful to note that there have been two nuclear crises there, both triggered by the North. The first erupted in 1993, when Pyongyang declared its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and sever all links with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—notably, dismantling monitoring devices installed in its Yŏngbyŏn nuclear complex and expelling IAEA inspectors stationed there on a rotating basis. The Clinton Administration's decision to embrace engagement—i.e., high-level talks with the North—helped to defuse the crisis, when a bilateral agreement was signed in Geneva in October 2004, in which the North agreed to freeze its nuclear facilities in exchange for the provision of two light-water reactors (LWRs) and the annual supply of 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil (HFO) until the completion of the LWRs.
The second nuclear crisis erupted in 2002, when, under pressure by the George W. Bush Administration to disclose and stop what it suspected was a covert nuclear weapons program utilizing highly-enriched uranium (HER) and infuriated by Washington's decision to stop the supply of HFO to the North, Pyongyang unilaterally nullified the 2004 agreement and reactivated its nuclear facilities. This led the Bush Administration grudgingly to adopt an engagement policy, initiating the Six-Party talks involving the two Koreas and the four powers with high stakes in the Peninsula—the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia.
Kim and Kang point out that the differing interests of the six parties and complexity of the issues help account for the glacial pace of engagement in a multilateral context. Nonetheless, when they and their collaborators made their final revisions, there was ground for cautious optimism. Agreements had been reached on the basic framework for resolving the dispute—which boiled down to Pyongyang's consent to disable nuclear facilities and disclose all of its nuclear programs and material in exchange for a series of inducements, including a million metric tons of HFO, its removal from Washington's list of state sponsors of terrorism, and eventual normalization of relations with both the U.S. and Japan.
Developments since the book's publication, however, have made the situation much worse. The North balked at fulfilling its part of the deal, refusing to resume the multilateral talks. The North, moreover, conducted a second nuclear test in May 2009 and vowed never to give up what it calls its “nuclear deterrent.”
If the past is any guide, the North will return to the Six-Party talks sooner or later, raising the hope that the policy of engagement will eventually bear fruit. Hence the value of the book under review remains undiminished. All the chapters in the book, in fact, are highly informative and readable. The topics they discuss include the policies of the U.S., China, Japan, and Russia, the political economy of North Korea's external economic relations, the state-business coalition for South Korea's engagement with North Korea, “business advances to North Korea as outward foreign direct investment,” South Korean non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) engagement with North Korea, and North Korea's South Korea policy.
In sum, this is a welcome addition to the growing literature on North Korea. I would rank it in the top tier of the genre and recommend it without hesitation to anyone who is interested not merely in North Korea but also in the issues of peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and beyond. The caliber of the book is high enough for adoption in graduate courses as well.
