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Reviewed by:
  • Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies
  • Leon V. Sigal (bio)
Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies. By Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 280 pages. $18.95 paper.

In Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, Victor Cha and David Kang make a commendable effort to get beyond the bumper-sticker sloganeering that passes for public discourse in the United States to conduct a civilized debate on what to do about North Korea. For the most part, the book lives up to their aspirations "to produce scholarship on Korea that is empirically rich, analytical rigorous, and policy-relevant."

Starting from very different interpretations of North Korean intentions, they end up calling for conditional U.S. engagement with North Korea.

Kang, who teaches government at Dartmouth College, posits that North Korea has not come close to starting a war because it is weak and deterrence works. As it grows weaker, "the chances for war or unprovoked provocative acts becomes even slimmer." Having a few crude nuclear devices will not change that. Analysts who view North Korea as a threat, he says, smuggle in unwarranted assumptions about the irrationality of North Korea's leadership.

Instead, Kang contends, "North Korea is truly trying to reach a modus vivendi with the rest of the world." Its reforms are real: it "is opening up and many of the changes are becoming irreversible." He rests his case for engagement on accelerating this transformation: "We should encourage this trend, not hinder it." Yet, why should Americans care more about how North Korea runs its economy than about its nuclear weapons programs? Any rationale for engagement that does not confront this question is ultimately unpersuasive.

Kang sidesteps the question by quoting Marcus Noland's assertion that "through a policy of engagement either Pyongyang will evolve toward a less threatening regime, or engagement will undermine the ideological basis of the Kim Jong-il regime and eventually cause its collapse." Skeptics might wonder whether the regime will go quietly into that good night—or might worry whether an arms race might break out in Northeast Asia in the meantime.

North Korea has genuine security concerns, Kang argues. A policy of pressure [End Page 170] will only make it feel more insecure. "If we really have no intention of starting a war in northeast Asia, let's put it in writing, conclude a peace treaty, and finally end the cold war." He never says what's in it for us. Why shouldn't we insist that it eliminate its nuclear arms and missile programs in return?

Cha, who taught at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University before joining the Bush administration's National Security Council staff, argues that even though deterrence is robust enough to prevent an all-out attack, "North Korea could perceive some use of limited force as a rational or optimal choice even when there is little or no hope of victory." Desperate to avoid collapse or dominance by the South, the North could lash out and launch a preemptive or preventive war. Short of war, it can and does use coercive bargaining—"deliberate, limited acts of violence to create small crises and then negotiates down from the heightened state of tension to a bargaining outcome more to [its] liking than the status quo." In the worst case, Cha says, the North could use "long-range artillery barrages, missiles strikes, or chemical weapons attacks" avoiding American targets "to hold Seoul hostage with the hope of negotiating a new status quo."

Many of the examples Cha cites as evidence of this behavior seem ill-chosen. The 1994 shooting down of a U.S. reconnaissance helicopter that strayed into North Korean air space was hardly a case of a deliberate North Korean manipulation of violence. The June 1999 deadly naval clash was not the result of a deliberate provocation by the North to "extort concessions from a fearful ROK" but came about as the result of an interaction: after South Korean ships rammed the intruders, the North fired in response. So did more recent naval firefights with South Korea and Japan.

Cha...

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