Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (review)

BOOK REVIEWS169 significance oftheir long Confucian tradition, Koreans may discover the potentials that gave rise to the true meaning of the modern state with grace and dignity. The appearance of Setton's work on Tasan, along with James B. Palais's 1996 monograph on Yu Hyöngwön, a Practical Learning scholar who lived one century before Tasan, signifies that American scholars' understanding of traditional Korean society has deepened. And it is significant that both men came to their conclusions by understanding Practical Learning within the boundaries of the Confucian tradition. Setton's monograph provides an opportunity to rediscover the historical meaning of Korea's Confucian tradition. Chung Doo-hee Sögang University Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, by Leon V. Sigal. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. xi, 321 pp., index. $29.95 cloth. Had it not been for its suspected nuclear weapons program, North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), would not have catapulted itself to the top of Washington's foreign-policy agenda in the early 1990s. But the task of abating, if not eliminating, the danger of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula proved to be singularly difficult. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the difficulty stemmed not simply from Pyongyang's brinkmanship but from Washington's reliance on "coercive diplomacy " as well. It was only after Washington embraced the strategy of "cooperative threat reduction" that its goal of "disarming" North Korea was attained. Leon V Sigal, a former member of the New York Times editorial board and an adjunct professor in the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, sets out to dissect the origins, evolution, and outcome of the nuclear standoff between the DPRK and the United States in this insightful and highly readable book. Drawing on an impressive array of sources, including interviews with numerous people with firsthand knowledge of the issues and events delineated in the book, Sigal shows that U.S. policy toward North Korea was hampered by "shared images" on the part ofboth policymakers and other members of the "foreign policy establishment." One of them was the uncertainty about North Korean intentions and capabilities. The DPRK's "history ofbizarre and brutal behavior and its highly adversarial style of bargaining," Sigal writes, "sowed uncertainty about what it was doing and how best to respond." "Its habit of floating concessions on a sea of threats and vituperation," he adds, "alarmed and dismayed even those 170KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 23 who favored conciliation." The response ofpolicymakers to all this was to make "worst-case assessments and rash polices—threats of economic coercion, even armed force" (p. 11). Another shared image was that "proliferation is just too difficult to prevent —that once a nation decides to build the Bomb, it cannot be persuaded to stop" (p. 11). It was also widely believed that North Korea was a " 'rogue' state, the last redoubt of Stalinist-style communism, motivated to build bombs by hostility to the outside world" (p. 11). Still another shared image was that "the main proliferation menace comes from rogue states like North Korea, han, and Iraq. Russia, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan are not considered rogue states" (p. 12). Finally, there was the shared belief that "the way to get states to abandon their nuclear ambitions is to demonize them as outlaws and force them to disarm—the crime-and-punishment approach to preventing proliferation " (p. 12). Additionally, domestic politics exerted a potent influence on the Bush and the Clinton administrations alike, prompting them to adopt a hard line and inhibiting them from making concessions to North Korea. Two external players fueled Washington's hard line—the Kim Young Sam government in Seoul and the Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. It was a nongovernmental actor, former President Jimmy Carter, who helped to break the impasse and defuse a crisis of catastrophic proportions. His visit to North Korea and meetings with DPRK President Kim Il Sung in June 1994 paved the way for the resumption of U.S.-DPRK negotiations in Geneva, which produced a comprehensive agreement four months later. In the "agreed framework" of October 1994, North Korea agreed to give up...