I reviewed Siegfried Hecker’s Hinge Points for Responsible Statecraft in my new column. The book is Hecker’s account of the development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the failures of US policy in preventing North Korea from becoming a nuclear weapons state:
The key flaws of US policy in Hecker’s view were in repeatedly failing to do technically informed risk/benefit analysis and failing to understand North Korea’s dual-track approach to diplomacy and to building up its nuclear program.
Reading through Hecker’s book sometimes gave me a feeling of déjà vu, as the fights between proponents of engagements and hardline saboteurs over North Korea policy share so many similarities with fights over Iran policy over the last decade. Every time, advocates of engagement argued that making limited gains were better than nothing and getting inspectors on site to monitor North Korean facilities was better than not having them there, but every time hardliners found a way to block new agreements or kill existing ones. Hecker identifies six hinge points since the early Bush years, and at each point the US made the wrong choice. The hardliners’ position was then exposed as foolish and irresponsible as North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs advanced, but policymakers learned nothing from this and kept making similar mistakes. One would think that twenty years of failure would cause policymakers to stop listening to hardliners, but in a system without any accountability this doesn’t happen.
In some cases, the North Korea and Iran policies involve some of the same players. Any history of nonproliferation and arms control in the twenty-first century is sure to touch on John Bolton’s destructive role in both the Bush and Trump administrations, and he appears as the bête noire of Hecker’s book. On North Korea, Hecker makes clear that Bolton’s role in killing the Agreed Framework more than twenty years ago was the most significant of the many crucial moments when the US had chances to limit North Korea’s nuclear capabilities: “The most fateful hinge point occurred in October 2002, when the Bush administration dealt a fatal blow to the 1994 Agreed Framework without either fully evaluating or properly appreciating the risks of walking away.”
I would add that the Bush administration’s failure with North Korea were arguably just as dangerous and consequential as any of their other failures, and possibly more so, but this one has been almost completely forgotten except among arms control and nonproliferation experts. One reason why US North Korea policy has failed and continues to fail is that there are never any consequences for the people responsible for those failures, and instead some of the same people are recycled in different administrations to screw things up all over again. When there is no political or reputational price to be paid for colossal screwups, the short-term incentives of hawkish posturing will tend to win out. When that posturing ends up having serious costs for US and allied interests down the road, the policymakers that made the mess will already be on their way out the door or comfortably settled in their post-government sinecures. If they are sufficiently shameless, some of the same people that made things worse will come out of the woodwork to complain about the current administration’s handling of the issue they botched.
Read the rest of the article at SubStack
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
