Disarming Strangers

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic initiative by former President Jimmy Carter and others to reverse the dangerous American course and open the way to a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear crisis. Few Americans know the full details behind this story or perhaps realize the devastating impact it could have had on the nation's post-Cold War foreign policy. In this lively and authoritative book, Leon Sigal offers an inside look at how the Korean nuclear crisis originated, escalated, and was ultimately defused. He begins by exploring a web of intelligence failures by the United States and intransigence within South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Sigal pays particular attention to an American mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation in dealing with aggressive nations. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with policymakers from the countries involved, he discloses the details of the buildup to confrontation, American refusal to engage in diplomatic give-and-take, the Carter mission, and the diplomatic deal of October 1994. In the post-Cold War era, the United States is less willing and able than before to expend unlimited resources abroad; as a result it will need to act less unilaterally and more in concert with other nations. What will become of an American foreign policy that prefers coercion when conciliation is more likely to serve its national interests? Using the events that nearly led the United States into a second Korean War, Sigal explores the need for policy change when it comes to addressing the challenge of nuclear proliferation and avoiding conflict with nations like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. What the Cuban missile crisis was to fifty years of superpower conflict, the North Korean nuclear crisis is to the coming era.

This book offers a broader theory of nuclear deterrence and examines the way nuclear and conventional deterrence interact with non-military factors in a series of historical case studies. The existing body of literature largely leans toward the analytical primacy of nuclear deterrence and it is often implicitly assumed that nuclear weapons are so important that, when they are present, other factors need not be studied. This book addresses this omission. It develops a research framework that incorporates the military aspects of deterrence, both nuclear and conventional, together with various perceptual factors, international circumstances, domestic politics, and norms. This framework is then used to re-examine five historical crises that brought two nuclear countries to the brink of war: the hostile asymmetric nuclear relations between the United States and China in the early 1960s; between the Soviet Union and China in the late 1960s; between Israel and Iraq in 1977–1981; between the United States and North Korea in 1992–1994; and, finally, between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The main empirical findings challenge the common expectation that the threat of nuclear retaliation represents the ultimate deterrent. In fact, it can be said, with a high degree of confidence, that it was rather the threat of conventional retaliation that acted as a major stabilizer. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, cold war studies, deterrence theory, security studies and IR in general.

In A Moment of Crisis, Marion V. Creekmore, Jr. tells the story of Jimmy Carter's dramatic intervention in the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis and shows how Carter prevented what he had determined was an almost certain war. Writing with the cooperation of President Carter, and drawing on a large amount of primary source material that has never been used before, Creekmore, who accompanied Carter into North Korea, delivers a gripping narrative of the former President on one of his most remarkable missions, a clear-eyed investigation into the controversies and successes of the mission and others like it, and an illuminating look at how to best handle North Korea and other "rogue regimes." This is essential reading for anyone interested in diplomacy of the highest order, how Jimmy Carter has accomplished the extraordinary achievements of his post-Presidency, the circumstances that can lead to war, and the resolve that it takes to avoid it.

President Clinton and other U.S. officials have warned that "rogue states" pose a major threat to international peace in the post-Cold War era. But what exactly is a rogue state? Does the concept foster a sound approach to foreign policy, or is it, in the end, no more than a counterproductive political epithet? Robert Litwak traces the origins and development of rogue state policy and then assesses its efficacy through detailed case studies of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He shows that the policy is politically selective, inhibits the ability of U.S. policymakers to adapt to changed conditions, and has been rejected by the United States' major allies. Litwak concludes that by lumping and demonizing a disparate group of countries, the rogue state approach obscures understanding and distorts policymaking. In place of a generic and constricting strategy, he argues for the development of "differentiated" strategies of containment, tailored to the particular circumstances within individual states.

Although the current world order is still dominated by the US, there is increasing international concern over the possibility of regional security dilemmas arising from smaller powers’ attempts to develop Weapons of Mass Destruction. A study of US-North Korean interaction using the security dilemma as a conceptual frame of analysis is thus not only hugely topical, but also particularly relevant for the 21st century on theoretical as well as empirical grounds. Is there the prospect of a security dilemma contagion if North Korea acquire nuclear weapons capability leading to an Asia Pacific wide nuclear arms race? This book examines this contentious issue in-depth and explores the difficult choices policymakers face as a result of the uncertainty in international politics.

The ordeal of negotiating with North Koreans during the Cold War has left the impression of a crazy and bizarre diplomacy, of negotiators who insult and provoke their Western counterparts while fabricating crises and fomenting discord. As "Negotiating on the Edge" reveals, however, there is not only a method to this madness but also an ongoing shift toward a less provocative negotiating style.Drawing on interviews with an eminent cast of U.S. officials and marshalling extensive research on North Korea past and present, Scott Snyder traces the historical and cultural roots of North Korea's negotiating behavior and exposes the full range of tactics in its diplomatic arsenal. He explains why North Koreans behave as they do, and he argues that there is, in fact, an internal logic to what often seems to be outrageous conduct.Finally, Snyder explores how economic desperation and the end of the Cold War have forced North Korea to modify its negotiating style and objectives. Focusing on the U.S. negotiating experience with North Korea in the 1990s, Snyder also deals comparatively with recent South Korean and multilateral attempts to engage Pyongyang."

Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy. Harrison shows why North Korea is not--as many policymakers expect--about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel. Similarly, he proposes specific trade-offs to forestall the North's development of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. nuclear umbrella in conjunction with agreements to denuclearize Korea embracing China, Russia, and Japan. The long-term goal of U.S. policy, he argues, should be the full disengagement of U.S. combat forces from Korea as part of regional agreements insulating the peninsula from all foreign conventional and nuclear forces. A veteran journalist with decades of extensive firsthand knowledge of North Korea and long-standing contacts with leaders in Washington, Seoul, and Pyongyang, Harrison is perfectly placed to make these arguments. Throughout, he supports his analysis with revealing accounts of conversations with North Korean, South Korean, and U.S. leaders over thirty-five years. Combining probing scholarship with a seasoned reporter's on-the-ground experience and insights, he has given us the definitive book on U.S. policy in Korea--past, present, and future.

In this volume, leading scholars of U.S. foreign policy, international relations, and political psychology examine one of the most consequential and controversial statements of national security policy in contemporary American history. Unlike other books which focus only on unilateralism or preventive war, Stanley A. Renshon and Peter Suedfeld provide a comprehensive framework with which to analyze the Bush Doctrine by identifying five central and interrelated elements of the doctrine: American pre-eminence assertive realism equivocal alliances selective multilateralism democratic transformation. Given its centrality to American national security, and the fact that the effects of it are likely to be felt well into the twenty-first century, Understanding the Bush Doctrine provides a critically balanced and pointed assessment of the Bush Doctrine and its premises, as well as a fair appraisal of its implications and prospects.