OPINION:
When he was a State Department official, Joel Wit assisted in difficult talks between American and North Korean diplomats on the 1994 “framework agreement” for Pyongyang to halt its nuclear warhead program.
Mr. Wit writes from the perspective of one who later visited North Korea to verify compliance with the deal. For years afterward, he ran the website 38 North, watching the communist state above the 38th parallel that sliced the Korean Peninsula between North and South after World War II.
As the title of his book suggests, Mr. Wit believes the Americans didn’t have to walk away from the framework eight years later, in 2002. That was after the North Korean envoy was believed to have acknowledged the existence of a separate secret program for the building of warheads with highly enriched uranium outside the nuclear complex Mr. Wit had seen.
Mr. Wit shows his disdain for the failure of the agreement without telling readers what the envoy reportedly said. Instead, Mr. Wit suggests that repeated American failures account for why the U.S. and North Korea have been at dangerous odds ever since the Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, in July 1953.
On the way, he recounts a number of nasty episodes, including the 2016 arrest and jailing of University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier. The North Koreans held Warmbier for more than a year for a relatively trivial (and trumped-up) infraction, only to then hand him over to a senior U.S. diplomat when he was in a coma.
Warmbier never regained consciousness, and he died back in the U.S. under mysterious circumstances shortly after being returned to his family.
Far from showing the impossibility of negotiating with the North, Mr. Wit treats this episode as a mishap that the Americans used to discourage talks.
In an account laced with reminiscences of his own role and his memories of some of the leading American figures, Mr. Wit leaves no doubt as to whom he sees as the good guys and whom he sees as the bad. The worst, he makes clear, is John R. Bolton, whom President Trump named national security adviser in 2018.
Mr. Bolton was retained long enough to get a seat at the table in Mr. Trump’s summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at Singapore in June of that year and at Hanoi in February 2019. Mr. Bolton had a “history of disloyalty to his bosses,” Mr. Wit writes, and “cheered when the 1994 deal collapsed.”
Among the good guys, in Mr. Wit’s opinion: Stephen Biegun, a former Ford executive once in charge of international relations. Mr. Biegun took on the role of trying to deal with the North in a style “guaranteed to alienate Bolton.”
Mr. Wit laces this account with colorful details. Mr. Kim, he writes, was “more than ready to tackle denuclearization” in a meeting in Pyongyang with the often abrasive Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the soft-spoken, open-minded Mr. Biegun.
Yet the sense that success was within reach, as divined by Mr. Wit, is misleading despite the almost minute-by-minute detail he provides on the breakdown of the second summit in Hanoi. Surprisingly, Mr. Bolton was not to blame. There was no getting around the reality that Mr. Kim was not about to give up his nuclear program.
Mr. Wit does tell the inside story of that failure in a way that I could not have imagined from my perspective in a giant press center not far from the venerable Metropole Hotel. There, several hours earlier, I saw a young North Korean and a young American soldier standing guard outside the room where Messrs. Kim and Trump and their entourages were to meet.
For all his colorful writing, much of it carefully footnoted, Mr. Wit can hardly avoid the fact that he doesn’t have the answers either.
Mr. Wit believes that a final “Hail Mary pass appeared to have paid off” four months later, when Mr. Trump diverted from a mission to see liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Seoul for a third meeting with Mr. Kim. Mr. Trump became the first American president to set foot across the North-South line as the men embraced like bosom buddies.
Dourly, Mr. Wit blames “Washington’s military exercises with South Korea” for the failure of this final attempt at reconciliation.
In the end, though, like everyone else, Mr. Wit has no convincing solutions. Instead, he resorts to quoting a paper on 38 North in which “two defense experts” suggest a “‘virtual’ security commitment … where the American peacetime military presence is minimal.”
Is Mr. Wit advocating withdrawal of America’s 28,500 troops and an end to war games? He never mentions the invasion of South Korea, ordered by Mr. Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, in June 1950, when only 500 advisers were left of American forces south of the 38th parallel.
• Donald Kirk is a former Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the old Washington Star.
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Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea
Yale University Press, $38, 535 pages
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