■'조엘 S. 위트'ㅡ7년 전까지 북한의 설득력 있는 핵무기 포기 의사를 무시한, 지난 4명의 미국 대통령의 집단적 정책실패다.

[제임스강]

■북한 핵무기 문제에 대하여

○1990년대 중반의 (핵무장한 북한이 국제질서에 참을 수 없는 위협이라는 믿음에 대한) 가정이 사라졌다.

▪︎1962년 케네디가 흐루시초프와 대치한 후, 닉슨이 소비에트가 쿠바에 SS-4 미사일을 배치하도록 허용했다면 이와 같은 상황이었을 것이다.

▪︎전직 미국 외교관 조엘 윗은 자신의 저서 『◇Fallout』에서..

◇조엘 S. 위트(Joel S. Wit)의 저서 『Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea』(한국어판 제목: 폴아웃)의 출판년도는 다음과 같습니다.

▪︎원서(영어판): 2025년 10월 (예일 대학교 출판부 발간)▪︎한국어 번역판: 2026년 5월 (메디치미디어 발간)

이 책은 전 미국 국무부 관리였던 저자가 미국의 북핵 협상 35년 역사와 실패 과정을 분석한 기록물입니다.

"트럼프, 1기와 달리 제어장치無…북미 정상회담 성사시 큰 실수할 우려" 신간 북토크서 "美, 북핵대응 여러 기회 놓쳐…외교실패 대표사례"

"오늘날 북한은 미국의 주요 도시들을 황폐화시켜 30분 내에 수십만 명에서 수백만 명을 죽일 수 있다"고 쓴다.

▪︎"인구가 굶주린 작고 고립된 후진국이 어떻게 미국에 실존적 위협이 되었는가?"

▪︎이 이야기는 북한의 성공이 아니라 미국의 실패에 관한 것이다.

▪︎김씨 왕조에게 핵무기는 그 자체가 목적이 아니라 강력하고 인접한 적국의 공격에 대비하는 보험이다.

▪︎약 7년 전까지 북한은 설득력 있는 미국의 안보 보장과 맞바꾸기 위해 핵무기 포기 의사를 반복해서 보였다. 그러나 워싱턴이 이를 인정하고 대화를 거부한 것은, 지난 4명의 미국 대통령의 집단적 실패이다.

□각 대통령이 자신만의 방식으로 실패했지만, 공통점이 있다.
그것은,
▪︎관심 부족, ▪︎성급함, ▪︎산만함(주로 중동 사건으로 인한), 그리고, '자기 패배적 편견'에 의한 정책실패를 불러온 것이다.


☆조엘 위트
"트럼프, 김정은이 주한미군철수요구시 관심가질수도" | 연합뉴스

조엘 위트 "트럼프, 김정은이 주한미군철수요구시 관심가질수도" | 연합뉴스

Vol. 48 No. 17 · 24 September 2026
Keeping up with the Kims
Richard Lloyd Parry
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5110 words

Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea

by Joel S. Wit.
Yale, 535 pp., £30, January, 978 0 300 27877 4


Thirty-two​ years ago, in one of the last and least remembered crises of the 20th century, the United States came to the brink of war over the spread of nuclear weapons. Less than a year and a half into his first term, Bill Clinton was shown evidence that North Korea had removed fuel rods from a plutonium reactor, the first step towards creating the raw material for nuclear warheads. Over the spring and early summer of 1994, the American government considered the consequences of bombing the nuclear complex at Yongbyon, and the price that would be paid if it did not. Clinton’s advisers agreed that such an attack would almost certainly provoke North Korea to attack the South, which would precipitate a second Korean War.

The commander of US forces in South Korea, Gary Luck, assured Clinton that eventual victory was certain – but at a colossal cost. Luck estimated that as many as a million people would be killed, including eighty to a hundred thousand Americans; that the war would cost the US more than a hundred billion dollars; and that the economic damage to South Korea and East Asia would amount to more than a trillion.

Before they went under, the North Koreans would bombard Seoul, home to a quarter of the South Korean population, with an arsenal containing chemical as well as conventional shells. China might intervene on Pyongyang’s side, as it had during the first Korean War, risking regional and even global conflict. But there was consensus, within the US government and among the public, that a nuclear-armed North Korea could not be tolerated. ‘In the view of American military planners, the unloaded fuel rods represented a tangible and physical threat that the DPRK could move ahead to manufacture nuclear weapons,’ Don Oberdorfer writes in The Two Koreas (1997), the best account of the 1994 crisis. ‘If not stopped near the beginning, they believed, North Korea eventually could possess an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, which it could use for threats and blackmail and even to sell to high bidders in the Middle East. That simply could not be permitted to happen.’

In a world of diplomatic red lines, the starkest of all are those that mark the boundary between possession and non-possession of nuclear weapons. ‘We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril,’ John F. Kennedy told the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. ‘Nuclear weapons are so destructive and ballistic missiles are so swift that any substantially increased possibility of their use or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.’ The principle was invoked by George W. Bush in 2003 and by Donald Trump this year; it’s possible to deplore the methods and motivation for the invasion of Iraq and the attack on Iran while agreeing that self-declared enemies should be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. So what happened in North Korea?

Three decades after Clinton, North Korea has carried out the act that tempted him to go to war – unloading spent fuel rods – at least four more times. The best assessments are that Kim Jong-un’s regime has more than forty nuclear warheads and the capacity to add a further six each year. If the upper estimates – more than a hundred existing warheads and production of eighteen a year – are correct, then its nuclear arsenal is on course to surpass those of France and the UK by the end of the decade. North Korea is the only country to have carried out a nuclear test in the 21st century: it has exploded six warheads underground since 2006, including what it plausibly boasts was a hydrogen bomb. Many independent experts believe Pyongyang’s claim to have fashioned warheads compact enough for intercontinental ballistic missiles with the range to reach the US mainland. There is no question that it can readily strike South Korea and Japan with short and medium-range nuclear weapons.

The assumptions of the mid-1990s – that a nuclear-armed North Korea was an unendurable menace to the world order – have evaporated. It’s as if, after Kennedy faced off Khrushchev in 1962, Nixon had meekly allowed Brezhnev to install the SS-4s in Cuba anyway. ‘Today, North Korea can inflict devastation on major American cities, killing hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people in thirty minutes,’ writes Joel Wit, a former American diplomat who played an active part in the events he recounts in Fallout. ‘How did a small, isolated, backward country with a half-starved population become an existential threat to the United States?’

The story Wit tells is not one of North Korean success but of American failure. For the Kims, nuclear weapons have never been an end in themselves; they are an insurance policy against attack by their powerful and proximate enemies. Until about seven years ago, North Korea repeatedly showed its willingness to trade its nuclear arsenal for convincing US security guarantees. Washington’s refusal to recognise and engage with this is a collective failure of its last four presidents. Each failed in his own way, but there were common features: incuriosity, impatience, distraction (often by events in the Middle East) and self-defeating prejudice.

Bruce Cumings, the foremost scholar of the Korean War, has described the pose of ‘original innocence’ on nuclear weapons that Washington has assumed in its dealings with Pyongyang. In fact, ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, explicit or implicit threats of nuclear attack have underpinned US policy in north-east Asia, and no country has had more to fear than North Korea. American nuclear warheads were stationed in the South until 1991; at their peak they numbered 763, and rehearsals for their use were part of US military exercises on the peninsula. American satellites spotted the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in 1982. At first it generated only electricity, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Kim Il-sung found himself deprived of the handouts, favourable trade terms and security guarantees from communist allies that had sustained North Korea throughout the Cold War. ‘I’m running out of villains,’ Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in 1991. ‘I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.’

As Clinton’s grim deliberations showed, the nuclear route was a gamble for Kim, but he won his bet. The 1994 crisis was dramatically resolved with an intervention by Jimmy Carter, who flew to Pyongyang, made a deal and bounced a dumbfounded Clinton into endorsing it with a live announcement on CNN. Kim’s sudden death three weeks later did nothing to impede progress towards the Agreed Framework, an elaborate and brittle arrangement under which a conglomerate of concerned governments would provide fuel oil and ‘safe’ nuclear reactors, without the potential to fuel nuclear bombs, in exchange for freezing and eventually dismantling Yongbyon.

A crisis had been averted. Equally important, lines of communication had been established into the world’s most isolated and rebarbative regime. In 2000, in the last months of Clinton’s second term, his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, flew to Pyongyang and met the newly installed Kim Jong-il. To Washington’s surprise, he agreed to shut down the second element of North Korea’s nuclear programme: the ballistic missiles required to deliver warheads to their targets. In return, the two sides would normalise diplomatic relations and declare an end to hostilities, opening opportunities for aid, investment and economic engagement that would save North Korea from ongoing famine. ‘All we had to do was continue on this path and we were going to get there, and the decades of danger and crises were about to end,’ Clinton’s negotiator, Charles Kartman, told the journalist Mike Chinoy. ‘We had this sense that not only a page but an entire chapter of history was turning.’

The condition was a visit to Pyongyang by the president himself; it would have been his last significant act in office. Clinton wanted to go, but his aides were divided. Then came the Gore-Bush election and the prolonged imbroglio over the count in Florida. Powell, as incoming secretary of state, promised that the new administration would pick up where the old one had left off, so Clinton dedicated his last diplomatic efforts to one more failed push at peace in the Middle East and cancelled his North Korean trip.

It’s tempting to see this as one of those moments when history turned on a pivot. But probably no engagement with North Korea could have survived Bush. The Agreed Framework collapsed after an argument over whether North Korea was enriching uranium, an alternative basis for the manufacture of warheads. But the ‘cheating’ was no more than a pretext for walking away from a situation that Bush didn’t understand, but knew he couldn’t tolerate. ‘I loathe Kim Jong-il,’ he told Bob Woodward, who described the president ‘waving his finger in the air’. ‘We don’t negotiate with evil,’ Dick Cheney explained. ‘We defeat it.’

In the age of Trump, the notion of virtue rather than self-interest as a guiding principle in foreign policy is almost quaint, but that’s the way US governments talked in the early 21st century. The moral binaries that trashed the Agreed Framework were the same ones that justified the war in Iraq: a belief that, just as overwhelming military power secured a physical victory, so superior ‘values’ were a guarantee of political success. The failure of this Sunday school theology led to the swift toppling of Saddam Hussein and a prolonged war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In North Korea, it enabled the emergence of a nuclear power and the invigoration of a regime that had looked as if it was heading for the dustbin of history.

By 2003, as the US and UK waded into Iraq, North Korea had expelled international nuclear inspectors and withdrawn from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and was unloading plutonium. Too late, Bush discovered that he had no means to prevent this from happening. The neocons objected to ‘rewarding’ Pyongyang with the honour of American attention, but there was no other way to stop North Korea becoming a nuclear power. Bush’s second term was spent unsuccessfully trying to coax the Chinese into talking the North Koreans into a far less comprehensive agreement than the one that had recently been torn up.

Barack Obama gave the impression of disdaining the vapid morality of the neocons. ‘Know that you are on the wrong side of history,’ he exhorted the despots of the world in his inaugural address, ‘but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’ (Or, as he also put it, ‘It. Is. Not. A. Reward. To. Talk. To. Folks.’) Having invested time and diplomatic capital on Iran, a country far less advanced in its nuclear project and therefore easier to intercept, he secured the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On North Korea, he settled on a policy officially known as ‘strategic patience’, which meant imposing international sanctions and then waiting for Pyongyang to buckle under the pressure. But economic coercion has never worked on the Kims. By cutting off the country from international flows of capital, they have been sanctioning themselves, by the Western standard, since the end of the Cold War. In the absence of a credible option for military violence, all that is left is diplomacy. And diplomacy requires compromise and concentration, which the US has never been able to muster, at least for long enough to make a settlement of the Korean conflict possible.

Clinton finally went to Pyongyang after he retired, to secure the release of two American journalists who had been arrested after sneaking across the China-North Korea border. He reported that Kim Jong-il had offered a moratorium on testing ballistic missiles, but Obama’s people didn’t pursue it – a huge diplomatic opportunity that ‘somehow fell through the policy cracks’, according to Wit. The low point came in 2012, four months after Kim’s death and the succession of his son, the ‘Young General’ Jong-un. The US and North Korea announced a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, which would trade food aid and the promise of peace negotiations for a freeze on Pyongyang’s nuclear and long-range missile tests. This time, it was the North Koreans who did the trashing, by firing off a satellite-bearing rocket which employed the same technology as an intercontinental missile. Obama’s wounded fury exposed the impatience at the heart of strategic patience. ‘In fact,’ Wit writes, ‘the Obama administration had decided to deal with North Korea by not dealing with North Korea. It was a policy of paralysis cloaked in a virtuous posture.’ Or as another diplomat put it, ‘strategic patience during the second term meant we weren’t going to deal with those assholes any more.’

Since​ Trump’s election, it has become rare to hear the leaders of North Korea described as mad. It used to be standard, among fairly sophisticated people, to speak of the Kims as ‘psychopathic’, ‘megalomaniac’, ‘crazed’ and ‘deranged’. This wasn’t a psychiatric diagnosis, of course, but a complex of qualities held to be undesirable in those holding positions of power: belligerent and inflated rhetoric, extravagant self-aggrandisement, mindless sloganeering and unpredictability. Once these were characteristics associated exclusively with tinpot dictatorships, banana republics and other risible polities. Not any more. The Kimification of American politics is one of the least recognised contributions North Korea has made to the world.

The former CIA analyst Jung Pak has identified the similarities in upbringing and temperament between the Young General and the Great Dealmaker. ‘They were both in their twenties when they inherited wealth and an empire,’ she writes in Becoming Kim Jong-un (2021). ‘Trump’s was in real estate; Kim’s was in nuclear weapons and a country of 25 million people.’ Trump himself has hinted at the affinity. ‘He’s 27 years old,’ he said of Kim. (Trump was 25 when he became president of Trump Management.) ‘His father dies, [he] took over a regime. So say what you want, but that is not easy, especially at that age.’ Both were born into spectacular wealth, led youthful lives of brattish privilege and married attractive, fashion-conscious women, but made their political appeal to the common man.

‘As self-proclaimed champions of an idealised internal order, the two men have relied on rhetoric depicting a hostile outside world,’ Pak writes.

Pyongyang had long been inward-looking and suspicious of the outside world, while extolling the purity, optimism and single-hearted unity and self-determination of the North Korean people and the state ... Trump’s message about the world is similarly dystopian – it is a dark, dangerous place, where evil people are constantly trying to hurt Americans, their values and their way of life, as they try to pick their pockets ... Amid sneers, doubt and condescending comments about their inexperience, unpredictability and brashness, Trump and Kim defied the critics and upended political and international norms.

The Trump-Kim relationship, however, began very badly indeed and brought Korea closer to war than at any time since 1994. American outrage was kindled by the fate of Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old frat boy from Ohio who had been arrested for tearing down a Kim propaganda poster while on holiday in Pyongyang, was released and returned to the US in a coma. He died six days later, for reasons that remain murky. Trump called it the result of torture, but it seems more likely that he caused himself fatal harm with a failed suicide attempt. North Korea had been testing short and intermediate-range ballistic missiles all year. In his New Year speech, Kim had boasted that he would soon fire a long-range weapon capable of striking mainland North America. ‘It won’t happen!’ Trump tweeted, but in November North Korea launched an ICBM called the Hwasong-15.

Previous policy had been to react to such fireworks with no more than dignified statements of disapproval. But now the US and South Korea were responding in kind, with missile volleys of their own and the dispatch of what Trump called ‘armadas’ of naval ships. ‘North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,’ he warned in August. ‘They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.’ Kim’s riposte was the sixth and biggest ever underground nuclear test, with a yield at least eight times that of Hiroshima. ‘The H-bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens [of] kiloton to hundreds [of] kiloton, is a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes,’ North Korean state media reported. ‘All components of the H-bomb were homemade ... enabling the country to produce powerful nuclear weapons as many as it wants.’

A fortnight later, Trump made his first appearance at the UN General Assembly. ‘The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,’ he said. ‘Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.’ It was the first time any world leader had used the podium of the UN to threaten the deaths of 25 million people, but in the North Koreans he had met his rhetorical match. The foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, responded with epithets of his own for Trump: ‘Commander-in-Grief’, ‘Lyin’ King’ and ‘President Evil’. Kim contented himself with the observation that ‘a frightened dog barks louder. I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.’

It was a queasy moment. Sitting in Tokyo (which would surely be high on any North Korean target list), I found myself wondering at what point I would need to evacuate my children. After 22 years of reporting on North Korean crises, I had acquired a scepticism about what the news agencies refer to as ‘bellicose rhetoric’, but there was a new element of unpredictability in all this, and it didn’t come from Pyongyang. Explicit nuclear threats are ill-advised against a weaker adversary whose only military hope is to launch first, on the use-it-or-lose-it principle. In such circumstances, a ‘mad dog’ strategy doesn’t serve anyone. ‘Make them think I’m crazy,’ Trump told his UN ambassador, Nikki Haley. What an irony; what a reversal. The American president’s pose of insanity depended on the assumption that it was the nutjobs of Pyongyang who were sane, calm and rational.

Then something unexpected happened: Little Rocket Man turned to diplomacy. In December, Kim ascended the sacred mountain of Paektu on a white horse, symbolic of a man contemplating a mighty decision. In his 2018 New Year message, he announced that a North Korean delegation was to take part in South Korea’s Winter Olympics. That spring, he met the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, and made it clear that he was ready to hold a summit with Trump. In the White House’s analysis, Kim was finally succumbing to the agony of sanctions and the threat of American shock and awe, but to a non-partisan observer it looked like a decision made from a position of confidence. Kim had a strategic goal: the acquisition of a nuclear weapon capable of striking, and therefore deterring, the US. Having taken out his insurance policy, he had every reason to engage diplomatically in the hope of gaining valuable concessions. But now he could do so with hugely enhanced power, authority and menace.

Hardliners around Trump, led by the national security adviser, John Bolton, did everything they could to sabotage progress towards a summit, but the prospect of such historic dealmaking was too appetising to the Great Dealmaker. Nixon’s summit with Mao in 1972, and Reagan’s with Gorbachev in 1986, had been meticulously prepared diplomatic encounters, the expression‎ of shifts in the geopolitical tectonic plates. The Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, by contrast, was a rushed effort whose only theme was the personalities of the leaders. ‘It’s about the attitude,’ Trump told his aides. ‘The first minute I’ll know – just my touch, my feel, that’s what I do.’ Later he compared the summit to a first encounter with a woman: ‘In one second, you know whether or not it’s all going to happen.’ Trump didn’t go all the way with Kim, but the spectacle of his efforts was riveting.

The flirtation unfolded over a year and three dates, in Singapore, Vietnam and at the North-South border. ‘I think the entire world is watching this moment,’ Kim said at the first meeting. ‘Many people in the world will think of this as a scene from a fantasy, from a science fiction movie.’ There was no obvious reason why Trump had gone from threatening nuclear war to shaking hands; like so much else about him, it made no sense in terms of long-established US principle and precedent. But there they were: the tubby Dalek and the ageing Klingon, touching arms, patting backs, nodding and smiling.

When the South Korean president, Moon, had entertained Kim two months earlier, the event had been meticulously choreographed for maximum symbolic resonance. Compared to that graceful pas de deux, this was a clumping Dad dance. ‘There were ... awkward moments,’ Wit writes. Trump offered Kim some Tic Tacs before lunch, but Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, ‘thought the chairman hesitated. She fantasised that Kim was worried the president might be trying to poison him. After Trump popped a few in his mouth, the chairman did the same.’ The pens provided for the signing of the communiqué bore Trump’s signature, but Kim’s sister, the vigilant Yo-jong, spotted this and handed her brother a North Korean pen at the last minute. Sanders claimed later that Kim had winked at her lasciviously over lunch. The communiqué was little more than a rehash of a Clinton-era statement, without any concrete commitments. But it left the way open for a second summit, in Hanoi the following year, where everything fell apart.

It is difficult​, even now, to identify exactly what went wrong. The gap between the two sides had narrowed in the eight months since Singapore. The sherpas had agreed in advance on a formal declaration of an end to the Korean War, negotiations to replace the 1953 armistice with a full peace treaty and an exchange of diplomatic offices. There would be reciprocal cultural and sporting events and help for North Korea from the IMF and World Bank. But all of this depended on how far Kim would commit to denuclearisation and Trump to the easing of sanctions, and the detail of what would be delivered when.

None of this had been pinned down when they met in the Metropole Hotel. Trump was tired and cross after staying up all night to watch his former lawyer Michael Cohen testify to Congress that he was a racist, con man and cheat. The glowering Bolton was relentlessly ‘briefing’ the president that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal.’ Kim had been under the impression that the Americans had agreed to lift all sanctions in return for the dismantling of the Yongbyon reactor, and was stunned when Trump said he needed more. If the North Koreans had been willing to settle for partial sanctions relief, Wit believes, the summit would have been saved: ‘The president was ready to accept a small deal, just not Kim’s small deal.’ The signing ceremony was cancelled; the two sides didn’t even sit down for lunch. At the last minute, Kim sent a vice-foreign minister to Trump’s chief negotiator with a compromise. But the president and his entourage were already sweeping through the lobby of the hotel.

Trump, it must be said, tried harder than anyone before him to bring to an end the last surviving confrontation of the Cold War. Wit believes he was let down by his short attention span, and could have succeeded if he had hung around the Metropole for a few hours longer. But there was a contradiction at the heart of the talks that the Americans showed no sign of grasping. Trump was after a grand bargain, in which peace would descend on the peninsula as North Korea was catapulted into the global neoliberal commonwealth. ‘They have great beaches,’ he said, on being shown photographs of artillery exercises on the North Korean coast. ‘Boy, look at that view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo?’ He believed that Kim didn’t recognise his country’s potential and that, once it was explained to him, he would naturally embrace the way of the markets. But North Korean leaders have been studying capitalism since before the reforms in China half a century ago. They understand that a competitive economy would bring material improvements to the lives of their people and increased risks to their own power. Domestic entrepreneurship, free markets and foreign investment would reduce their control not only of the economy, but of politics. China and Vietnam have maintained one-party control and grown rich, but they don’t face the equivalent of South Korea – hugely dynamic and successful, politically as well as economically free, and on their doorstep. Kim knows what people in Seoul and Washington privately admit: economic engagement is a Trojan horse.

At the same time, he ardently wanted to make a more limited deal and was personally affronted when it fell through. People sniggered when Trump talked of Kim’s ‘beautiful letters’ and declared that ‘we fell in love,’ but the correspondence shows Kim to have been more emotional, needy and vulnerable than anyone had imagined. The two had a brief final meeting at the North-South border in June 2019, but an agreement to resume working-level negotiations was scuppered when the US and South Korea went ahead with military exercises that Trump had said would be cancelled, a scorching betrayal by the man Kim addressed as ‘Your Excellency’.

‘I am clearly offended, and I do not want to hide this feeling from you,’ Kim wrote. ‘I am really very offended.’

I have done more than I can at this present stage, very responsively and practically in order to keep the trust we have. However, what has Your Excellency done and what am I to explain to my people about what has changed since we met? Have actions been relaxed or any [of] my country’s external environments been improved? Have military exercises been stopped? ... If you do not think of our relationship as a stepping stone that only benefits you, then you would not make me look like an idiot that will only give without getting anything in return.

These letters rebut the claim of the hardliners that the Kims are impossible and incorrigible, that they were determined to have nuclear weapons and that any effort to deal with them was doomed. As long as Trump was in office, Kim did not abandon hope of a settlement. (‘I will put in even greater effort, Mr President,’ his last letter concluded, ‘to protect my faith in you.’) He maintained the unilateral moratorium on ballistic missile testing that had been one of his early gifts to Trump. ‘I have two daughters, and I don’t expect them to carry those nuclear weapons in their backpack for the rest of their lives,’ Kim told Mike Pompeo in 2018. ‘So yes, I do want to get rid of it when the time is right.’

It was under Joe Biden that he changed his mind. The Biden government, wholly preoccupied by Ukraine, had reverted to a listless version of strategic patience. In 2022, North Korea began intensively test-firing missiles again, and declared itself a permanent and irrevocable nuclear power, willing to use its deterrent pre-emptively in response to an anticipated attack. Uncompromising poses have been struck before, only to be negotiated away; but the North Korean government has articulated this one repeatedly, in the form of legislation, constitutional amendment and public utterance. ‘Personally, I still retain fond memories of the current US president, Mr Trump,’ Kim told his parliament last year. What followed, though, made it clear that he had moved on.

If the US were to abandon its unrealistic obsession with denuclearisation, acknowledge reality and genuinely seek peaceful co-existence with us, there would be no reason for us not to face the US ... [But] let me state unequivocally: ‘denuclearisation’ is absolutely, absolutely impossible for us. Even if the United States and its allies chant and chorus about ‘denuclearisation’ for ten, twenty, no, fifty, or even a hundred years, [the] fact of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear possession will remain unchanged.

This year, Xi Jinping quietly gave up calling for denuclearisation. Even Trump has described Little Rocket Man as a ‘nuclear power’, which in the world of non-proliferation implies admittance into the established nuclear ‘club’. In August, he gave vague intimations that he will meet Kim again later this year; even if this happens, it is difficult to see a route to the kind of ‘win’ that Trump’s personality demands. Having gone to war to stop an Iranian regime well below the threshold of nuclear capability, he finds himself in the same position on North Korea as all his predecessors, without any realistic options other than dogged diplomacy with an interlocutor in a stronger position than ever.

Wit’s story is one of American ineptitude, but it has the effect of revealing something else – the strategic brilliance and steely nerves of three generations of North Korean rulers, and Kim Jong-un above all. When he came to power in 2011, many Western specialists assumed that he would be gone in a few months. Seven years later, he was negotiating face to face with the president of the US. Put aside questions of justice, morality and human rights: in terms of personal effectiveness, of having made the best of a bad lot and expanded national power and prestige, Kim is the greatest national leader of the 21st century.

Today, he ranks third after Xi and Vladimir Putin in the rapidly solidifying eastern bloc of the new global confrontation. No one is better equipped for the new conditions: North Koreans are the only people in the world who never stopped being on a Cold War footing. Far more than their pampered adversaries in the West, more than their Chinese and Russian confrères, they are used to a war economy and the sacrifices it demands. For decades, they were lectured about being on the wrong side of history. How bitter to realise, as the ground shifts and lurches, that they were in the right place all along.

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Letters
Richard Lloyd Parry
Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia editor at the Times. His novel, In the Green Heart, is out in paperback.
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