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.
I really dislike paywalls like substack it’s almost as if this place is being used to sell something..
I apologize for my mood…lol
Ya don’t say! selling things. What a sin against humanity. Much better if everyone just worked for free.
this smacks of using this platform to market. I’m here to read informative musings not to be told I need to buy a subscription to do so. Whats the point of this place if this site is just a means to market various subscription on substack?
“What’s the point of milk if I have to pay for it?”
Anti-war.com isn’t just a means to market various subscriptions on substack. It isn’t even predominantly that. Their links to substack are few and far between compared to their original content, and their links to open articles. You’re kinda making a mountain out of a molehill.
I made a joke and you are the one getting upset…just whose mountain is this molehill? Is humor beyond you? I honestly don’t care given how silly this thread is.
Daniel Larison writes columns for Antiwar.com, and he publishes material elsewhere, including but not limited to Substack.
Obviously, we love to have his full originals here as often as possible, but we also link to his stuff elsewhere, because it’s good stuff. And while I could be wrong, my recollection is that we link to his “free” full articles on Substack, not to his partial articles available only to paying subscribers.
I clicked the link within the first few minutes the story went up and got the dreaded sign up page to read more but now it leads to the whole thing not the offer of a free trail so my angst is cured; it was just a early glitch I surmise.
I could easily “free trial spam” with my trusty virtual credit card but that’s for streamers like Hulu, AppleTV, Deezer, etc. to avoid that monthly bill but that’s saved for our Big Tech overlords, not a guy like the author.
I would have never even had mentioned it if this site was a normal lets-make-a-lot-of-money type site but it was so unusual to see such a sight here.
People who obsess on money and/or material things are less evolved than others, or have evolved incorrectly.
The whole point of evolution is that there isn’t a “correct” way to evolve. There is no “purpose”. It happens randomly. It just is.
Nor is there an objective sense in which some people are “more” or “less” evolved than others. They have simply evolved in different ways.
The idea that evolution has a “progression” to it is extremely racist; it’s at the root of such ideas as the “mongoloid”, a thoroughly false claim that down’s syndrome is caused by a premature halt in evolution in the womb, and that Mongolians as a race have all stopped at that same evolutionary stage. It’s a disgusting and racist idea. But more importantly, it’s false. There is no “correct” way to evolve. The universe doesn’t have a value system. We do.
There’s absolutely nothing racist about saying that people who shed their desires and egos more than others are more evolved mentally and spiritually. That‘s the fact here, not your liberal drivel. I never said anything about skin color, so you obviously have some issues there.
And of course there are more and less correct ways to evolve. Species who die out quickly did not evolve correctly, or they would have survived much longer (species generally exist for 1-2 million years). I’m not talking about human-caused extinctions, which are unnatural, but about species that couldn’t make it because of some defect or defects in their evolution.
As if the U.S. should be dictating which countries may do what. Screw both of these points of view, they’re both Ugly American BS. The country with thousands of nuclear weapons and the only country to ever use them can’t tell anyone else they can’t develop or have them and still maintain any credibility. I’m as against nuclear weapons as anyone, but the U.S. isn’t the country that should be trying to prevent others from getting them.