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Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025)
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A
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B
After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program, which now has the capability of striking American cities with weapons of mass destruction. Now a new book by one of the former negotiators explains why US Efforts to contain North Korea have not worked and gives readers a front row seat to the policy debates, diplomatic deals, and secret talks between Washington and Pyongyang. Hello and welcome back to New Books in Diplomatic History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Dr. Andrew Pace, the host of the channel today. Our guest is Joel S. Witt, a Distinguished Fellow in Asian Security Studies at the Henry L. Stimson center and a former U.S. state Department official. Today we'll be talking about his new book, the Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea, which was published in 2025 by Yale University Press. Joel, welcome to the show.
- [02:09]
C
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
- [02:11]
B
It's great to have you. Would you start by telling us a little bit about yourself? How did you become an expert on North Korea and what led you to the nuclear negotiating table with Pyongyang?
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C
Well, I didn't start out in life wanting to be an expert on North Korea. I sort of stumbled into it. And let me explain what I mean by that. When I went to graduate school at Columbia, my main focus was the Soviet Union and also nuclear arms control. And I really wanted to have a career in government, working on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, but also reducing nuclear arsenals in the United States and the Soviet Union. So I did start doing that. I got into the State Department. I worked on nuclear arms control agreements under President Reagan and under President. I guess it was President Reagan mainly. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed, it didn't seem as exciting as it had before. And I sort of moved on at State Department, and I ended up working on North Korea because I had friends who were also working on it. And I've been stuck working on North Korea ever since. And so that means the past, I guess it's now 30 years, one way or another, I've been working on that issue.
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B
And you've actually written about North Korea before. Your first book was called Going the First North Korean Crisis. How does fallout build upon your first book?
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C
Well, they're two very different experiences, and I guess we'll talk more about the Clinton administration, but Going Critical is basically on the crisis under the Clinton administration. And I was in government then. And so I wrote it with the gentleman, Bob Gallucci, who was the chief negotiator. And as a result, we had access to government documents to write that book. So if you fast forward now to when I wrote this book, which I guess is now, you know, 20 years later, it covers mainly the Obama and Trump administrations. But the point I'm trying to make is this source is I didn't have access to government sources. So the book is based on 300 interviews with US South Korean and Chinese officials, as well as my own experiences over those 30 years with North Koreans. And I tried to drill down to bring the reader into the room where things were happening. And that was the main objective of the book. And I hope I achieved that.
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B
I think you did. There is a ton of detail about the negotiations, about the policy debates, both within the United States, but also in the discussions with North Korean officials. But I think your first book is a good sort of jumping off point for the start of fallout, as you note, when you were in the State Department in 1993. So Pyongyang threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and turn their stock of plutonium into nuclear weapons. And this created a crisis for the Clinton administration. But they were able to hammer out a treaty or an agreement, right?
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C
Well, yeah, in the fall of 1994, we reached an agreement called the Agreed Framework. But in the time period between when the North Koreans threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, until the time we reached an agreement, it was a roller coaster ride. I mean, we had negotiations. At times, they made very little progress. And in the spring of 1994, we actually were on the brink of a second Korean War because of the failure of our diplomatic efforts. And that, of course, as you would probably guess, was a very tense time period. And the dangers were enormous. At one point, Bill Clinton asked the American general who was in charge of US Forces in Korea, what would be the cost of a second Korean War. And the general said to him, a million and a trillion. And Clinton, of course, said to him, well, what do you mean? And the general, General, look. Said, a million casualties and a trillion dollars. It was a very tense moment in time. And luckily we didn't have a second Korean War, and we got back on the diplomatic track.
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B
So to what extent did the Agreed Framework, you know, solve the problem? It ended the immediate crisis. There was no second Korean War. But this. This tension between Pyongyang and Washington doesn't seem to be fully resolved. And. And it sounds like there was a critical point at the end of Clinton's a second term when he had the chance maybe to resolve relations or improve relations with North Korea, but was unable to. Am I correct in saying that?
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C
Well, you're right. The agreement didn't resolve the tensions because you wouldn't expect one agreement to resolve decades of tensions. And we had fought a war with North Korea, very destructive war. And then afterwards, there were decades of still remaining tensions. But the agreement set us on a path to ending the Cold War confrontation and also to preventing North Korea from building nuclear weapons. And very basically, the agreement had two parts. One was focused on the nuclear danger. In that part, the United States promised to provide North Korea with two nuclear power reactors and some heavy fuel oil, and in return, North Korea would dismantle its program. And the second part was intended to put us on the path to ending the Cold War by, for example, establishing diplomatic relations, ending the sanctions that we had imposed on North Korea. So all of that was in place at the end of Clinton's first term, and we were moving forward with implementation. And President Clinton could have pushed it a little bit further because at the end of the second term, Madeleine Albright visited North Korea, met with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, and they had a very productive meeting to the point where Clinton had the chance to visit Pyongyang himself. The problem was we didn't nail down all the details of the agreement we were trying to reach to prevent North Korea from building long range missiles. And Clinton had a choice. He could choose a summit in the Middle east or going to Pyongyang. And at the end of the day, he chose the Middle east summit. And afterwards he regretted his decision because that was not successful.
- [10:50]
B
That seems to be a common challenge that you present in your book, that each administration has a really full diplomatic plate. And trying to decide whether you're going to pursue peace in the Middle east or whether you're going to improve relations with Russia or solve the latest crisis somewhere else in the world or negotiate with Pyongyang means that you have to pick and choose your priorities. And North Korea often gets relegated to, you know, lower on the docket. But as, as you say, we were on what seemed to be a fruitful path at the end of the Clinton administration. And then there's a new president, a new administration, a new Republican administration, and the new Bush administration was largely torpedoes this framework. And Bush surrounded himself with a number of foreign policy hawks who took a very hard line against North Korea. Why did they approach the crisis this way?
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C
Well, as you can imagine, even though we reached an agreement under the Clinton administration, there were problems with the agreement. And one of the problems was during the second term of the Clinton administration, we discovered that North Korea was essentially cheating on the agreement. And if I, you know, I'm not going to belabor the technical details, but there are two ways of building nuclear weapons. One is you produce plutonium. The other way is you produce highly enriched uranium. The Agreed Framework covered both. But the North Koreans were exploring producing highly enriched uranium. And we discovered that at the end of the Clinton administration. And our plan was to use the leverage of the deal, which was enormous, because the North Koreans wanted those new reactors to use the leverage to force them to stop cheating. And so we had a plan in place that was being slowly unveiled. Unfortunately, Al Gore did not win the election in 2000, and President Bush and his advisors viewed how to deal with cheating in a much different way. And it fit in with their overall philosophy, which is the United States doesn't negotiate with evil. And of course, North Korea was seen as evil. So they didn't really pursue our plan that the Clinton administration put in place. Instead, they presented Pyongyang with an ultimatum, either stop cheating or else. And as a friend of mine who has experience dealing with North Korea has said, if there's one thing the North Koreans know how to deal with. It's a frontal assault. And so the North Koreans withdrew from the deal and immediately restarted their nuclear weapons program. And to make matters even worse, the Bush administration didn't know what to do. It didn't have a plan to deal with that possibility. So it went back to negotiations in the second term and ironically tried to reach a deal with the North Koreans, which in many ways resembled the deal that they had ditched. And they never succeeded.
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B
Try now@windows.com copilot and then in 2006, North Korea tests its first nuclear device, which was a tremendous shock, I think, to the Bush administration. And relations between the United States and North Korea seem to hit a new low. But despite that, you actually assign less blame to the Bush administration and instead you write that Barack Obama and Donald Trump bear special blame for North Korea's nuclear program. Why is that? Why do Obama and Trump bear more of the responsibility for the failure to disarm North Korea?
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C
Well, at the end of the Bush administration and the beginning of the Obama administration, if you took a snapshot of North Korea's nuclear stockpile and its missiles, they had very few nuclear weapons. Maybe A handful at most. And the missiles they had could only reach Japan, and there were very few of those, too. So if you fast forward to the end of the Obama administration, North Korea was well on its way to building a much larger nuclear arsenal, including hydrogen bombs and missiles that could reach American cities. So during his administration, the nuclear program and the threat to the United States really took off. And under Trump, that continued, although he had a really serious chance to stop that development. So I think both of those presidents are mainly responsible for the threat to American cities.
- [18:26]
B
And Obama's approach was what was often referred to as strategic patience. Was that, I guess, was that a reasonable approach? Or to rephrase it, I guess it seems that since the Cold War, even during the Cold War, there has been a long standing belief among US Policymakers that if they simply bided their time or they continued to put pressure on Pyongyang in different ways, political pressure, economic sanctions, that North Korea's regime would collapse and sort of implode on its own, perhaps in the same way that communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fell apart at the end of the Cold War. Is that a reasonable assumption?
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G
It obviously has not happened.
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B
But there seems to have been a long standing belief that the United States could sort of wait it out and outlast North Korea.
- [19:44]
C
Well, you're right. And there's a bigger theme here. It's not just North Korea. It's a theme that runs through US Foreign policy for decades. And the bigger theme is that we can essentially force countries to do things they don't want to do. We can force them to change what they think are their national interests. And a big part of that belief is that we don't really understand these countries and what motivates them. So you can see that in many different cases. You can see it in the case of Vietnam, the case of Iraq, on and on and on. And North Korea fits in that mold. The United States has felt all along that through a combination of sanctions and other pressures, it could force North Korea to give up its weapons of mass destruction. And a big part of the problem is we really don't understand North Korea. You know, these other countries we did not really understand. And it may have been even worse in the case of North Korea because we had fought a war with them, we had very little contact with North Korea afterwards. And inside the U.S. government, where you would expect some expertise to reside, there was, in fact, very little. So I think all of these factors have contributed to the failure of American policy. So you raise the Example of. Well, we thought North Korea would collapse because of everything we were doing. And maybe that's the best example of not understanding North Korea. We were applying the lessons of the Soviet Union's collapse. And in the case of the Obama administration, the president himself even said publicly, North Korea is going to collapse. And he said it after the Arab Spring.
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B
Right.
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C
He saw the changes in the Middle.
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B
East that the Internet would bring down North Korea.
- [22:11]
C
Exactly, exactly. But this portrays a fundamental misunderstanding of a country where the government didn't collapse in the 1990s during a famine that may have killed a million people. So the idea that North Korea would collapse, I think is a strand that runs through U.S. policy. But I don't want to. You know, it's a hope that many in the government had, but we never really could figure out how to make it happen in a direct way.
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B
Yeah, well, and fast forwarding a little bit to Trump's first term. The North Koreans had made, as you just said, tremendous progress in their program. They now had missiles. They were developing hydrogen bombs. And then Donald Trump assumes office. He makes North Korea one of his priorities in foreign policy. And you criticize Trump for his hubris and his narcissism, but you also say that his diplomatic instincts were generally correct in terms of his willingness to engage and actually meet with North Korean officials, including Kim Jong Un. There were. There were, I think, three summits that Trump had, and it sounds like in your book, you've said that, you know, he sort of had the right idea, and yet things still did not go well, or at least according to, you know, American objectives.
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A
Where.
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B
Where did Trump go wrong then, in the actual deal making?
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C
Well, there are a couple of points here. The first of all, it's in some ways ironic because Trump made North Korea his top priority after his only meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office. And Obama essentially admitted he had made a mistake in not making North Korea a priority and it was going to be a big threat. So Trump walked out of that meeting saying, my God, I have to deal with this somehow.
- [24:33]
B
Well, and I think that was maybe the only thing they talked about in their transition meeting, or at least they spent the majority of the time talking about North Korea.
- [24:43]
C
Yeah. You know, Obama went into the Oval Office meeting fully intending to talk mainly about North Korea as a foreign policy priority, which is, of course, even more ironic because for most of his eight years in office, it was not a priority. And so, yes, and North Korea was one of the main subjects, although there were other things that were discussed, like Trump Talking about the size of the crowds at his inauguration, all this stuff. But to get to your main question about Trump's diplomacy, on the surface, and if you people were reading the newspapers about Trump and North Korea, it seemed kind of silly he was calling this the letters he was getting from Kim Jong Un, love letters, which is hard to imagine with the dictator of North Korea. But underneath the surface, there was a lot going on. So, for example, these letters, which we now have access to, had a lot of substance in them. They were very important in moving the diplomacy forward that was going on underneath the surface. Also underneath the surface, although not entirely hidden, there were a lot of meetings between Kim Jong Un, visiting South Korean envoys, Mike Pompeo and other visitors that were moving the discussions forward. And to top that off, there was a US Special envoy, Stephen Biegan, who met with the North Koreans before the key summit in Hanoi and achieved enormous success in his talks with the North Koreans. So all of these factors combined to bring us to the brink of a major agreement at the Hanoi summit in 2019.
- [27:00]
B
And then it sounds like Trump sort of walked out at that moment, or at least right as it seemed that Kim was. Was approaching a deal or some concessions. Trump left.
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C
Yeah, exactly. So there's sort of a lot of myths out there about the Hanoi summit, and I can mention a few. One of them was that Trump went in, he was pushing for an unacceptable comprehensive denuclearization deal that Kim wouldn't accept. So Trump walked out. That is not true. Not true. So what happened in the summit itself was there were only two issues left to discuss. Steve Biegan had done such a great job before the summit that there was a draft 10 page document that essentially resolved every issue the US and North Korea had negotiated on since the time I was in the Clinton administration. So it was really an important document. But the two issues that were unresolved were the two main issues, and that's not surprising because leaders should be resolving the main issues. One was how much denuclearization would happen initially, what would North Korea give up as a first step towards complete denuclearization? And in return, how many sanctions would Donald Trump lift that had been imposed on North Korea? So the two leaders were haggling over this trade off. Trump wanted to either lift fewer sanctions or have North Korea dismantle more nuclear activities than Kim Jong Un was initially willing to do. And that was very frustrating for Trump, who was renowned for having a very short attention span. I think Antony Fauci said Trump had the attention span of a kindergartner. And you can see that today. Even so, Trump got very frustrated and decided he was going to walk out before the summit was over. But as he was starting to walk out, there was a negotiation going on in the hallway between this American envoy, Steve began, and a senior Kim aide. And they were making progress on the key issue. The problem was Trump walked right by them out the door. And of course, when you're an American on a delegation with the president of the United States, you have to follow him out the door. So the Americans walked out the door. That cut the negotiation short, and that was the end. So I'm not saying, well, they would have reached a deal. I'm saying they were at least making steps forward. And the question is, what would have happened if Trump didn't walk out and the summit continued the rest of the day. This is a real good story about.
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B
Yeah, there are a lot of interesting what ifs that you bring up in your book, but I'm curious to hear, what are the North Koreans like? There are not a lot of people in the United States who have been to Pyongyang. You've been there. You've sat at the table with them in Geneva in secret talks, unofficial talks. And there's, as you note, a lot of myths or a lot of stereotypes about North Korea as a country. And, you know, even in Your book, you. You point out that Obama's team sometimes compared them to a crime family or as. As cult members with these lapel pins featuring Kim Il Sung's face. During the Clinton years, often they're portrayed as, you know, totalitarian thugs. But in your book, in the meetings, they often come off as informed, fluent in English, many of them, and familiar with American politics and culture. There's one official who often quoted Gone with the Wind, which I thought was fascinating. Anyway, you get some interesting diplomatic personalities. Some of them have. Have names like the bulldozer or Dr. No or iron Butt. But what is it like being at the table? And what are the North Koreans like as you try to discuss these tremendously important issues?
- [33:19]
C
Yeah, you mentioned the Clinton administration, and there's a funny story about that. When it was the first time American negotiators encountered, you know, North Korean negotiators in a serious way. And the North Koreans had all the. They always wear lapel pins with pictures of their leader. And, you know, of course, Americans sitting across from them thought that was, you know, it was cult like. But on the other hand, the North Koreans, it's interesting, the North Korean delegation, when it arrived at JFK airport in New York, they were met, met by policemen with guns, and they asked an American escort, are we going to be arrested? So, you know, there's that level of, you know, not understanding the other side that over the years, I think changed. It evolved. And particularly if you had face to face contact with the North Koreans, particularly the Foreign Ministry, people who became very knowledgeable and were highly educated. So, for example, I had a very long relationship that bordered on friendship with a woman named Chae Son Hee, who is now the foreign minister of North Korea. And so for decades, she was part of the negotiations with the United States. And he didn't want to talk about the politics of North Korea with the North Korean elite. That's a subject you avoided, but otherwise very intelligent, very well informed, and could be pragmatic at times. And that was Chase Unheeded, you know, a member of the elite. She knew the Kim family very well. She had been educated abroad and at home she spoke Russian, Chinese and English. And she was the top American expert to the point where she, you know, she read American books, she read American magazines. At one meeting I had with her, I was sitting next to her at dinner, and she turned to me and said, what do you think about Hillary Clinton's book It Takes a Village? This is in 2008. And I was embarrassed because I hadn't read it. But here was a North Korean who had read this book. So they were really well prepared for dealing with the United States. And unfortunately, we weren't as well prepared to deal with them. That's the elite. I could go on and on and on about the more average people in North Korea who you don't talk politics, but were very friendly, very hospitable. They weren't programmed to be that way because you were an American. That's just the way they were. But obviously, they were living in very different circumstances than we do here.
- [36:45]
B
Right, yeah. Of course, you've mentioned that one of the sort of takeaways from these decades of talks is that Washington and American policymakers have really learned very little from history. And as you pointed out, that's not unique to North Korea. That seems to be true of American foreign policy generally, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. But I want to talk a little bit more about the lessons that you think readers and policymakers should learn from these experiences. And one thing that I found really interesting was that you seem to suggest that American negotiators or American policymakers were too idealistic, that they again overestimated their ability to influence or coerce other nations, and that they struggled to deal with reality. Maybe the famous case would be William Perry during the Clinton administration, who wrote a paper saying that the United States needed to deal with North Korea as it is and not as we wish it to be. And that seems to be a sort of motif in these dealings with North Korea, that Americans frequently struggle to deal with these stubborn realities and want to create the world as it should be and not as it is.
- [38:41]
C
Well, yeah, and it's, you know, and we can fast forward to today, for example. There's been a lot of talk about Trump meeting Kim Jong Un again. And Trump has. He's obviously very interested in that. I think he wants to pick up where he left off in 2019 and clinch a denuclearization deal with North Korea today. But that doesn't recognize the changed reality in North Korea or in our relationship from 2019. Situation today is very different. North Korea is not interested in engagement with the United States anymore. They were interested in it for 30 years. They tried for 30 years. Now they're not interested in 2021, when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, the North Koreans thought they saw the handwriting on the wall and that the United States was a retreating power. And subsequently they looked for other patrons and of course found Russia, and they always had China, too, but mainly they found Russia. And so the relationships now are very different. Secondly, Kim Jong Un is very different now because he's not interested in this engagement with the United States based on his relations with his new friends. I think Kim Jong Un feels he's really in a very strong position. He not only has a bigger nuclear arsenal and more missiles, he's modernizing his conventional forces. He's rebuilding his defense industries. He's become much more threatening to South Korea. So it's a very different situation. And on top of that, there's an arms race in Northeast Asia between him and Japan and South Korea. Very different situation than in 2019. But I'm not sure. I'm fairly certain President Trump doesn't understand that. So once again, we're in a situation where we may not understand the real situation and what to do about it.
- [41:21]
B
So what do you think the United States should do now that North Korea finally has a capable nuclear program? Is there any chance now of disarming North Korea and convincing them to abandon their program, or does the United States need to adapt to this new reality?
- [41:44]
C
That is the key question facing us today. And I think most experts would agree that North Korea is not going to give up its nuclear weapons at this point. And that's one of the results of the past 30 years of failure. The arsenal has grown to such an extent and the missile force has grown to such an extent that they're not going to give it up. And so the only alternative is to figure out how to lessen tensions in the region through diplomacy, how to reduce the risk of war once again through diplomacy, while at the same time maintaining deterrence and maintaining the forces necessary in South Korea, Japan, and the United States to convince North Korea that it's not worth starting a war. I think that's all that's left for us, really.
- [42:52]
B
Okay. A number of times in your book, you indicated that during the negotiations, North Korean officials sometimes seemed that they were. That they were willing to trade their nuclear program for normal relations. Is that. I mean, I think you're right that Pyongyang is not going to trade their program. But are normal relations still possible with North Korea? Is that something that Pyongyang still desires? Or have they been willing to, I guess, accommodate themselves to that reality in exchange for keeping their ICBMs?
- [43:44]
C
You know, when we used to talk about normal relations in the past, we were talking about the ultimate objective would be North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons. We'd have a permanent peace treaty on the Korean peninsula to replace the temporary armistice. We'd have diplomatic relations with North Korea, and all the sanctions that have been imposed on North Korea would have been lifted today. It's really very difficult to imagine those kinds of normal relations. So today, what I would say is what we can imagine maybe is a lessening of tensions. Now, I don't know that that's sort of like the glass isn't half full and half empty. The glass is probably 10% full and 90% empty. And none of this is possible without better relations between the United States, Russia, and China because of our hostile relationships and because those two countries are now North Korea's two main patrons.
- [45:03]
B
Yeah. In the end of your book, you point out that we effectively have a new cold war in Asia. The United States, South Korea, and Japan on the one side and North Korea, China, and Russia on the other. And that's created its own arms race and created an incredibly risky situation. I think you. You cite a projection that North Korea could reach 3,000 weapons by 2028. That's more than Great Britain and France have. And Kim Jong Un has claimed that North Korea would use weapons anywhere, anytime if. If his nation were threatened. So it's. It seems clear that North Korea's nuclear program has completely changed the game in terms of relations with Pyongyang, changed the dynamics of. Of the Korean peninsula itself, but also the strategic situation in. In East Asia. And that's to. To our detriment. Right. It's an incredibly tense and risky situation. That's a really uncomfortable note to end on, but I don't know that there is a sort of comfortable or silver lining to find in this, except to perhaps say that you've identified ways that the United States could have done things more effectively. We could learn more about the countries that we're dealing with. We could show more strategic empathy and less arrogance, and that we can continue to talk. We can continue to try to engage with our allies with third parties and try to find a road to better relations, if not full relations. Right.
- [47:26]
C
Yeah, exactly. I'm not surprised that you're. People often say, gee, it's hard to end on this. Pessimistic. No, I would say, well, maybe we just need to be realistic.
- [47:41]
B
All right, well, Joel, we've taken up a lot of your time. I really appreciate you being on the show. As a sort of final question, what are you working on now? Do you have plans for another book?
- [47:55]
C
I think I'm just resting because it took me, I guess it was seven years to write this book, and, you know, the enormous number of interviews I did and just pulling it all together. I'm taking a little bit of a break and thinking about other book topics, but nothing at the moment.
- [48:17]
B
Well, it is a large, very detailed volume of talks and negotiations and policy debates, but it represents a tremendous amount of work on your part in gathering reflections and interviews and recollections and then putting this all together in a way that makes sense for us. But thanks again for being on the show. We really appreciate the time you spent having this conversation.
- [48:54]
C
Thanks a lot. I've enjoyed it.
- [48:56]
B
All right, thanks, Joel. Goodbye.
- [49:10]
G
Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day. Give it a try at mintmobile.
- [49:32]
H
Com Switch Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. Cmtmobile.
- [49:40]
B
Com.