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

Only a handful of people could have written this book, and few could have written it as well as Joel Wit. Wit spent three decades working on U.S.–North Korean relations, first as a government official and then as a lead participant in scholarly and semiofficial dialogues. He draws on his unique first-hand experience and over 300 interviews to craft a riveting, blow-by-blow account of the fierce internal battles, bureaucratic stove-piping, paralysis, and missed opportunities that have characterized U.S. policymaking toward North Korea since the 1990s. Wit is unsparing in his assessment of what he views as successive administrations’ sometimes well-intentioned but often flawed execution of North Korea policy. He characterizes the Obama administration’s approach as “paralysis cloaked in a virtuous posture of patience”; describes the George W. Bush administration’s decision-making as “a mess” because of internal competition between the State Department and the White House; and excoriates John Bolton, the U.S. national security adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, for relentlessly seeking to derail the president’s diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Wit’s personal negotiation experience and mastery of policy detail make this book invaluable both as a history of U.S.–North Korean relations and an analysis of the U.S. policy process.