If the American imperialists provoke us a bit, we will not hesitate to slap them with a preemptive nuclear strike. The United States must choose! It’s up to you whether the nation called the United States exists on this planet or not.
—NORTH KOREAN PROPAGANDA VIDEO, LAST CHANCE, 2016
FORT LESLEY J. McNair, a quiet place on the south side of the busy U.S. capital, lies at the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers. It is home to the National Defense University, including the National War College and a range of military education and research activities. While I was away in South Asia in April 2017, my wife, Katie, with the help of our daughters, moved into one of the World War I–era general officer quarters on the banks of the Washington Channel, which flows into and out of the Tidal Basin. The homes have views of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. Sunsets behind Hains Point, a peninsula between the channel and the Potomac River, are spectacular. Our home was the perfect setting to host administration colleagues and foreign counterparts. Because conversations there were relaxed, they tended to be more creative and productive than those in the West Wing. Katie and our enlisted aide, Sgt. First Class Juan Sanchez, always made our guests feel welcome.
Our first guest was my South Korean counterpart, Ambassador Chung Eui-yong. Ambassador Chung and his assistant, Park Jang-ho, joined Matt Pottinger and me in June. The timing was only weeks after President Moon Jae-in of South Korea’s left-wing Minjoo (Democratic) Party won a special election, brought forward nine months early by the downfall of President Park Geun-hye and ending nine years of conservative Liberty Party rule. Our relationship would be important. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) was one of the most pressing national security challenges. Chung and I both felt a sense of urgency due to that country’s nuclear and missile programs. We needed to ensure that the relationship between the one-month-old South Korean administration and the four-month-old Trump administration got off to a good start.
The growing threats from North Korea had become palpable, but they were not new. As we faced those threats, it would be necessary for the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) to be aligned. Over the years, the approaches that our two nations took toward North Korea, however, had all too often been divergent.
CHUNG KNEW the history of U.S.-ROK relations well. After his election to the National Assembly, Chung worked on the U.S.-ROK trade agreement and observed interactions between U.S. president George W. Bush and South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun. The two presidents were close; Bush would speak at Roh’s funeral after the latter’s tragic suicide in 2009. But the two presidents’ conflicting approaches to North Korea created daylight between the allies, daylight that Pyongyang was all too happy to exploit.
The stakes were high in 2002. During a visit to Pyongyang by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly, a North Korean official did not deny that the North was secretly working to produce highly enriched uranium as a new source of fuel for nuclear weapons, despite the 1994 Agreed Framework, the treaty under which North Korea was supposed to freeze its nuclear weapons program and welcome international inspectors into its facilities. In return, North Korea would get energy aid from the United States, including shipments of oil and the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors. But implementation of a weak agreement that had not been approved by the U.S. Senate was problematic from the outset.1
In response to the disclosure of the North’s uranium-enrichment program, Bush discontinued aid to the country he had described as part of an “axis of evil.” At the same time, the South Korean government under Roh pursued Roh’s version of a “Sunshine Policy” that sought reconciliation through peaceful cooperation and opening up to the North. So, when, in 2003, the Bush administration pursued the Six-Party Talks (which included the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas) to achieve the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the economic leverage was toothless due to Seoul’s assistance to Pyongyang. Economic opening was supposed to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, but why would Pyongyang give them up when the Sunshine Policy was delivering economic benefits for free?2
The Sunshine Policy maintained its allure, even though what appeared to be early successes were manufactured. In 2000, Roh’s predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, a politician who had made an unlikely comeback after being condemned to death for his role in the antigovernment Gwangju Uprising of twenty years earlier, received the Nobel Peace Prize for visiting Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and “paving the way for a brighter future for all Koreans and other peace-loving peoples of the world.” In pursuit of the historic summit, however, Kim Dae-jung’s administration had secretly paid the dictator $500 million in cash.3 After the payoff was exposed, Kim’s opponents quipped that it was the most expensive Nobel Prize in history. Just a few weeks after the summit, North and South Korean athletes marched jointly in the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Some commentators got caught up in the emotion and predicted imminent unification. But as with Kim Dae-jung’s summit, there was more to the story. North Korea had demanded and secured secret payments from Seoul.4 North Korea also demanded that athletes from the South not outnumber those from the North. As a result, many South Korean athletes had to sit out the ceremony. It would not be the last time that a sporting/cultural event would raise hopes for sudden change in the North-South relationship and the achievement of an enduring peace on the peninsula. Inter-Korean business projects and exchanges also followed the summit, including the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, the Kaesong Industrial Zone (KIZ), and Kaesong city tours. Those projects proved lucrative for cash-starved Pyongyang, but did not lead to the anticipated opening or to gradual reform in the North. The programs, especially the KIZ, did allow limited interaction between South and North Koreans, interaction that challenged the North’s propaganda that the people of South Korea were suffering from poverty under a miserably incompetent government. Economic projects allowed South Korean companies to employ cheap North Korean labor while providing the North with much-needed foreign currency as DPRK workers’ salaries went directly to the North Korean regime.5
In 2007, despite the incompatible policies of South Korea and the United States, a prolonged stalemate in the Six-Party Talks ended, and the parties signed a tentative disarmament agreement. In June 2008, North Korea destroyed cooling towers at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center and even allowed foreign journalists and diplomats to witness the demolition. In response, the United States removed North Korea from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and returned $25 million to Pyongyang that the United States had convinced Macao authorities to freeze in an account that North Korea used for money laundering. The agreement, as with the 1994 Agreed Framework, however, created only an illusion of progress. Four months later, North Korea reneged on verification measures and expelled IAEA inspectors from Yongbyon grounds.6 The Six-Party Talks died and never revived.
After 2008, South Korea’s Sunshine Policy disappeared behind a storm of North Korean aggression. As he replaced Roh, President Lee Myung-bak and his conservative administration believed that a decade of massive aid had neither improved the lives of destitute North Koreans nor induced any change in Pyongyang’s reckless behavior. By then, the North had abandoned even the appearance of cooperation and had resumed provocations, including a long-range missile test in April 2009 and its second underground nuclear test on May 25, U.S. Memorial Day.7 Amid the tests, the Kim regime took two U.S. journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, hostage after they crossed into North Korea without visas. Even though they worked for former vice president Al Gore’s Current TV, a North Korean kangaroo court sentenced them to twelve years of hard labor. Despite the release of the journalist-hostages after President Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang in August, provocations continued. In March 2010, a North Korean midget submarine sank the South Korean naval vessel ROKS Cheonan, killing forty-six sailors. Eight months later, the Korean People’s Army fired 170 artillery shells onto South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, killing four people and injuring nineteen.8 Later that year, the regime revealed to visiting Stanford University metallurgist Siegfried Hecker the apparently fully operational uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon. North Korean leaders had vehemently denied the facility’s existence for nearly a decade.9 Behind the series of well-timed provocations lay North Korea’s effort to bolster the military qualifications of successor-in-waiting Kim Jong-un to consolidate power and initiate negotiations from a position of strength.10
Yet Washington remained weak in its response by continuing to engage the regime for potential talks, under the misguided assumption that reconciliatory diplomacy could generate a fundamental shift in Pyongyang’s policy. After the sinking of the Cheonan, former president Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang, where he called for a new dialogue; he returned to the United States with a detained American. Two months later, North Korea carried out the artillery barrage against Yeonpyeong Island. Still, Carter maintained in an op-ed that the attacks were meant to “remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations.”11 The former president warned the Obama administration that without direct talks, “North Koreans [would] take whatever actions they consider necessary to defend themselves.”12
The Obama administration judged the status quo as preferable to actions that might escalate to military conflict. As he hosted ROK president Lee in Washington during a state visit in October 2011, President Obama declared that “If the North abandons its quest for nuclear weapons and moves toward denuclearization, it will enjoy greater security and opportunity for its people. That’s the choice that North Korea faces.” The Obama administration hoped that a policy of “strategic patience” might devalue the North’s provocations as the United States ignored rather than responded to Pyongyang’s efforts to get attention and extort concessions. The administration assumed that the Kim regime was, in the words of the North Korea expert Victor Cha, an impossible state that would ultimately collapse due to its brutality, corruption, and dysfunction.13 Besides, the ailing dictator Kim Jong-il would soon be replaced by a relatively unknown twenty-seven-year-old who seemed an unlikely dictator.
As Chung and I spoke over dinner at my home six years later, it was clear that Obama’s strategy of strategic patience, like Roh’s Sunshine Policy, had failed. In their first and only meeting, President Barack Obama told President-elect Donald Trump that the DPRK had become his most pressing problem.14 Kim Jong-un, who had taken on the moniker of the Great Successor, had consolidated power in brutal fashion, executing anyone deemed a potential challenger to his authority. One might even say that Kim Jong-un was pursuing his version of a policy of strategic impatience. The year 2016 marked the fifth year of the “Great Successor’s” rule, and he did not like being ignored. He accelerated the North’s nuclear and missile programs; both were progressing faster than most anticipated. Optimism that the North Korean regime could not be sustained by its third-generation dictator faded. The United States and South Korea were at a crossroads of rethinking their North Korea policies.
Chung and I agreed that, as we implemented a new strategy, the United States and South Korea needed to avoid working at cross-purposes. I suggested that we pledge to reject two flawed assumptions that undercut previous policies toward North Korea: first, the Sunshine Policy’s notion that an opening up to North Korea would change the nature of the regime; and second, the fundamental premise of the strategic patience policy, that the regime was unsustainable and on the brink of collapse or, at least, that it would collapse before the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea—something that presented an unacceptable risk to the United States and its allies.
Matt Pottinger and I summarized the strategy that he had started working on prior to the inauguration. The United States would work with others to apply unwavering, integrated, and multinational pressure on the Kim regime. We thought that the alignment of South Korean, U.S., and Japanese policies toward North Korea was the starting point for garnering broad international support for denuclearization. We needed a realistic strategy designed to convince Pyongyang that its nuclear and missile programs were a danger rather than an asset to the Kim regime.
CHUNG AND I agreed that aligning our efforts would be easier said than done. The Moon government was entering office at a tumultuous time. In 2016, a political scandal broke in Seoul that ultimately led to the impeachment, removal, prosecution, and imprisonment of Moon’s predecessor, President Park Geun-hye.15 As the first liberal president in a decade, many believed that Moon, who had served as Roh’s chief of staff, would resurrect the Sunshine Policy, which the South Korean press could not resist labeling a “Moonshine Policy” toward the North. I was frank with Chung that moonshine and what we were calling “maximum pressure” would not mix well.
I told Ambassador Chung that misalignment in our approaches could generate a perfect storm. Like warm air from a low-pressure system hitting the cool air from a high-pressure system, the deep skepticism of overseas military commitments among Trump-supporting “economic nationalists” could collide with the wariness toward dependence on America among Moon-supporting leftists. That collision might not only undermine the approach to North Korea, but also do irreparable damage to the alliance. Some Trump supporters were isolationists. Some of Moon’s supporters were sympathetic to New Left interpretations of history that blamed U.S. “capitalist imperialism” for problems on the Korean Peninsula and beyond. Although the Korean Peninsula lies at the far reaches of American power, it is central to debates over America’s role in the world.
We had about thirty thousand troops stationed in South Korea, and Chung knew that Trump was not the first U.S. president to question the need for U.S. forces there. While campaigning for president in 1976, the year that two American soldiers were axed to death by North Korean soldiers in the demilitarized zone for attempting to cut down a poplar tree, candidate Jimmy Carter often stated his desire to bring American troops home.16 Carter was frustrated with the corruption and human rights abuses of the general turned politician Park Chung-hee, who served five consecutive terms as president until he was assassinated by his intelligence chief in 1979. South Korea subsequently strengthened its democratic institutions and experienced extraordinary economic success during the two Park administrations and the thirty-four years that separated them. Yet that success provided some U.S. skeptics with a new rationale for American withdrawal: South Korea was rich and strong enough to defend itself. The argument that U.S. forces are vital for preventing another major conflict that could be even more destructive than the Korean War of 1950–1953 leaves these skeptics unconvinced, in part because it is impossible to prove a negative. History, however, can give warning in the form of potential consequences.
As I got to know Ambassador Chung and to learn about his background, I became aware that he was four years old when North Korea invaded. He lived in Seoul, the South’s capital city that changed hands four times during the war. His earliest memories included entire city blocks in rubble; his mother forcing him and his siblings to wear makeshift helmets she sewed out of seat cushions, to protect them from shrapnel; and his home full of patients screaming in pain as they waited for his father, a doctor, to treat their wounds. He remembers macabre scenes while playing on streets surrounded by partially covered corpses. And he remembers great hardships; he walked more than two hundred kilometers in freezing cold weather to escape the Chinese army’s assault on the capital in 1951. He remembers attending his first day of school in a “classroom” with no walls or ceiling; its only structure was a makeshift chalkboard. Ambassador Chung was aware that my father, Herbert McMaster, served as an infantryman in the Korean War, and he often expressed his gratitude for not only my father’s service but also the service and sacrifice of so many others. The Korean War cost the lives of close to 37,000 Americans, 200,000 South Korean and UN soldiers, 400,000 North Korean soldiers, 600,000 Chinese troops, and a million and a half civilians. All told, approximately 3 million people died as a direct result of a war, after which neither side could claim victory. Statistics can be numbing, but Chung understood the war through distant memories of horrors that we were determined to prevent from happening again. Chung and I agreed that it was cheaper to prevent a war than to fight one. We also agreed that the Korean War had been preventable.
At the end of World War II, Korea was freed from Japanese control by the Allies. President Harry Truman sent American soldiers to Korea to prevent the Soviets from occupying its entirety, and the United States and the Soviet Union would each occupy half of the peninsula over the next few years. When the formal UN-endorsed trusteeships over the two Koreas expired in 1948, the two superpowers failed to agree on how a united Korean state would be governed. After a general election in the South, Syngman Rhee, who held a doctorate in politics from Princeton University, took over from the U.S. military government. Meanwhile, the Soviets established the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) and chose as its leader Kim Il-sung, an ambitious young Communist guerrilla leader who had impressed his Soviet patrons while serving in the Soviet Army in the Far East.17 From the start, the ideologically incompatible two Koreas were each trying to undermine the other’s government, each wanting reunification under its control.18
Despite the obvious prospects for war on the peninsula, the first secretary of the new U.S. Department of Defense, James Forrestal, was skeptical about maintaining U.S. forces there. He saw the deployment as an unnecessary “drain on Army resources,” describing duty there as “a source of unceasing complaint from parents of the enlisted men who were unhappy, dissatisfied, and bored.”19 Stalin, emboldened by the drawdown of American forces, gave Kim Il-sung the green light to prepare for a large-scale invasion of South Korea.20 The war began at four o’clock on the morning of June 25, 1950, as six North Korean infantry divisions reinforced with tanks poured across the Thirty-Eighth Parallel.
It should not have been a surprise. A February 1949 CIA top-secret study predicted that the U.S. troop withdrawal “would probably in time be followed by an invasion” and that “continued presence in Korea of a moderate U.S. force would not only discourage the threatened invasion but also would help sustain the will and ability of the South Koreans to resist any future invasion.”21
I described to Chung my concern over a new strain of American isolationism based on a wariness of foreign entanglements. This strain traces back to our founding. In his 1801 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson listed “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none” as “essential principles of our government.” Twenty-first-century skeptics of U.S. military engagement abroad and especially of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are fond of quoting former president John Quincy Adams that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” while leaving out the context of the fledgling nation’s incomplete task of western expansion, preoccupation with conflicts on the frontier with Native Americans, and lack of financial and military power.22 Profound expressions of isolationist sentiment were manifest in America’s rejection of membership in the League of Nations after World War I and its reluctance to intervene directly in World War II until after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Pearl Harbor delivered a severe blow not only to the U.S. naval fleet but also to the isolationist movement in the United States. I warned Chung about the revival of American isolationism, as an activist element of President Trump’s political base rallied around building a border wall, defending the United States at the ocean’s edge, and ending protracted overseas commitments. At the very least, the president’s supporters wanted others (especially allies) to pull their own weight. Many viewed allies as free riding on security provided by Uncle Sam while the United States got little in return. Shouldering a fair share of the burden was not a new American concern, but the voices of those who held it were growing louder.
As we spoke, I realized that Chung was the right person in the leftist Moon government to help prevent the perfect storm. His quiet, calm confidence stemmed from his long experience as a diplomat. He had served as South Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations and Israel as well as the deputy minister for trade and minister of economic affairs in Washington. As a member of the South Korean National Assembly, he chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. He looked much younger than his seventy-one years, despite a grueling travel schedule that would have exhausted a much younger man. Chung could also help generate international support for the North Korea strategy as he was well respected across Asia and in Moscow and Beijing. We would have to work hard to stay aligned due not only to the incompatibility of Trump’s and Moon’s domestic supporters, but also because China’s leaders would do their best to divide us.
AFTER DINNER, we moved out onto the patio, where I conveyed my impressions from President Trump’s summit with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago of two months earlier. I thought that China was likely to use DPRK tensions opportunistically to gain dominant influence in Northeast Asia. If the Kim regime collapsed, the South would dominate a unified Korea, given its much larger population (51 million compared to 25 million) and an economy estimated to be as much as eighty-eight times the North’s size.23 If the Kim regime was ultimately doomed to failure, the best way for China to prevent strong U.S. influence from extending north to the Yalu River was to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul. Pushing the United States military off the peninsula would leave South Korea vulnerable to Chinese co-option and coercion, the objectives of which would be getting Seoul to align more closely with Beijing than with Washington and isolating China’s most powerful regional competitor, Japan.
China’s strategic priority of pushing the United States out of Northeast Asia explains why American efforts to get China to do more on North Korea were so often met with Chinese officials’ assertions of moral equivalency between North Korea, South Korea, and the United States. After even the most egregious DPRK acts of aggression, China would invariably call on all parties to reduce tensions. To absolve China from responsibility for North Korea’s aggression, Chinese leaders would persistently state that it was a problem between the United States and North Korea.
Beijing tries to obscure the obvious coercive power it has over the Kim regime. At Mar-a-Lago, President Trump told our Chinese counterparts that they could solve the problem of North Korea if they wanted to. He was correct. Over 90 percent of North Korea’s trade is with China, and virtually all the North’s fuel and oil imports come across the Chinese border.24 It is impossible to fire a missile without fuel. To appear as an honest broker, China, after DPRK provocations such as nuclear and missile tests, would invariably suggest a “freeze for freeze,” meaning that North Korea would cease testing in exchange for suspension of ROK-U.S. alliance activities such as joint training exercises. The problem was that each “freeze” reinforced the narrative that North Korea’s actions were defensive while locking in their more advanced capabilities as the new normal. At Mar-a-Lago, however, Pottinger and I discerned a subtle shift in Chinese leaders’ language on North Korea that might have communicated a willingness to soften their cynical manipulation of DPRK’s behavior to advance their long-term goal of hegemonic influence in Asia.
Chinese leaders need to recognize that a nuclear-armed North Korea is bad for China and the world. North Korea’s nuclear weapons would not only pose a direct threat to China, but also incite other nations to consider building their own nuclear capability to deter the Kim regime. Those nations would certainly include Japan and South Korea, but it would not be difficult to imagine similar discussions in Taiwan or Vietnam. Just as the United States played a role in discouraging both South Korea and Japan from pursuing nuclear weapons programs, it was past time for China to do something similar with North Korea.
We did not expect Chinese leaders to have an epiphany and commit fully to denuclearization, but the initial response was, at least, not disappointing. Xi, whose relationship with Kim Jong-un was nonexistent at the time—the two leaders had not yet met in person—dropped the moral equivalency language. There was no invocation of a “freeze for freeze.” Xi seemed to understand that complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization was the only acceptable outcome. Chung and I discussed how, despite those positive indicators, China would continue to find ways to undermine the U.S.-ROK alliance and use historical ROK-Japan animosities to isolate Japan. China shares with Korea a deep resentment associated with Imperial Japan’s brutal behavior across Northeast Asia. In addition to occupying Korea for thirty-five years, Japan invaded Manchuria, Shanghai, and Nanking. Especially brutal was the infamous Nanking Massacre, a campaign of killing, torture, and rape from December 1937 to January 1938 that left as many as two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand civilians dead. China takes advantage of animosity for Japan within the South Korean public and President Moon’s party, given this history of shared horrors.
STRATEGIC EMPATHY applies to allies as well as adversaries. I tried to understand Chung’s and President Moon’s perspective on our alliance as well as on the problem of North Korea. Ambassador Chung was older than the majority of officials in the Moon government and had lived through not only the horrors of the Korean War but also the long history of North Korean aggression after the cease-fire in 1953. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in diplomacy in 1968 as North Korea’s United Front strategy to destabilize the South Korean government and undermine the U.S.-ROK alliance intensified. That same year, during his last semester, thirty-one North Korean commandos infiltrated Seoul intending to storm the Blue House, official residence of the South Korean head of state, and kill everyone inside. They were intercepted, and all but two died in the firefight in downtown Seoul. That same month, DPRK submarine chasers and torpedo boats attacked the intelligence ship USS Pueblo near the North Korean coast, killing one sailor and capturing the ship and eighty-three sailors, who were abused and held in captivity for over a year. In October, 120 North Korean commandos attacked from the sea, landing on the east coast and occupying villages in an effort to instigate a Communist revolution. The invaders tried first to recruit the villagers to their cause with tales of the people’s paradise in the North and then murdered those who were visibly unconvinced of how happy they could be under the Kim regime. It took two months for the South Korean military to hunt down the unpersuasive thugs.25 North Korean attacks continued into 1969. On April 15, two People’s Liberation Army Air Force MiG interceptors shot down a defenseless U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft ninety-five miles off the east coast of the DPRK, killing thirty-one Americans.
Moon came of age well after Chung, in the 1980s, as part of a new, politically active generation nicknamed the 386 Generation because they were in their thirties, had attended university in the eighties, and were born in the sixties.26 Also, the Intel 386 microprocessor was the prevalent computer chip then, in the 1990s. For the older generation, the Korean War and South Korea’s recovery were their formative life events, in which the U.S. defended then assisted in their recovery. This led to very strong anti–North Korean and pro-U.S. viewpoints. For the 386ers, their formative experience was the Gwangju Uprising and the perceived U.S. assistance or acquiescence in allowing South Korean forces to violently put down the anti-government demonstrations that eventually led to Chun Doo-hwan’s ascendance to the presidency in 1979. This led to strong anti-U.S. feelings among the 386ers.
The 386ers drove the pro-democracy movement that in 1987 ended decades of authoritarian rule in Seoul. They jump-started an era of democratic reform and spectacular economic growth that remains one of the greatest successes in the history of democracy and capitalism. Once judged by some as incapable of popular rule, South Korea became one of the most vibrant democracies in Asia.
I shared with Chung my concern about some of President Moon’s campaign rhetoric. Moon risked resurrecting the underlying flawed assumption of the Sunshine Policy: that an opening up to North Korea through political concessions and unconditional aid would lead to a gradual change in the regime similar to what occurred in China under Deng Xiaoping or in Vietnam after economic reforms in 1986. It would be challenging to generate maximum pressure against the North if South Korea and other nations believed there was a solution that did not require tough economic measures, a united diplomatic effort to isolate Pyongyang, and military preparation for a worst-case scenario. Any South Korean effort at conciliation with the North would not only dissipate pressure on Pyongyang, but also encourage Kim to continue rather than curtail provocations in the hope of extorting concessions.
By 2017, it was also clear that the assumptions that underpinned the strategy of strategic patience were false. The third-generation dictator of the Kim family, “the Great Successor” Kim Jong-un, would not transform North Korea into a responsible state. And he had proved capable of continuing the brutal repression of the North Korean people. During the transition of power between Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un in December 2011, it was easy to find dark humor in the nature of the Kim dictatorship. Spectators sobbed hysterically during the over-the-top funeral procession. The man who led the procession seemed comical: a twenty-seven-year-old educated in Switzerland who kept an odd haircut so he might resemble his beloved grandfather Kim Il-sung. Even Chinese Communist Party leaders, not known for their sense of humor, referred to the Great Successor uncharitably as “Kim Fatty the Third.”27 The newest dictator seemed to take his family’s penchant for fabricating stories of their own brilliance, prowess, benevolence, and infallibility to new, even more laughable levels. In a manual for middle school teachers, Kim appeared as a child prodigy who started driving at the age of three and composed numerous musical scores.28 That aside, Kim Jong-un was deadly serious and consolidated power with a ruthlessness befitting his family’s long history of inhumanity.
Just two months before my meeting with Chung, the Great Successor’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong-nam (KJN), suffered a gruesome death in Malaysia. KJN was a gambler, playboy, and heavy drinker who enjoyed the good life in Asia’s most vibrant cities. Kim Jong-un would never trust his half-brother because his mere existence, backed by China, meant that he was a plausible replacement. KJN’s fatal mistake, however, was to criticize his half-brother. On February 13, 2017, the ordinary-looking, balding forty-five-year-old walked through the bustling Kuala Lumpur International Airport terminal on his way to check in for a flight to Macau. As he stood at the kiosk, two women approached. The first, a young Indonesian woman, came up behind him, covered his eyes, and then wiped her hands down his face and over his mouth. Then a Vietnamese woman repeated the action. Both were purportedly told they were participating in a television prank. As the women ran off, KJN began to experience the symptoms of exposure to the internationally banned VX nerve agent. His muscles started to contract uncontrollably. He was escorted to the airport’s medical clinic and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after approximately fifteen minutes of agony.29
The assassination underscored Kim’s determination to preempt opposition. The Institute for National Security Strategy, a South Korean think tank, estimated that in his first five years as dictator, Kim personally ordered the executions of at least 340 people, 140 of whom were senior military, government, or party officials.30 Executions in North Korea were not unprecedented, but including one’s own family was a new twist. KJN was not the first victim in Kim’s family. A few years earlier, Kim Jong-un had ordered the execution of his uncle by marriage, Jang Song-thaek. Jang, who was thought to be the real power behind the young dictator, was accused of various offenses, including treason and graft.31 He was blown apart by antiaircraft cannons in front of military cadets. The scene must have pleased Kim, as he used the same method two years later to execute the chief of the Korean People’s Army’s General Staff, General Hyon Yong-chol, whose offenses included treason compounded by falling asleep in meetings with the Great Successor.32 Death by antiaircraft cannon may not be the most economical means of execution, but like the use of a nerve agent on Kim Jong-nam in a busy airport, it sent a dramatic message to anyone who might want to challenge the young dictator’s authority.
NO ONE was surprised by Kim’s tightening grip on power. Most knew that the death of Kim Jong-il would not change the DPRK regime’s ability to control every aspect of people’s lives. Outside information is forbidden. Every citizen is monitored to detect any sign of dissent. The Kim family also uses North Korea’s songbun political class system, which categorizes the population into three classes: loyal, wavering, and hostile. While the 40 percent of the population stuck in the undesirable or hostile category have no hope for advancement, those at the top can be threatened with plummeting to the bottom.33 The party uses local informants, who report even the slightest hint of disloyalty. The accused find themselves in North Korea’s massive penal labor colonies, in which an estimated two hundred thousand “counter-revolutionaries” are consigned to reeducation, hard labor, starvation, beatings, and torture. Women are raped, forced to have abortions, and sometimes have to watch as their newborn babies are killed in front of them. Some are forced to kill their babies or be killed themselves. The United Nations and an international tribunal of human rights judges concluded that Kim should be tried for crimes against humanity.34 North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs appeared even more dangerous in the context of the regime’s brutality. Strategic patience was no longer a viable strategy.
The fact that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were advancing more rapidly than most had imagined was another reason to lose our patience. On January 6, 2016, North Korea announced that it had conducted a fourth nuclear weapon test, claiming to have detonated a hydrogen bomb for the first time, although experts were dubious given the seismic evidence. A month later, in defiance of UN prohibitions, North Korea launched a long-range ballistic missile carrying what it claimed was an earth observation satellite. Eight intermediate-range missile tests followed in the next eight months. Although seven of those tests failed, it was clear that Kim Jong-un had prioritized the program and that its scientists were learning from those failures. And just two months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, North Korea conducted a fifth nuclear weapon test of what it claimed to be a nuclear warhead.35
It was those multiple tests in 2016 that prompted the Obama administration and the Park government in South Korea to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) transportable missile system to South Korea. The system intercepts incoming short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase of flight. It seemed like a logical response to a growing threat to South Korea and to the approximately 23,000 U.S. troops and 130,000 American civilians living there.36 But in the summer of 2017, THAAD threatened to generate that perfect storm between Donald Trump’s and Moon Jae-in’s political bases.
THAAD was contentious with President Trump and his political base because of its cost and the perception that it was another case of the United States defending a faraway place at American taxpayers’ expense. Skeptics of U.S. military presence overseas did not care that the system was wholly owned and operated by the U.S. Army, nor that it was a cheaper missile defense solution than the alternative of multiple Patriot air defense batteries. They were especially doubtful that countries like South Korea could not afford their own defenses.
President Moon’s party had its own reservations about THAAD. China had already punished South Korea economically for the missile system, including with financial sanctions, restrictions on South Korean corporations in China, and a sharp reduction in tourism. During his campaign, Moon said that THAAD required more study as well as parliamentary approval. He had also expressed disappointment over a preelection early-morning emplacement of two rockets and radar on the former golf course designated as the site for THAAD as well as the expedited arrival of the remaining four missiles in South Korea. Moon felt that the rushed deployment was to get the missiles in place without his new government’s consent. Some South Korean critics fell for the baseless claim of the Chinese Communist Party leadership that THAAD would conduct radar surveillance deep into Chinese territory and shoot down Chinese rather than North Korean missiles. The THAAD deployment was especially contentious among South Koreans skeptical of the U.S. military presence, who, despite the North’s provocations, tended to blame America for everything, including China’s punitive economic actions against the South for hosting the missile system.37
President Trump and other American leaders were likely to view any South Korean hesitation to deploy THAAD as a sign of weakness in deference to China as well as a sign of ingratitude for U.S. assistance, even as the threat from North Korea grew. Issues with THAAD were being conflated with the perception that the United States–Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) was a bad deal for the United States. Prior to the South Korean presidential election, President Trump had threatened to pull out of KORUS and force South Korea to pay for THAAD.
Chung brought to our dinner a proposal to delay the deployment of the remaining missiles and other components in the THAAD battery, to allow for more analysis of the issue, parliamentary approval, and the completion of an environmental study. He drew on a napkin the portion of the converted golf course in which the initial two missiles were deployed as the others were readied for emplacement. I told Chung that his proposal could lead to disaster. President Trump, a real estate developer, would likely have a visceral reaction to even the suggestion of an environmental study. He would also see it for what it was: a delaying tactic or, even worse, an effort to bargain away an alliance capability to placate China. The delay of the THAAD deployment would also allow alliance skeptics on the right in the United States to portray the Moon government as ungrateful and strengthen those in the United States who questioned not only the THAAD deployment, but also KORUS and even the presence of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula. I told him that I was not an alarmist, but that the delay of THAAD could be the first step toward the rending of the alliance that had prevented war for more than six decades.
I slid the napkin toward myself and drew the remaining four missiles into the smaller area with the other two. I asked Chung why all the missiles could not go into the smaller space to prevent further delay. The environmental study could then be done deliberately, after which the missiles could be spread out over the larger space. After Chung said that he would try to make it work, I passed the napkin to Pottinger and told Chung that if he and President Moon made the THAAD deployment happen quickly, we would frame the napkin for posterity.
Pottinger and I thought that the dinner with Chung was successful. Not only did we begin to develop what would become a strong friendship, but we also resolved that we would not approach the North Korea problem consistent with the definition of insanity mentioned previously: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. We resolved to stay aligned as we endeavored to break the historical pattern of North Korean provocation, extortion, and negotiation that had worked so well for the Kim family dictators in the past. And we resolved not to take our alliance for granted.
IN THE summer of 2017, I thought that we were off to a good start in replacing the strategy of strategic patience with a strategy of maximum pressure. President Trump had approved the maximum pressure strategy in March. All in attendance at that National Security Council meeting had agreed that we should assume that the North Korean regime was likely neither to collapse nor to reform. We resolved not to repeat the failed pattern of past efforts and emphasized the importance of getting other nations to make that same resolution.
Coordination with South Korea was going well, and the potential dangers to our relationship were receding. At the end of June, President Moon visited Washington. He and President Trump agreed on the strategy of maximum pressure to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea. But we were under no illusions that this would be easy to achieve. We were testing a thesis that the United States and other nations could force Kim Jong-un to envision a future in which he continued to rule in an increasingly prosperous North, and thus conclude that he and his regime were safer without nuclear weapons than they were with them.
After his visit to Washington, President Moon reversed his earlier decision to wait for an environmental assessment and approved the plan drawn on the napkin at my house. I gladly received President Trump’s ire for South Korea’s not paying for a missile system our army owned and our soldiers operated. Meanwhile, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and I made the case that renegotiating KORUS was better for the American people than withdrawing from the deal, both from an economic and a national security perspective.
But as maximum pressure increased, so did North Korea’s attempts to force a return to the failed cycle of the past. The DPRK would conduct seventeen missile tests throughout 2017, including the test of an intercontinental ballistic missile on July 4, America’s Independence Day. These tests helped solidify support for our strategy as the best alternative to what would be a dangerous and costly military confrontation or premature negotiations that would lock in the status quo as the new normal while North Korea continued to mature its nuclear program. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, masterfully negotiated four new UN Security Council resolutions that helped place significant economic pressure on North Korea. The administration worked with Congress to impose additional sanctions. The Department of State, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Justice redoubled efforts to enforce those sanctions and disrupt North Korea’s organized crime and cybercrime activities.
Because of our flawed assumptions and misaligned policies, the North Korean regime had never felt diplomatic, economic, financial, or military pressure sufficient to convince its leaders that denuclearization was in their interests. On the contrary, the cycle of North Korean provocation, feigned conciliation, negotiation, extortion, concession, promulgation of a weak agreement, and the inevitable violation of that agreement actually encouraged the North’s aggression. As pressure mounted in 2017 and as nations around the world, including China, began to enforce sanctions, North Korea redoubled its efforts to get back to the negotiating table. On September 3, over Labor Day weekend in the United States, North Korea conducted a nuclear test that it again claimed to be a hydrogen bomb. The blast was estimated to have destructive power equivalent to 140 kilotons of TNT, ten times as powerful as Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.38
We had work to do. Implementation would depend on maintaining unity of effort internally and with multinational partners. But despite promising, unified early efforts, it proved difficult to keep everyone committed. Some officials who helped develop the campaign of maximum pressure started using the term peaceful pressure instead. It was easy to lapse into strategic narcissism and, in particular, to do what one might prefer to do rather than what the situation demanded. Pottinger, the NSC staff, and I worked hard to prevent divergent and inconsistent approaches to North Korea across our departments and agencies. At one point, in October 2017, as the State Department reverted to form by seeking several channels of communication with Pyongyang despite the president’s guidance to let Pyongyang first feel the consequences of its actions, the president tweeted to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”39
As we prepared for President Trump’s first State of the Union address, one of three moving speeches in which he criticized North Korean human rights violations, we were reminded of the importance of our work on the North Korea challenge. I hosted the family of Otto Warmbier in my office with Pottinger and our director for Korea, Allison Hooker, before they met President Trump in the Oval Office. Otto had been a student at the University of Virginia when, on his way to study abroad in Asia, he joined a tour to North Korea. The regime’s thugs arrested him and charged him with crimes against the state for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster. He was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. He was tortured nearly to death and repatriated to the United States just before he died. Meeting Otto’s parents, Fred and Cindy, and his brother, Austin, and sister, Greta, as well as North Korean escapees, prior to the State of the Union address strengthened my belief in the importance of placing the nature of the Kim regime, its warped ideology, and its profound inhumanity at the foundation of our strategy. It was unfortunate that after the Singapore Summit in 2018, President Trump ceased criticism of North Korean human rights, downplayed Kim Jong-un’s knowledge of Otto’s treatment, and described Kim as “honorable” and a person who “loves his people.”