530 pages of whitewash: in his voluminous memoir, Victor Cha, George W. Bush's top Asia adviser, reveals nothing about how the administration managed to let North Korea get nukes.

• Author: Beck, Peter
• Position: The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future - Book review

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The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

by Victor Cha

HarperCollins, 530 pp.

The North Korean regime was supposed to have collapsed by now. Indeed, for years analysts debated not if the regime would fall, but whether the landing would be hard or soft. Instead, it has become a nuclear power and continues to thumb its nose at the world, defying the best efforts of a succession of American presidents to lure the reclusive state into a constructive relationship with the rest of the world.

Georgetown University professor Victor Cha served one of the presidents who tried to strike a deal with the North Koreans, and the one on whose watch North Korea acquired nukes, George W. Bush. Cha is the first member of the North Korea team from Bush's second term to publish a book about his experiences negotiating with the North, which gives him a unique perspective. He was the first Korea specialist (and the first Korean American) to be the Asia director at the National Security Council (NSC), and now contributes regularly to the New York Times and the Washington Post, making him one of the more influential voices on North Korea both inside and outside the Beltway.

Unfortunately, his book is more than disappointing; it's just plain awful, and a huge missed opportunity. Cha not only fails to shed any light on North Korea policymaking during the Bush years, he also gets the country completely wrong.

For starters, Cha tries to spice up his book with his personal experiences in North Korea but winds up with little more than banal travelogues. At several points he lambasts CNN, Time, and, more broadly, the Western media for their shallow depictions of North Korea, but he is just as guilty. Of the more than 700 footnotes, fewer than a handful refer to personal interviews or Korean-language materials. Instead, we are presented with endless summaries of English-language sources. The book lacks the compelling narrative arc of Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick's powerful Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea or the research and rigor of Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig's The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom.

Cha's book is also almost entirely bereft of new ideas about how we should understand or deal with North Korea. The only new concept I could find is nothing more than academic-sounding nonsense: elaborating on a notion he first introduced last fall in the Washington Post, Cha describes...