Pacific hieroglyphic: what the Bush administration doesn't know about North Korea.

• Author: Ho, Soyoung
• Position: North Korea: Another Country - Book Review

North Korea: Another Country By Bruce Cumings The New Press, $24.95 Smart diplomacy has always required an empathetic understanding of the adversary's point of view as well as a clear-eyed sense of one's own interests--and using the latter to advance the former. But it can be hard to get the balance right. Too much empathy and one becomes captive to the rival's agenda. Too little, and one makes dumb mistakes.

Exhibit A of the latter danger is the Bush administration's decision in December 2002 to suspend fuel-oil shipments to North Korea after learning that the regime was secretly enriching uranium. The administration hard-liners who pushed the decision had little specialized knowledge of the Korean Peninsula; but according to The Washington Post, they had been convinced lay reports from a single deflector that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's hold on power was shaky., and that his regime might collapse if the United States stood tough. The deflector turned out to be unreliable, and the North Koreans reacted with a heedless fury that anyone who knew anything about that regime could have predicted. They expelled international inspectors who had been monitoring plutonium from a nuclear facility shuttered in a deal brokered by. the Clinton administration, and subsequently withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This plutonium gave Kim the ability to make nuclear" weapons quickly (the uranium route would have taken years), and indications are that he has now done so. Meanwhile, the Bush administration, having vowed not to negotiate with North Korea, is now doing just that--though it will be difficult even to get matters back to where they stood last year (with Pyongyang's plutonium trader international lock and key).

Tiffs time, administration negotiators might want to pick up a copy of North Korea:Another Country by University of Chicago scholar Bruce Cumings. Though he falls into the trap of feeling too great an empathy, Cumings is one of the few American experts who read Korean and possess a deep, sophisticated grasp of modern Korean history and culture. Hence, his book is full of insights that help explain why Pyongyang behaves as it does--and possible clues to how to make it behave better.

Perhaps the book's biggest revelation, one little known even to most Western historians of the region, is the depth of the suffering visited on North Korea by the Korean War. Cumings describes the ferocious and sustained air campaign that...