Choi Jong Kun and Joel S. Wit

In “North Korea as It Is” (May/June 2026), Victor Cha recasts three decades of diplomacy as a strategic failure and claims that North Korean leaders were uniformly deceitful and “determined to build a nuclear arsenal at any cost.” But Cha’s narrative of futility is wrong.

Beginning in the early 1990s, North Korea was prepared to bargain away its nuclear program after South Korea normalized relations with Russia and China. Lacking friends and worried about its vulnerabilities, Pyongyang offered to gradually denuclearize in return for U.S. actions to improve relations, such as lifting sanctions. Although Washington frequently insisted on front-loaded steps toward denuclearization and delayed relief, when the two sides compromised, they were able to sign accords such as the 1994 Agreed Framework.

But the United States often over-estimated its coercive ability and under-estimated Pyongyang’s resolve to safeguard its security in case diplomacy failed. That mistake became obvious when Kim Jong Un took power in 2011 and accelerated the country’s weapons programs. At the Hanoi summit with Kim in 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump had a chance to stem the tide, but he grew impatient and walked out before lunch on the second day.

South Korea also contributed to this failure. Presidents Kim Dae-jung, Roh Moo-hyun, and Moon Jae-in built frameworks to engage the north, but in each case, their respective conservative successors dismantled that progress. From Pyongyang’s vantage point, no commitment by Seoul carries weight beyond a single electoral cycle.

The Korean Peninsula today is more dangerous than at any point in three decades. It is important to understand what really happened to learn what to do in the future. Cha’s simplistic history doesn’t serve that purpose.

Choi Jong Kun is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Yonsei University and former First Vice Foreign Minister of South Korea.

Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center.

Washington can no longer count on North Korea’s near-term denuclearization because Pyongyang has embedded nuclear expansion in its constitutional identity, legal doctrine,........

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