North Korea is as close as it has ever been from being able to reliably deliver a nuclear-tipped missile to the U.S. mainland. Twenty-five to thirty years of failed policy has all come down to this: A nuclear-armed Kim dynasty theoretically has the military capacity to deter the United States, South Korea, Japan, and any other country thinking about overthrowing it.
North Korea’s nuclear success, however, is not just a time for U.S. officials to gear up for a new era, plan for the worst, and hope for the best. While it is highly likely that Washington missed the opportunity to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula by pressuring Kim Jong-un to give up his nuclear weapons program in return for a peace agreement or a normalization of relations, U.S. policymakers, analysts, and scholars now have a duty to look into the history of how we got here and determine where U.S. policy went wrong.
This isn’t an especially happy exercise for those in the national security community who have spent decades studying North Korea and trying to avert its nuclear program. But it could get much, much worse if the U.S. fails to analyze what went wrong, what strategies may have made the situation better, and whether lessons can be learned from the experience.
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