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Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis

Discussion of US foreign policy tends to centre around Iraq and Iran, but relations with North Korea are just as important, says John Feffer for Inter Press Services. In his new book Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, former CNN Beijing bureau chief Mike Chinoy delivers an account of how the Bush administration "transformed" the country's North Korean policy in "fascinating detail." Chinoy reveals how the White House story on dealings with the Hermit Kingdom is just as "misleading as the propaganda crafted in Pyongyang," says Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post. Instead of making things better, the hard line the Bush administration took in dealing with the North Korean regime made things worse. There have been several books by prominent international journalists on the topic, but Chinoy's is the "most comprehensive and readable. People who are fresh to the North Korea issue will be disheartened by what they learn, but so will specialists who thought they knew all about the administration's fierce infighting," says Kessler. An "outstanding chapter" outlines a meeting in Pyongyang in 2002 when US delegates confronted the North Koreans over their nuclear program, and how it might have been a missed opportunity for the US. Though at times Chinoy's sourcing is "irritatingly vague," his book is "an important contribution to the historical record." The problem is the flaws in Chinoy's analysis, says Mark L Clifford in Time. "Indeed it is revealing that the first photo in the book is of Chinoy meeting Kim Il-sung in 1994 and looking extremely pleased with himself." He glosses over the regime's dark side, which makes Mao's Cultural Revolution "look like a dinner party," and paints its dangerous actions as the "antics of a misunderstood regime." Chinoy's subtext is that North Korea is "more or less a normal country being prevented by silly US policies from coming out of its shell." Bush's methods may have been wrong, but "there is nothing to suggest" that North Korea is a "benign dictatorship - and Chinoy, unfortunately, comes perilously close to saying that it is."

Mike Chinoy

St Martin's Press, $27.95

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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