Staring Down the Barrel of the Button
How close did the world come to a nuclear catastrophe in 2017? By the peak of tensions between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump late in the year, some informed observers warned the probability of coming to blows was as high as 50:50 — a toss of a coin. Even in retrospect, it is impossible to know for sure, but Van Jackson’s meticulous reconstruction of events in On the Brink is likely to stand as an essential “first draft” for historians in the future.
Having served in the US government during the Barack Obama administration and now teaching at Victoria University of Wellington, Jackson combines the virtues of an insider’s practical sense of “how the sausage is made” with an academic’s appreciation of underlying drivers behind policy statements and political rhetoric. Perhaps the most interesting argument he develops is a counterfactual thought experiment of a Hillary Clinton presidency, which serves to show how Trump’s colorful rhetoric only “accelerated” a crisis that was coming anyway — in part due to the strategic failure and “policy inertia” of the Obama administration’s approach to North Korea.
To critique Obama is not to let Trump off the hook. Given Pyongyang’s expectations of US aggression and need to maintain asymmetric deterrence, Trump’s menacing and undisciplined language unwittingly ran catastrophic risks of a conflict breaking out, and escalating rapidly. Like Graham Allison’s classic deconstruction of the Cuban missile crisis in Essence of Decision, Jackson’s book reveals how close two hostile, nuclear-armed states came to fighting a “war of choice” that neither really wanted.