Missed Opportunities 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