Fred Fleitz, Vice President of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), during an interview on the afternoon of June 12 in Tokyo (©Sankei/Yusuke Yoneoka)
Fred Fleitz has spent a quarter century watching the United States mishandle North Korea. A former CIA officer who later served at the State Department, the House Intelligence Committee, and as Chief of Staff of the National Security Council under Donald Trump, he is now Vice Chair of the America First Policy Institute.
In an interview with Japan Forward to discuss his new book, North Korea, Nuclear Brinkmanship, and the Oval Office, he offers a detailed post-mortem on how one of the world's weakest states repeatedly outmaneuvered the world's strongest power. The conclusion is damning: every American president from George H.W. Bush onward got it wrong.
A Pattern of Underestimation
"I think it's been American officials who didn't take the Kim family seriously, who determined that the Kim family would get what they want," Fleitz says. "They underestimated the determination of North Korea. And the fact that they had six nuclear tests really wasn't a wake-up call."
He recalls the reaction when North Korea detonated its first device in 2006: some observers tried to dismiss it as a large conventional explosion rather than a nuclear test. "That wasn't completely wrong, because the yield was small—it was a preload of nuclear explosive, not a complete success. But this was a test. You can't say a test is a failure."
Is Denuclearization Still Possible?
The result of decades of underestimation is an arsenal that Fleitz puts at a minimum of 50 nuclear weapons. Asked whether denuclearization remains a realistic goal at that scale, he is careful but firm, stating that the Trump administration would not accept North Korea as a nuclear power.
He notes that Kim Jong Un himself pledged denuclearization at the 2018 Singapore Summit. "We should hold him to his word. At a minimum, North Korea should stop building nuclear weapons and shut down the facilities that make them."
When Intelligence Became Inconvenient
One of the book's most striking chapters concerns the politicization of American intelligence on North Korea's uranium enrichment program. In 2002, the United States confronted Pyongyang with evidence of a covert uranium enrichment effort.
Initially, the intelligence was treated as solid. But as diplomatic pressure mounted to preserve a negotiating framework with Pyongyang, Fleitz says the intelligence community reversed itself.
"Both the State Department and intelligence analysts started to question this intelligence because it went against the narrative that North Korea didn't have a nuclear weapons program—and because it countered efforts by State Department officials to save a deal."
By the mid-2000s, the enrichment program assessment had been quietly downgraded because it was "politically inconvenient." Years later, the program was confirmed independently. The episode, Fleitz argues, is a textbook example of bureaucrats sabotaging policies they personally disagreed with by manipulating the intelligence that underpins them.
The Lessons of Hanoi
On the prospects for renewed diplomacy under Trump's second term, Fleitz draws on his firsthand experience of the first round of talks, including the Hanoi Summit of 2019 where negotiations collapsed. A central problem, he says, was that working-level contact with North Korean counterparts was deeply difficult. "They would misbehave. They would shout at us. They'd walk out of the room. They would bang their fists on tables."
The failure was compounded by a mismatch in expectations: Kim Jong Un had been led to believe—by his own team or by lower-level US State Department officials—that a deal was within reach, only to discover that Trump was on a different page. "We have to make sure that whatever is agreed at the leader level, the lower-level people are going to deliver on it."
Arming South Korea
On South Korea, Fleitz is notably hawkish. Trump recently announced that the United States would share nuclear propulsion technology with Seoul—a step toward allowing South Korea to build its own nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Fleitz believes Washington should go further. He argues South Korea should be given full access to the nuclear fuel cycle, including reprocessing—technology that would also allow Seoul to produce more powerful, lower-waste reactor fuel. "It makes no sense that South Korea manufactures some of the most advanced nuclear reactors on Earth, yet is barred from enriching its own nuclear fuel under agreements with the United States."Argentina can do this. Other countries can do this. South Korea should be able to do this."
The China Illusion
Fleitz is skeptical that Beijing will ever use its leverage to meaningfully constrain Pyongyang. "Kim is much more capable of playing China than China is of playing Kim," he says. Beijing provides North Korea's economic lifeline, but Kim has learned to extract concessions while giving up as little sovereignty as possible. "I think Kim will continue to play this game—trying to get more out of China without giving China more control."
The book's central lesson, Fleitz says, is about what happens when a great power allows itself to be fooled. "North Korea is a lesson in what happens if you allow a state to not be afraid of you—to see activities that any reasonable person says are red flags, and to ignore them anyway."
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