Threat Consensus and Rapprochement Failure: Revisiting the Collapse of US–North Korea Relations, 1994–2002 V AN J ACKSON Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies Why do states that make a deliberate effort to pursue rapprochement sometimes fail? This article dissects US–North Korea relations between 1994 and 2002 as one way to better understand how deliberate decisions to dramatically improve rela- tions with a historical adversary go awry. This vastly understudied period in US– North Korea relations started in late 1994 with an ambitious agreement to move toward diplomatic normalization through a gradual process based on reciprocal “action for action,” abruptly ending in 2002 with mutual acrimony and the re- sumption of long-standing hostility. Why did reciprocity strategies by both sides in the intervening period fail to deliver the promised relational change? The seemingly obvious explanation—a lack of consensus among US policy elites about North Korea policy—does not fit with what actually happened. Moreover, theories of rapprochement that might have anticipated success in the US–North Korea case cannot readily explain why rapprochement failed without resorting to situation-specific factors, which undermines their explanatory power. At the same time, theories of rapprochement that would have correctly predicted failure, on the basis of identity incompatibility or other unfavorable conditions, offer an incomplete account of events. Such rapprochement pessimists struggle to explain why the United States would seek rapprochement with North Korea if the prospects of success were so predictably dim, why the Clinton administration would settle on the rapprochement approach it did, and why it would simulta- neously pursue rapprochement while publicly promoting North Korea as a threat. This article shows how the strength and character of political discourse about an adversary can constitute a condition that favors maintaining rigid adversarial perceptions and policies, sabotaging attempts at rapprochement in at least three specific ways: by constraining the policy options available to decision makers who pursue rapprochement, by encouraging the pursuit of major security challenges with only minor accommodative means, and by imposing interpretive frames that bias perceptions of adversary behavior in the context of rapprochement. Each of these makes a rapprochement process delicate and prone to reversion to hostility. By analyzing the process that led to rapprochement failure, I find the presence and conditioning effects of a bipartisan “threat consensus” among US policy elites—that is, a shared perception and intersubjectively held understanding among elites of the threat that North Korea posed. This explanation does not contradict but rather subsumes cognitive theories of decision making as an Dr. Van Jackson is an Associate Professor in the College of Security Studies at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, as well as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He is the author of the book Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in U.S.-North Korea Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The views expressed are his own. Jackson, Van. (2016) Threat Consensus and Rapprochement Failure: Revisiting the Collapse of US–North Korea Relations, 1994–2002. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1093/fpa/orw034 V C The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Foreign Policy Analysis (2016) 0, 1–19 Foreign Policy Analysis Advance Access published April 13, 2016 at International Studie Association on April 13, 2016 http://fpa.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from