The Foreign Service Journal, October 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2019 31 The author also contributed three chapters to Climate Abandoned: We’re on the Endangered Species List (2019), edited by Jilly Cody. Covering the ideology of climate change denial, various myths and political failures, McPherson seeks to explain how the failure to act has often been encouraged through faulty interpretations of science. WilliamMcPherson spent 21 years in the Foreign Service, serving in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Switzerland and Washington, D.C., among other postings. In retirement, he has worked on international environmental issues and is an activist with the Sierra Club on climate change and coal exports. He has published three previous books: Ideology versus Science (2014), Climate, Weather and Ideology: Climate Change Denial (2015) and Sabotaging the Planet: Denial and International Negotia- tions (2016). Mongolia’s Foreign Policy: Navigating a Changing World Alicia Campi, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019, $85/hardcover, 349 pages. Strategically located at the crossroads of Central Asia, China and Rus- sia, Mongolia has long attracted the attention of major world powers. How does this traditionally nomadic, but resource-rich, country envision its place in the modern world? And as it prepares to mark its 30th year as an independent democracy, what challenges does it face? To answer these questions, Alicia Campi offers a multifaceted examination of the context, formulation and execution of con- temporary Mongolian foreign policy. She posits that Mongolia operates in accordance with what she calls a “Wolf Strategy,” whose goal is to ensure that the nation does not become eco- nomically or politically dependent on any single power. Robert Bedeski of the University of Victoria hails Mongolia’s Foreign Policy as “a must-read” and “a superb study of the chal- lenges and responses of liberated and democratic Mongolia. [In its pages] Campi gives voice to the dilemmas facing this stra- tegically positioned nation.” A former State Department Foreign Service officer and FSJ business manager, Alicia Campi is the longtime president of the Mongolia Society and the U.S.-Mongolia Advisory Group. She also heads the Chinggis Khan Foundation and teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and at the Foreign Service Institute. Ms. Campi is the author of The Impact of China and Russia on United States-Mongolian Political Relations in the Twentieth Century (2009). North Korea: What Everyone Needs to Know Patrick McEachern, Oxford University Press, 2019, $16.95/paperback, 244 pages. The largely ceremonial meetings between President Donald Trump and North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, and the unpredictability of both par- ties, have done little to quell concerns that the Korean Peninsula’s security situation is an intractable conflict. And that realization, in turn, raises the question, “How did we get here?” This primer by FSO Patrick McEachern unpacks the con- tentious and tangled relationship between the Koreas in an approachable question-and-answer format. Among the many topics he addresses: Why have the two Koreas developed politically and economi- cally in such radically different ways? How have three genera- tions of the authoritarian Kim dictatorship shaped North Korea? What is the history of North-South Korea relations? Why did the North Korean government develop nuclear weapons? How do powers such as Japan, China and Russia fit into the mix? What is it like to live in North Korea and South Korea? Patrick McEachern has been an FSO for 16 years, serving in Seoul (where he was the chief political officer monitoring devel- opments in North Korea), Tokyo, Bratislava and Washington, D.C., where he was a North Korea intelligence analyst for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Currently the unit chief for Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, he previously served as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He is co-author of North Korea, Iran and the Challenge to International Order (2017) and author of Inside the Red Box: North Korea’s Post-total- itarian Politics (2010). He is the author of this month’s FSJ cover story, “What Does North Korea Want?” (see p. 20).