The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2012 31 National Security under the Obama Administration BahramM. Rajaee and Mark J. Miller, eds., Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, $90, hardcover, 239 pages. Barack Obama won the presidency with a message of hope and change for the Ameri- can people that was shared by the inter- national community. Rajaee and Miller’s collection of essays, written by American and non-American experts in the field from a variety of backgrounds, evaluates the Obama administration’s security policy to date. National Secu- rity under the Obama Administration examines the institutional processes and institutions dealing with U.S. security, as well as the regional and major policy dimensions of contemporary U.S. engagement with the world. “Much more than a simple assessment of how the Obama administration has fared in the national security global arena,” is how Robin Dorff, a professor at the U.S. Army War College Strate- gic Studies Institute describes the work. “It provides much-needed and long-overdue non-U.S. perspective to the discussion.” All of the contributors have been associated with a series of U.S. foreign and national security policy “institutes” convened at the University of Delaware, made possible by grants from the Department of State and the university’s Institute for Global Studies. Bahram Rajaee is a specialist on U.S. foreign policy, Iranian politics and the international relations of Southwest Asia, who has served as a director at the University of Delaware’s Institute for Global Studies. Mark Miller is the Emma Smith Morris Profes- sor at the University of Delaware, where he has taught political science and international relations since 1978. Inside the Red Box: North Korea’s Post-Totalitarian Politics Patrick McEachern, Columbia University Press, 2010, $35, hardcover, 320 pages. The government of unpredictable North Korea is hard to categorize in terms of the classical political models of totalitarian, personalistic and communist regimes. Through Inside the Red Box Patrick McEachern, a specialist on North Korean affairs, presents a new theoretical model to explain how this isolated nation’s political institutions debate policy and inform and execute strategic-level decisions today. Focusing on the regime of the late Kim Jong-Il, McEachern argues that the Korean government was changed by the crises of the 1990s and is no longer the “one-man dictatorship” many believe it to be. He calls Kim Jong-Il’s leadership style “post- totalitarian” and identifies three major institutions that maintain political continuity: the Cabinet, the party and the military. These institutions constantly debate political issues, both before and after the supreme leader and his senior advisers have made a decision. Because Kim Jong-Il was less powerful than his father, Kim Il-Sung, he routinely pitted institutions against one another in a strategy of divide and rule. The author documents the evolution of North Korean politics under Kim Il-Sung, discusses the modified institutional struc- ture of Kim Jong-Il’s rule, and describes the country’s founding national institutions and ideology. He also examines the compet- ing models of North Korean politics, tests his own predictions against real events and concludes with some general lessons for foreign-policy practitioners. FSO Patrick McEachern was based in Seoul supporting the Six-Party Talks while writing this book. He is a former North Korea analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. U.S. Government Counterterrorism: A Guide to Who Does What Michael B. Kraft & Edward Marks, CRC Press, 2012, $69.95, hardcover, 407 pages. There are numerous agencies across the United States government that are engaged in the fight against global terror- ism. In this book, Ambassador Edward Marks and Michael Kraft show how, like pieces in a puzzle, these varied and widely dispersed agencies, offices and programs work together to combat global terror. The authors use their combined knowledge as veterans of the government’s anti-terror efforts to explain what each agency does and how they coordinate with one another, a problem that has frequently thwarted U.S. counterterrorism operations. They address such topics as government training initiatives, weapons of mass destruction, research and development, and the congres- sional role in policy and budget issues. The book also discusses the challenges involved in coordinat- ing the counterterrorism efforts at federal, state and local levels, and explains how key events influenced the development of programs, agencies and legislation. In addition, the authors pro-