Agreements without Commitments? The U.S. congress and the U.S.-North Korea agreed framework, 1994–2002

Twenty years after the deal struck between the United States and North Korea over the nuclear crisis, the security environment on the Korean Peninsula remains unstable. When it comes to the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework from 1994 through 2002, previous research has paid scant attention to how the U.S. Congress responded to President Clinton’s accord with the Pyongyang regime. This article provides a rare empirical assessment of what led America’s lawmakers to uphold or overturn the executive agreements with North Korea. The bottom-line finding is that politics hardly stops at the water’s edge, with “politics-as-usual” forces such as partisan conflicts ultimately having derailed Congressional commitments to the U.S.-DPRK accords. The results shed light on how and why domestic politics often redirects the course of international agreements, particularly in the era of polarized politics.