ON THE BRINK by Van Jackson, former policy adviser and strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, will definitely be of interest to our students. Last year, I had several researchers interested in foreign policy and I know that one in particular bemoaned the difficulty in finding recent and accurate information about North Korea. Now, the just published ON THE BRINK has been praised by retired military officials, university professors and fellow scholars. Author Van Jackson speaks from personal experience; he participated in nuclear negotiations with North Korea and formulated deterrence policies with South Korea. In this text, he is not a fan of Trump’s handling of the 2017 situation, but also indicates that "conditions ... made some kind of confrontation with North Korea plausible even under a Clinton presidency." Jackson notes that "any prospect of opening [the North] took a backseat to nuclear survival in the initial years of his [Kim Jong Un's] rule." The progress made in terms of nuclear capability meant that "America's historically preferred approach to North Korea (coercive diplomacy) was laden with heightened risks." This, in turn, was accelerated by the more hawkish advisors and Trump's own pre-dispositions. Jackson's analysis which discusses approaches during the Obama and Trump administrations, includes over 20 pages of notes and references as well as a useful index.