Joel Wit
November 9, 2026
Topic: What to Do About North Korea: Past, Present and Future
Joel S. Wit is a Distinguished Fellow in Asian Security Studies at the Stimson Center. Wit is an internationally recognized expert on Northeast Asia security issues. As a U.S. State Department official, he helped negotiate the 1994 US-DPRK Agreed Framework and was subsequently in charge of its implementation until he left government in 2002, holding countless talks with North Korean officials, including the military and nuclear establishments.
Wit served as a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies US-Korea Institute from 2007-2018, a Senior Fellow at CSIS from 2002-2006. He has previously served a consultant to the National Academy of Science and an Adjunct Senior Researcher at Columbia University’s Weatherhead Institute for Asian Studies.
Wit is the author of Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale University Press, 2025), which draws on decades of firsthand experience and extensive interviews to examine U.S. diplomatic efforts to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Wit is also a co-author (with Robert Gallucci and Daniel Poneman) of Going Critical: The First North Korea Nuclear Crisis, the winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy’s 2004 prize for best book. He has written extensively in publications ranging from Foreignpolicy.com to the New York Times and is a regular expert guest on television shows (e.g. PBS Newshour, CNN’s The Situation Room and BBC) and radio (e.g. National Public Radio and BBC Radio).