Transcript
MICHAEL O'HANLON: The basic argument in our book is that we need to think bigger about the Korea problem and enlarge the agenda. You could take a line out of Secretary Rumsfeld's famous list of adages: If you find a problem you can't solve, enlarge it. And the argument here is that if we stay where we are today, we're essentially in a Catch-22. The United States demands that North Korea denuclearize, and makes that almost a precondition for anything else, and makes more or less complete denuclearization a precondition for almost everything else—not entirely; I'll get to that in a second. That's the main U.S. demand.
North Korea, I believe, recognizes it only has one or two cards to play in its entire inventory, or hand, or possible national assets, possible ways to gain international attention, the nuclear capability being perhaps the most notable. And therefore it's unlikely that North Korea is going to unilaterally disarm without more inducements, without American pledges that it believes, it can believe, that are concrete, that are specific.
And so we feel like we're in a Catch-22. The President doesn't want to be blackmailed, refuses to be blackmailed. That's understandable. The North Koreans, however, are unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons capability without some kind of prospect of a more stable and more prosperous future. I don't say this to defend the North Korean position in any way. Certainly our book, like any other book I've read on North Korea, is extraordinarily critical of that terrible and Stalinist regime. But we have to deal with that regime as it is, not as we would like it to be.
A couple of quick words on where we stand with negotiations. We have Jack Pritchard here, and others, to say a lot more, so let me just give my very broad take and how it relates to the argument of our book.
I give the President credit for having convened these multilateral talks. I think there are benefits to being in this kind of a format. According to our plan, which I will detail a little bit more in just a second, we would need other parties to be part of any implementation of the proposal we've got, because we need the Chinese to help with economic reform, we need the Russians to help with conventional force reductions and verification. We certainly need the South Koreans and the Japanese as well.
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