Transcript
RICHARD C. BUSH III: My name is Richard Bush. I am a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and it is my great pleasure to welcome all of you here today for our seminar on "North Korea: 2007 and Beyond."
We are very privileged at Brookings today to be cosponsoring this event with the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.
Actually, the origin of this meeting is a chat that I had with Dr. Gi Wook Shin, the director of the Shorenstein APARC Center, back in April of this year. He told me about a volume that his center was publishing with The Brookings Institution Press — I didn't even know that — entitled North Korea: 2005 and Beyond.
You can see fliers about the book outside, and we welcome you to buy a copy. We are actually drawing on authors from that volume, but we decided that it would be a great idea for our two institutions to cooperate together and use the talent from that volume to put together a conference in Washington to talk about North Korea.
Now, I really cannot tell a lie. We did not know when we scheduled this conference today that President Roh Moo hyun was going to kindly do his meeting with President George W. Bush today, but so what.
But it is fitting and appropriate actually that we should meet on the same day of the summit because really North Korea is the nub of the issue. Right? The starting point of relations between the United States and South Korea is defining what is North Korea all about, what are its plans and intentions, and where is it going. The divisions between us really have to do with answering those questions. So our conference this morning and the issues we will address are highly relevant to the issues that I hope President Bush and President Roh will be discussing this morning.
So, without further ado, I would like to call on my good friend, Gi Wook, to say a few words and then introduce our first speaker.
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