President Moon Jae-in of South Korea
arrived in Washington today,
and this evening he began two days
of meetings at the White House.
At the top of the agenda is figuring out
how to stop North Korea’s nuclear program.
Neither country currently has a proven strategy—
but even if they can agree on a way forward,
an even more daunting step may lie ahead:
Direct negotiations with the North Koreans themselves.
Ambassador Mitchell Reiss learned
just how hard that can be
when he served as lead negotiator with
Pyongyang during the Clinton administration:
— The key difference is the vast cultural gulf.
The isolation is significant.
What that means in terms of day-to-day negotiating
is that you have to proceed through
three different sets of traps.
The first is you have to make sure
that you share the same concept.
Do they have the same concept
of nuclear weapons as you do?
What’s the words that you use?
Are the words similar?
And that’s where you then get down to the final level.
They often ascribe different meanings
to the same word.
And so you go from concept, to word, to meaning.
That takes an awfully long time,
so you’ve got to prepare yourself to
go forward in a very methodical way.
You can’t make assumptions that there’s
similar cultural touchstones or reference points.
They’re extremely sensitive about
any references to their leadership.
Often in these negotiations,
there was a member of the security force
watching what they said,
watching how they behaved,
and reporting back to the capital.
They don’t always have the flexibility or the
freedom to say or act the way one would assume.
So how would I sum up diplomatic history
between the United States and the North Koreans?
There were hopes,
sometimes punctuated by limited success,
that we could actually find
a diplomatic pathway forward.
Nothing in the past 50 years has really
justified the continuation of that hope.
We have to look towards other options,
such as denying them the technology
and the money that they need to build these programs
and making sure that deterrence remains strong,
because the North Koreans are committed to
developing nuclear weapons to protect their regime.
The current leader’s grandfather started the program,
his father accelerated it.
It’s inconceivable to me that there’s any prize,
any rewards that we could offer
that would persuade him
to abandon the course that the country
has been on for more than half a century.
