David Kang

Thank you so much for coming here.  This has been an unbelievably well-organized event, so it's been a real joy to spend the time here with all of you.  I’m going to just lay out a quick overview of why I think that a policy that emphasizes engaging North Korea is a better policy for the United States to take than one that encourage coercion. 

But before I get started I thought I'd talk a little bit about why we actually wrote this book.  The debate, as we heard in the introduction, is extremely divisive and what happens for North Korea is that it's always second or third on the priority list of international issues that the United States has to face.  Even now, Iraq and Afghanistan are more important than North Korea.  We can't only pay attention to it when there's a crisis.  What happens is that the kind of discussion that tends to go on is superficial, shrill and ill-informed for the most part.  So you'll get opinion pieces written by people who don't really know anything about the issue.  Victor and I got the idea when we had competing op eds on successive Sundays with the New York Times, and we said, "We've been friends for along time.  We disagree.  We respect each other and we've studied North Korea for years.  We ought to put this together in a book where people can actually see both sides from people who've actually studied the issue for a long time and then decide for themselves what they think, but at least we will actually move the debate forward by allowing people to get a much fuller picture of what North Korea is like." 

I'm going to make three points when we start out here.  The first one is about the current nuclear crisis; the second one is about some changes that are going on in North Korea; and then I'll conclude by talking about what the United States might have to do in the long run.

To me, the nuclear crisis comes down to one essential question which is:  Does North Korea have genuine security fears or not?  If they don't, if they're making up a threat from the United States, then they are trying to blackmail us, they're trying to extort money by creating a threat and hoping to get something in return.  However, if North Korea does have genuine security concerns, and I think they do, then without resolving those security concerns we will not resolve the nuclear issue, because it's unlikely that North Korea will unilaterally disarm and trust the United States to do the right thing by them. 

Why do I think that North Korea has a legitimate security concern?  I want to emphasize that this is a reprehensible, corrupt, brutal regime and Victor and I agree that we would all like to see the regime go away and the peninsula be denuclearized.  However, even a corrupt morally reprehensible regime can still have genuine security concerns.  We have had a 53 year war with North Korea; we signed a truce in 1953, but we're still technically at war with North Korea.  No peace treaty has ever been signed.  We specifically targeted North Korea with nuclear weapons in the 2002 nuclear posture review despite in 1994 saying that we would provide assurances against first use.  We had 36,000 troops on the ground, and it's very obvious that we, as a country, and certainly the political leadership, does not like North Korea.  So they have reason to have security concerns and it's not a surprise then that what they don't want to do is give up those weapons and hope that the United States won't take advantage of that. 

Just to give you a small example of the relative sizes of the countries that we're talking about, the Gross Domestic Product, the economic output of the United States is about $10 trillion dollars, Japan has about $4 trillion, South Korea about $800 million, North Korea about $18 billion dollars.  Now, if that doesn't give you a good comparison, I am now living in New Hampshire.  The state's economic output of New Hampshire is $47 billion dollars.  If anyone has been to New Hampshire you know that all there is are trees there and snow.  North Korea is a tiny country.  That doesn't mean it's not dangerous but what it does mean is you can see that a small country that has lost both its allies, China and the Soviet Union, and has experienced economic problems for the last decade could justifiably have concerns.  If the United States continues to press, I fear that we will end up with precisely an outcome we don't want, which is a North Korea that says, "There is no way we can give up these nuclear weapons.  This is the only thing that we can do."  I think too much pressure would provoke a counter response.

Now, point number two is there have been changes that are going on in North Korea, and I think the United States should encourage these trends and not retard them.  Again, because the United States is not paying a lot of attention to North Korea, we only focus on them when there's a military security issue, but one thing that tends to be overlooked is that North Korea has had a real, and I think, profound, economic reform that has gone on in the last decade.  The North Korea of 2003 does not look at all like the North Korea of 1991-92.  Most particularly, in July 2002, North Korea abandoned the centrally planned economy.  No longer is there a ration system, supply and demand now determine prices.  This is dramatic.  There are other things that have happened -- the railroads have been reconnected through the DMZ, there are special economic zones, there are private markets, there are over a billion U.S. dollars in circulation in North Korea that are used in buying foreign goods. 

Yet of all these changes that were completely unthinkable a decade ago the most important is abandoning the centrally planned economy for two reasons.  The first is this was a top-down, centrally-planned decision by the government.  Kim Jong-il is taking a huge risk with this because this affects every single North Korean citizen.  You can have a special economic zone and make sure you put enough barbed wire around it so that it doesn't affect the whole country, but you let everyone now make a choice about what they're going to do with their money and you are affecting every citizen in North Korea.  This is the kind of trend that the United States should encourage. 

The actual plan, when I talk about engagement you may hear things today about hawk versus dove and what I say about that is if being a dove means promoting capitalism and American values throughout the world and using force as a last resort, then I'm a dove.  What I think will happen is the way we're going to get regime change in North Korea is by promoting capitalism and encouraging them to learn more about the outside world.  There is movement along that path and the United States should encourage that.

My final point is, what should the U.S. actually have as its long-term foreign policy?  What we tend to do is have a crisis, come to some kind of temporary conclusion, a resolution of it, breath a sigh of relief and go away kicking the can down the road another five years or ten years, come back when there's another crisis, and run around clutching our heads.  We need to start thinking about the fact that North Korea, even though it may collapse tomorrow, could be around for another 20 or 30 years.  Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall people have been predicting "in six months North Korea can't survive".  When Kim Jung Il took power in 1994 they said there's no way he can rule.  He's only his father's son -- that's his only claim to legitimacy, there's no way he can survive.  He is now going on year ten. 

While we may hope that we'll resolve these crises and North Korea will crumble tomorrow there's a fair amount of indication that this country will survive for the foreseeable future.  If that is the case, we as Americans need to think about what we will have as a long-term policy.  Toward that end, a policy that emphasizes bringing North Korea into the world community is both gradual and peaceful and humane. 

I'll close by giving a couple of examples.  China took 25 years to get to where it is today.  In 1978 when Dang Xiaoping said, "to get rich is glorious," he did not instantly become a market economy and in fact they're not even one now.  There are still state owned enterprises and enormous government control and a brutal repressive regime in China.  But you know what?  We're not nearly as worried about them as we were when they were Red China.  Why?  Maybe because they became capitalists.  We trade with them, we have a lot of knowledge about them, there are Chinese who come here.  Don't forget it was Nixon who went to China, not the other way around.  We engaged them first to the benefit of both the United States and China and had a gradual bringing back of Red China into the world.  That policy, to me, has a long-arm strategy for the United States and seems the safest and most humane way to go because our quarrel is not with the North Korean citizens, it's with the regime.

Thank you very much and I'll turn over to Victor.

Victor Cha

It's a pleasure to be at the World Affairs Council here in Los Angeles.  I have spoken at other World Affairs Councils, but this is by far the most organized and interesting group to interact with. 

It's also special for me in the sense that in the audience out there is my nephew and it's the first time he's actually heard me speak in front of a group.  He knows that I go around and speak a lot around the country and in Asia, but it's the first time he's actually come to see me give a talk.

David said Nixon went to China, President Bush is not going to North Korea.  I can assure you of that. He says there's about a billion U.S. dollars circulating in the North Korean economy and that is largely because half of it is counterfeit money that the North Koreans produced as a form of economic activity. 

As you can see David and I have very different views on North Korea but we're still friends. The reason we wrote this book was because, as you all know very well there's a 24/7 news cycle out there which is constantly pressured to talk informatively about these issues.  We were not happy with the level of discussion that took place on this question and we were also concerned because the stakes are so high here.  Clearly the stakes are high in Iraq, the stakes are high in Afghanistan, but this is an issue that often gets neglected and if you think about it, it's one of the issues that could easily spin out of control. We could be sitting here asking ourselves, "How did war break out again on the Korean peninsula?"  That's why we wrote this book -- to give what we believe are two fairly well-informed views from a hawk and dove’s perspective on how to deal with North Korea and to give you all an opportunity to weave those two views and come to your own conclusion about which is the appropriate policy.  And by the way, we think it's a great Christmas gift. 

My starting point is a very simple one, and that is that you can't really talk about what to do with North Korea without first talking about what you believe North Korea's intentions are.  What does the regime want?  What do they want to do?  And I think there are a lot of people out there with Dave's perspective or who listen to Dave who basically believe that the North Koreans are developing these nuclear weapons out of insecurity and a fear of the United States, out of a desire to get help from the outside world and they're basically looking to trade their nuclear threat for food from the outside world, for economic aid and for security.  And if that's what you believe North Korea is doing, then you should engage North Korea, because you can make that trade happen and it's relatively costless if you think about the grand scheme of things, it’s relatively costless to make that trade if you get rid of the weapons program. 

My assumptions are different.  Basically I think that North Korea is developing nuclear weapons and in part is willing to trade some of those weapons for food, fuel, and security but in the end they're not going to give up all of them.  They're going to want to retain some sort of nuclear weapon capability.  In short, they want to have their cake and eat it too.  They want to have nuclear weapons and they want help from the outside world, and if that's what they want this becomes an infinitely more difficult issue.  It becomes much more difficult in terms of what you should do with regard to this problem.  That's my first point.

My second point -- if you go from the assumption—that North Korea wants both, that it wants to have nuclear weapons and have help from the outside world—then the only chance you really have of trying to get the North Koreans not to want both is to get every country in the region, if not the world, the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Australia, ASEAN, the European Union, get all of them to say to North Korea, "You can't have both.  You can have food, fuel and security but you have to verify that you will irreversibly give up your nuclear weapon program."  If the United States goes to North Korea and does that on its own that's not going to be as credible a message. In fact, from the U.S. perspective what you end up with is a situation where everybody in the region says, "Nuclear North Korea problem.  You Americans, you go deal with that.  You're always the one concerned about nonproliferation.  So you go deal with the North Koreans.  You get a good deal, and by the way, when you get that good deal you can't use the threat of force and you can't use sanctions."  That's not a good position for the United States to be in.  The idea of having everybody work together to get the North Koreans to give up these weapons is the most advisable way to go.

The third point I would like to make is that David is absolutely right in terms of North Korean economic reforms.  Over the past year they have really undertaken some fundamental reforms in terms of their economy, things that we have not seen in the past.  My only point there would be that those are all positive things and one should encourage those things, but to look at the economic reforms and then to make the logical leap that those economic reforms also mean that they want to give up their nuclear weapons—that's a leap in the logic that I'm not yet willing to make.  In other words, it's very true that North Korea could be seeking economic reforms because it wants to make money, but just because it wants to make money doesn't necessarily mean it wants to give up its nuclear weapons.  Again, it could want both and the idea of expecting or hoping that simply giving economic goodies to North Korea is going to cause them to give up their nuclear weapons program is, I think, a tremendous leap of faith. 

So, that's essentially where I stand on this issue.  As you will see, David and I agree on certain points, we disagree on a whole lot of other points, but I think what we'd like to do is to take your questions.  I think through our answers to your questions you'll get a better sense of where we stand on each of these issues.

Thanks.