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Fault on Both Sides: 25 Years of North Korea Negotiations
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Photo:
Jacklin Nguyen/The Cipher Brief
With the prospect
of a Trump-Kim summit in the near future, it’s worth
looking back at the history of U.S. negotiations with North Korea over
the past quarter century.
Mike Chinoy,
a
former CNN Senior Asia Correspondent who’s traveled to the Hermit Kingdom 17 times, offers
some key insights:
- “The conventional wisdom
says that whenever any agreement has been reached, North Korea has
cheated. But
the reality is more complex. Not all negotiations have failed — and
the collapse of agreements during that time has been as much the
responsibility of Washington as of Pyongyang.”
- “Internal divisions and
mixed signals on the U.S. side have repeatedly crippled
otherwise promising diplomatic opportunities, contributing to
misunderstanding and miscalculations in Pyongyang about American
intentions and behavior.”
- “This
may help explain why North Korea has so far issued no formal public
statement
on the reported offer of talks Kim Jong Un made to visiting South
Korean officials last week. Kim Jong Un is likely very much aware of
this history, and may well be waiting and watching to see whether
the Trump administration— chaotic, lacking Korea expertise, and
internally divided – is in fact ready to move forward…[before
confirming he is] prepared to do so as well.”
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Join
us at the Leadership Summit for
Women in National Security Careers on April 25! Featuring
opening remarks from Sue Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National
Intelligence of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, this
day of inspirational speakers, self-examination and action planning is a
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grow and explore. The time is now to create a new culture in the national
security arena.
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Turks in Afrin: How Does It End?
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Turkish forces are
reportedly poised to enter the
embattled city of Afrin in northwest Syria, the
culmination of a two-month-old campaign against Syrian Kurdish militia.
But it’s not clear what Turkey sees as a victory, according to Amb. James
Jeffrey, former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Iraq. He offers a way for
the U.S. and Turkey to secure a compromise:
- “The Afrin campaign…complicates the extremely
dangerous situation in Syria— with multiple conflicts involving the
U.S., its allies Turkey and Israel, a loose Russia-Syria-Iran
coalition, and local actors such as ISIS and the Syrian Kurdish
militia.”
- “Turkey,
for understandable reasons, considers the [Syria’s
main Kurdish party] PYD – and its YPG militia, aka ‘People’s
Protection Units’ – to be an arm of the Turkish Kurdistan Worker’s
Party or PKK. The PKK has fought for Kurdish independence inside
Turkey since 1984 – and also has had off-and-on close relations with
the Assad regime.”
- “Turkey insists Afrin is
only the first step to cleansing the entire northern border of
PYD/YPG elements, but this is unrealistic. It would mean a huge
conflict with millions of Kurds with impact on Turkey’s own Kurds, a
possibly violent break with the U.S., and likely opposition from
Russia.”
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