Event

North Korea’s Smile Diplomacy: Breakthrough or Déjà Vu?

June 4, 2018
12:15 pm - 1:30 pm

Event Description

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance hosted a lunch conversation on Monday, June 4, 2018.

The U.S.-North Korea summit is scheduled to take place in Singapore on June 12. The question remains whether Kim Jong Un is ready to denuclearize, or if he is using his father’s and grandfather’s playbook of prolonging negotiations and commitments while insisting on immediate sanctions relief. Reviewing past negotiations with North Korea can provide useful recommendations for the Trump administration as it prepares for this historic summit. Should policymakers insist on Libya-style, immediate denuclearization before providing sanctions relief? What traps should U.S. officials be sure to avoid? With so much at stake, how will the outcome of these talks affect the U.S. relationship with South Korea, Japan, and other regional players?

The conversation featured Anthony Ruggiero, Senior Fellow at FDD and CSIF and former non-proliferation advisor to the U.S. delegation to the 2005 rounds of the Six-Party Talks in Beijing on North Korea’s nuclear program; Dr. Jung Pak, senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at Brookings Institution and former deputy national intelligence officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; and Bruce Klingner, senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center and former CIA deputy division chief for Korea.  The discussion will be moderated by Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times and author of “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.”

North Korea’s Smile Diplomacy: Breakthrough or Déjà Vu?
A conversation with Bruce Klingner, Jung Pak, and Anthony Ruggiero,
moderated by Barbara Demick

Monday, June 4, 2018
12:15pm – 1:30pm

Barbara Demick is the New York correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, formerly head of the bureaus in Beijing and Seoul. She is the author of “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” and “Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.” Ms. Demick has won Britain’s Samuel Johnson Award for best nonfiction, the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, as well as the Osborn Elliot Prize for Journalism from the Asia Society and the Overseas Press Club, the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Award and Stanford University’s Shorenstein Award for best Asia reporting. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bruce Klingner specializes in Korean and Japanese affairs as the senior research fellow for Northeast Asia at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. His analysis and writing about North Korea, South Korea and Japan, as well as related issues, are informed by his 20 years of service at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is a frequent commentator in U.S. and foreign media. From 1996 to 2001, Mr. Klingner was CIA’s deputy division chief for Korea, responsible for the analysis of political, military, economic and leadership issues for the president of the United States and other senior U.S. policymakers. In 1993-1994, he was the chief of CIA’s Korea branch, which analyzed military developments during a nuclear crisis with North Korea.

Dr. Jung H. Pak is a senior fellow and the SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korea Studies at Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She has held senior positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). From 2014 to 2016, she served as a deputy national intelligence officer at the National Intelligence Council at ODNI, where she led the U.S. intelligence community’s production of strategic analysis on Korean Peninsula issues.

Anthony Ruggiero is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance. He spent more than 17 years in the U.S. government focused targeted financial measures. Most recently, he was a Foreign Policy Fellow in the Office of Senator Marco Rubio, where he drafted Iran-related legislation and was Senator Rubio’s senior advisor on issues related to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also served in the Treasury Department as Deputy Director and then Director of the Office of Global Affairs in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. Prior to joining Treasury, he spent over 13 years in various capacities at State Department, including as Chief of the Defensive Measures and WMD Finance Team. Mr. Ruggiero was Non-Proliferation Advisor to the U.S. delegation to the 2005 rounds of the Six-Party Talks in Beijing on North Korea’s nuclear program, and participated in U.S.-North Korea meetings following the identification of Macau-based Banco Delta Asia as a primary money laundering concern.

Issues:

North Korea