Robert Gallucci Talks to David Remnick About Negotiating with North Korea

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: Robert Gallucci Talks to David Remnick About Negotiating with North Korea

Date: June 12, 2017
Host: David Remnick
Guest: Robert Gallucci (Former U.S. chief negotiator for North Korea, 1994 Agreed Framework)

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Episode Overview

This episode features David Remnick in conversation with Robert Gallucci, a leading expert on North Korea and the chief U.S. negotiator during the 1994 nuclear crisis. Their wide-ranging discussion explores the current state of the North Korean situation under Kim Jong Un, the Trump administration’s policy responses, the role of China, and the broader questions of nuclear deterrence, negotiation, and regime survival. Gallucci provides historical context, firsthand insight into diplomatic dynamics, and sober analysis of potential policy paths forward.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What North Korea Wants (02:46)

• Regime Survival & Grand Strategy:
  • North Korea’s primary objective is regime survival, motivated by fears of U.S.-led regime change, informed by recent examples like Iraq and Libya.
  • While unification of the Korean peninsula under their rule is a stated long-term goal, it is not considered a near-term realistic objective.
• Quote:
  • “What North Koreans have told me flat out on more than one occasion, what they worry about most is an American attempt to change their regime.” — Robert Gallucci [02:59]

2. U.S. Rhetoric & Policy: Comparisons and Concerns (03:37)

• Historical Parallels with Iraq:

  • Remnants of the preemptive “mushroom cloud” rhetoric from 2003 are influencing present-day conversations.
  • Discussion of Secretary Mattis's statements about North Korea’s capabilities possibly justifying preemptive military action.

• Trump Administration’s Approach:

  • The administration’s policy, Gallucci argues, is unclear and inconsistent, oscillating between openness to negotiation and aggressive posturing.
  • Quote:
    • “I have tried very hard to figure out what it is the leadership in this administration thinks about the plausibility of negotiations… and I can’t tell.” — Robert Gallucci [05:38]
    • “It’s not yet coherent.” — Robert Gallucci [06:24]

3. Deterrence, Sanctions, and China’s Role (06:34)

• Sanctions:

  • Sanctions’ effectiveness hinges on China’s willingness to exert real pressure, something Gallucci says Beijing is unwilling to escalate beyond a certain threshold.

• China’s Calculus:

  • China desires North Korea’s regime stability and limited provocations, favoring negotiations but reluctant to risk regime collapse.
  • Quote:
    • “They’d like it to be less provocative… willing to let some pressure be applied… but not enough that the leadership feels real pain.” — Robert Gallucci [07:19]

4. Understanding North Korea Today (07:59)

• Pyongyang’s Transformation:

  • While Gallucci has not visited North Korea, he relays recent reports of construction, increased cars, and restaurants in Pyongyang.
  • The elites are largely insulated from sanctions’ effects, underlining the regime’s focus on self-preservation.

• Totalitarian Structure:

  • The nation operates as a totalitarian system, with a predominant cult of leadership and little tolerance for dissent, complicating negotiation prospects.

5. Nuclear Weapons as Deterrence: Lessons from Libya and Iraq (09:50)

• Misconceptions About Disarmament:
  • Remnick probes whether U.S. interventions in Iraq and Libya have taught other states (like North Korea) that nuclear weapons are worth pursuing.
  • Gallucci clarifies Libya never had nuclear weapons, only a nascent program.
  • Quote:
    • “The description is rough, crude and wrong… Libya never had nuclear weapons.” — Robert Gallucci [10:14]
  • Underlying Point:
    • U.S.-led regime changes have made adversaries value nuclear deterrents for survival.

6. Cautioning Against Use of Force (11:16)

• Advice for Current Leaders:

  • Gallucci cautions against military enthusiasm, citing deterrence’s success with far larger nuclear threats from the Soviet Union.
  • Quote:
    • “Be cautious about your enthusiasm for the use of force to deal with the threat from ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.” — Robert Gallucci [11:16]

• Rationality of North Korean Leadership:

  • Asserts that North Korea is not undeterrable or irrational; assuming suicidal intent is not justified by evidence.
  • Quote:
    • “Unless your proposition is that they are insane or suicidal… deterrence should work.” — Robert Gallucci [12:14]

7. Engagement vs. Containment—The Path Forward (13:04)

• Necessity of Direct Engagement:
  • Gallucci believes face-to-face negotiations are essential and criticizes the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” as inadequate.
  • Quote:
    • “A policy of engagement where we, in fact, don’t have preconditions… I don’t think that’s the way to go.” — Robert Gallucci [13:04]
• Rejecting Preconditioned Talks:
  • Talks should not be treated as rewards, and unnecessary preconditions only enable North Korea’s nuclear advancements.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Regime Survival (Robert Gallucci) [02:46]:
  • “What they worry about most is an American attempt to change their regime… they point to Iraq and to Libya as recent cases.”
• On the Dangers of Escalation (Robert Gallucci) [05:38]:
  • “I have tried very hard to figure out what it is the leadership in this administration thinks… and I can’t tell.”
• On the Logic of Deterrence (Robert Gallucci) [12:14]:
  • “Unless that’s your proposition — that [the North Koreans] are insane or suicidal — deterrence should work.”
• On Past Policy Failures (Robert Gallucci) [13:04]:
  • “I was something of a critic of President Obama's North Korea policy. I thought the phrase strategic patience was an enormous mistake…”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• North Korea’s Motives and Fears: [02:46]
• Historical Iraq Comparisons & U.S. Rhetoric: [03:37–05:20]
• Trump Administration’s North Korea Policy: [05:20–06:34]
• Effectiveness of Sanctions & China’s Role: [06:34–07:59]
• Inside North Korean Society & Elite Resilience: [07:59–09:50]
• Lessons from Libya & Nuclear Deterrence: [09:50–11:16]
• Deterrence vs. Use of Force: [11:16–12:58]
• Need for Direct Talks and Policy Recommendations: [12:58–14:04]

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Summary

This episode offers essential context on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and long-standing motivations, rooted in regime survival and lessons from recent history. Gallucci warns against militaristic escalation, emphasizing the continued viability of deterrence, and calls for direct, unconditional engagement as the only hope for resolving current tensions. His historical perspective, diplomatic candor, and willingness to critique past and present U.S. policy make this a crucial listen for anyone seeking to understand the ongoing conundrum on the Korean peninsula.

Transcript

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[David Remnick]

I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks with Robert Gallucci about the Trump administration's North Korea policy. Gallucci was the United States chief negotiator during the North Korean nuclear CR in 1994 and helped to craft the Agreed Framework that limited the country's nuclear capabilities.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Recently I had the chance to talk to some North Korean diplomats here in New York, and I asked them who in our country understands North Korea best. The person they pointed to was Robert Gallucci. Gallucci is a retired diplomat, a scholar, and he was America's chief negotiator during the last big crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. That was in 1994, and Gallucci's efforts then effectively froze their nuclear program for nearly a decade. I wanted to talk to Gallucci right Now, more than 20 years later, because the situation with North Korea is, to say the least, extremely concerning. Kim Jong Un's regime has launched a series of ballistic missile tests. The Trump administration has responded with a successful anti missile test of its own, and the Rhetoric everywhere on Twitter and otherwise is out of control. What do we know and what do we not know about the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un? What does he want? What is the purpose of his not only testing ballistic missiles and making no secret of his nuclear program, but also publicizing it so widely, wanting to make it known.

[Robert Gallucci]

So the question of what the North Koreans want, what's their grand strategy? I think most analysts would say that North Koreans would like to reunify the Korean peninsula under their regime, one Korea. But that they must recognize is not a near term prospect. Short of that, the defensive objective of North Korea has been the survival of their regime. And what North Koreans have told me flat out on more than one occasion, what they worry about most is an American attempt to change their regime. And they point to Iraq and to Libya as recent cases of American decisions to change a regime they did not like.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

But this anxiety and this rhetoric and this bellicose behavior far precedes the Iraq War of 2003.

[Robert Gallucci]

Well, yes, but let's focus here a little on what we remember about 2003. And certainly one of the things we remember is that the administration was talking about the threat from Iraq being the use of a nuclear weapon. Do you remember the phrase do not let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud over Washington?

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

I sure do.

[Robert Gallucci]

And so I suspected Jemay. So if we keep these things in mind, that we were attempting to characterize the situation as one in which if we went to war against Baghdad, it would be a preemptive war. In other words, that you were on the verge of being attacked, and you must for your own defense attack. Now, at the time, many of us thought that was ludicrous, and afterwards it was demonstrably ludicrous. Unfortunately, what we have right now is a case in which the administration could be arguing. And Secretary of Defense Mattis, who I don't think is likely to throw around words loosely, said on 28 May, just last month, that this situation of the North Korean capability is now present. We don't have to wait, he said, explicit, for them to test that intercontinental ballistic missile. This capability is evident. Well, that's beginning to sound like if we wish to protect ourselves, we may have to strike first. So this is not a time of stability. I would say pretty much dabbling in.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Understatement here or consistent leadership. I think Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was obviously in the Bush administration, said, we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it. And he was talking about North Korea. There, there. Are we seeing then a return to that kind of philosophy in the Trump era, or is it just not consistent enough to locate?

[Robert Gallucci]

I'm sorry. I have tried very hard to figure out what it is the leadership in this administration thinks about the plausibility of negotiations as a way to resolve this crisis, reduce the tensions. And I can't tell if Secretary Tillerson or Secretary Secretary Mattis, or the national security adviser, General McMaster, or even the president, who has talked about willingness to negotiate directly with Kim Jong Un and at other times seems much more bellicose than that. So you might not want to fault the administration for not having a well thought out policy yet because it is.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Relatively early, but you're saying it's incoherent?

[Robert Gallucci]

Incoherent is a tad more pejorative than I'm trying to be. What I would say is it's unclear and it's difficult to discern, and it is not yet coherent.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Fair enough. Is it a mistake to take deterrence off the table or sanctions?

[Robert Gallucci]

Well, deterrence and sanctions, there's a great deal difference between them. Let's do sanctions first. It's easier. The effectiveness of sanctions has a lot to do with how Beijing responds. So I'm not opposed to sanctions, but I'm not one that thinks they're likely to produce the outcome that we want and need now to go to.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Let's talk about China for a second. When Trump talks about North Korea, he often says that the key to defusing the tension lies with China. It's unique in its ability to put pressure on the regime, and yet China is often described as basically unwilling to exert that kind of leverage that Trump expects.

[Robert Gallucci]

So the Chinese want very much for the regime in Pyongyang to continue to exist. They'd like it to be less provocative. They'd like for the North Koreans to come to the table and have a negotiated settlement with the United States and the rest of the national community. And they're willing to let some pressure be applied to the north, but not enough pressure such that the leadership in the north will feel real pain. But I am persuaded that, in a sense, the president is right, that the Chinese do bear responsibility here, but I don't know that they're going to be the ultimate key to resolving this.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

I think when the average American who thinks about North Korea thinks about it at all, they think of a kind of dark, comical, stereotype vision. How do you characterize North Korean society today and its leadership? We need to thicken our impression of what that country is all about.

[Robert Gallucci]

Yeah, I will. I'M going to try to give you some texture. But first, truth in advertising. I have never been to North Korea. I've been working on this issue since the early 90s, and for a variety of reasons. It was inappropriate for me to go when I was in the government working on the issue. And I never thought it would be a terrific place to vacation. So I have not been there. All the people I've talked to in the last couple of years have talked about the changes in Pyongyang. Now, that's different than saying the changes in the dprk. There is construction everywhere. Everyone tells me there are lots of automobiles on the street. There are lots of restaurants. There certainly is no feeling that I've gotten from talking to people who have visited that sanctions are depressing life in Pyongyang for the elites, and they, of course, are the ones who determine policy. One is struck in talking to even official North Koreans who have traveled by the extent to which they are comfortable with a cult of the Kims, the extent to which this is a totalitarian rather than just an authoritarian political system, the way in which they accept what is by all reasonable accounts, a brutal regime's way of dealing with dissent. And all this makes the idea of a normal relationship between North Korea and the United States harder to imagine. And that's a problem for negotiations.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

You mentioned Iraq before. Let me bring Libya into this. Have we taught countries like North Korea that it's worth it to have nuclear weapons? Libya got rid of its nuclear weapons and the next thing you know, that was the end of Muammar Gaddafi. It's a very rough and crude depiction, but nevertheless, in Kim Jong Un's mind, that may well be the object lesson though it is.

[Robert Gallucci]

The description is rough, crude and wrong. I don't mean to be rude here. Go ahead and be rude. But Libya never had nuclear weapons. They had a nuclear weapons program. They had one for a very long time. And there was some reason to think that given enough time, even Libya would eventually enrich uranium and could go to nuclear weapons. But more important, the thrust of your question is when a United States of America changes a regime, it costs us in terms of our credibility and for countries with whom we are not getting on. And North Korea has certainly won, yes, it does motivate them to have a deterrent.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

When Donald Trump left the White House the first time after meeting with Barack Obama, they had one face to face meeting. The one thing that he did say was that it was made clear to him by the Obama administration that the biggest threat that he would have to face was North Korea. If you were advising Donald Trump, what would you tell him at this point?

[Robert Gallucci]

Well, the very first thing is something that's on my mind is that be cautious about your enthusiasm for the use of force to deal with the threat from ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. That we relied on deterrence to deal with a country that had 30,000 nuclear weapons, 30,000. Soviet Union count 1983ish. North Korea has maybe 12. We lived with the threat from the Soviet Union, had no ability to defend ourselves.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

But we had this impression during the Cold War and even after that, as dangerous as that was, and it was apocalyptically dangerous, there was some kind of logical enemy on the other side of the table, that there was a certain kind of logic at work in the Cold War, that there is an irrationalism at work with North Korea. What do you think about that?

[Robert Gallucci]

Well, you've got to do a little more than irrationalism, I think, if you're going to decide to go to war to prevent a war where there is no war coming, unless you think once the capability exists, the North Koreans will just have no ability to resist attacking the United States of America, which sounds ludicrous to me. So while I'm not an enthusiast for doing nothing, trust me on that, nor do I think we should abandon efforts at real ballistic missile defense. But the proposition that the North Koreans are, if you will, either suicidal, which is what we'd be talking about, or insane, unless that's your proposition. Deterrence should work.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Do you think that this is a situation that can be resolved without face to face meetings?

[Robert Gallucci]

No, I do not. I haven't seen really the effort at engagement. I was something of a critic of President Obama's North Korea policy. I thought the phrase strategic patience was an enormous mistake as a phrase as well.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

You felt he was just kicking the can down the road?

[Robert Gallucci]

Well, to use the older lingo, I thought he was prepared to accept containment as a way of dealing with the North Korean problem. But the North Korean problem was getting substantially worse as we were in the process of containing it. And so I think a more aggressive policy aimed at engaging the north would have been more appropriate. I think now a policy of engagement where we, in fact, don't have preconditions to have talks about talks. We don't look at talks as a reward for North Korean behavior. So they have to behave good for six months or something. I'm not. I don't think that's the way to go.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

Mr. Gallucci, thank you very much.

[Robert Gallucci]

Thank you very much.

[David Remnick]

That was Robert Gallucci talking to David Remnick.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.

[Robert Gallucci]

I'm Michael Colori, Wired's director of consumer, tech and culture. And I'm Lauren Good.

[David Remnick]

I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.

[Robert Gallucci]

And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Katie Drummond]

At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.

[Robert Gallucci]

Right.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

So whether we're talking about privacy, AI.

[Robert Gallucci]

Social media, or a major tech figure.

[Interviewer (likely David Remnick)]

We will always explain the Silicon Valley.

[Robert Gallucci]

Forces behind these stories and how they affect you.

[Katie Drummond]

Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[Robert Gallucci]

From prx.