Tag: Robert Gallucci

This may end of backfiring on the Moon administration:

The U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI) stated it will close next month due to a cut in funding from the South Korean government, media outlets reported Tuesday.

The USKI is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It runs the website 38 North specializing in North Korea affairs.

The USKI received 2.1 billion won ($1.87 million) in annual funding from the government, through the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP) affiliated with the Prime Minister’s Office.

This is about 60 percent of its total budget, according to a KIEP official. The USKI also receives funding from Johns Hopkins University, she said.

According to AP, USKI Chairman Robert Gallucci said the think tank will close in May, after rejecting “utterly inappropriate meddling” in its academic affairs.

Earlier, the government stated it would stop funding the institute starting in June, citing problems with transparency in accounting and selecting visiting scholars and interns.

The USKI claimed there had been pressure from Cheong Wa Dae to oust the institute’s director Jae H. Ku, due to his conservative inclinations that were out of line with the liberal Moon Jae-in administration. Ku has headed the think tank since 2007.   [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.  For those who haven’t I recommend reading my prior post on this subject as well.  The 38North.org website operated by USKI has a posting up saying they will continue to publish.

The silencing of the US-Korea Institute I think may backfire because they have been largely friendly to the Moon administration’s policies.  Now that the organization is no longer funded by the Korean government their may be more of a willingness to take on the Moon administration.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Over at One Free Korea here has a very interesting posting up about how liberal South Korean administrations target certain think tanks to fire employees or lose funding:

Contemporary press reports alleged that Roh’s people directed the funding cut because they didn’t care for what TAE wrote, and because they really didn’t care for Nicholas Eberstadt (interviewed at this blog eons ago). One of the TAE authors called for an “amicable divorce” of the U.S.-Korea alliance, something that even most anti-American South Koreans fear. If this were to happen prematurely, it could cause capital flight, crash the KOSPI, and undermine the political support left-wing politicians build by profiting from the anti-American demagoguery of their simpaticos without openly propagating it themselves. Clearly, these issues are important matters of public policy for Americans.  [One Free Korea]

Here is the most recent example of a liberal administration trying to influence a think tank:

The Chosun Ilbo and the Joongang Ilbo now report that the South Korean government directed the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP) to cut most of its funding to Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI), (…………)

Paradoxically, USKI is best known for publishing the reliably soft-line, anti-anti-North Korean, pro-“engagement” 38 North blog. It’s the last outlet you’d think Moon Jae-in’s people would mess with. (…………)

Not surprisingly, USKI and the KIEP have different explanations for KIEP’s funding decision, and by the end of this post, you’ll see why. KIEP says the National Assembly demanded the cut over questions about the transparency of USKI’s budget. But Robert Gallucci, the Director of USKI, says the real reason is that the Blue House wanted him to fire Jae Ku, one of the few right-of-center thinkers at USKI. (Mr. Ku gave an interview to this blog way back in 2005. I hope I’m not doing him any more harm by calling him a friend.) Later, Gallucci says the Blue House also told him to fire Jenny Town, a co-founder of 38 North.  [One Free Korea]

I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link, but it looks like the people at the Blue House involved in cutting the funding have ties to the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) organization.

Hong and his boss Jang spent 6 years at People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy: it's an activist group ostensibly opposed to abuses of power by government & chebols. But it also put on anti-US beef (mad cow disease) demos and called for alternative Cheonan investigations pic.twitter.com/f4OW0Vay6u

— Noon in Korea (@NoonInKorea) April 7, 2018

So who is PSPD?  They are a group that has long championed anti-US causes to include opposing the US-ROK FTA, the Camp Humphreys expansion, exploiting the No Gun Ri issue, wanting SOFA changes, and closing the Kooni Bombing Range.  The most ridiculous issue they helped to lead was the 2008 anti-US Beef Riots.  Most recently PSPD has been one of the major groups behind the anti-THAAD protests in Seongju.

The way I look at it the Korean government has every right to cut funding to think tanks they support.  However, then they should release from jail the people imprisoned for the so called cultural blacklist during the Park Geun-hye administration.  If the Park administration could not blacklist certain cultural organizations than shouldn’t the Moon administration not be able to blacklist certain think tanks?

Once again I highly recommend reading One Free Korea’s entire posting.

Robert Gallucci the former nuclear negotiator with North Korea during the Clinton administration recently sat down and conducted an interview with the Joong Ang Ilbo about the upcoming Trump-Kim summit.  Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Q. Do you think a “one-shot” negotiation is possible between Trump and Kim Jong-un at the first U.S.-North Korea summit?

A. First of all, it never occurred to me that this would be a one-shot negotiation. It is hard for me to believe that anybody familiar with the complexity of the issues would think that anybody — and I do mean anybody — could sit down at a negotiation and work out all the differences between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the United States in one session. It is, for me, inconceivable. If you accept that, that means that if this is going to be a successful engagement, the summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump will be the start of a series of talks which will be top-down, because you can’t go higher up. So that means that there would be presumably professional diplomats or at least representatives of both governments who would then meet someplace or at an extended period of time, back and forth, to work out the details of an agreement. I cannot see a single session solving this problem.

What issue will be most hotly contested at the U.S.-North Korea summit?

If I look back to 1994 and to the 2000s, transparency, verification, monitoring, that’s always a difficult matter in the negotiation where we are looking to limit capability on both nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles. I imagine what’s in the mind of the American side is that they would want to reach an agreement in which the North Koreans commit to giving up their nuclear weapons program, that they want a nuclear weapons-free peninsula. So you can imagine North Koreans saying, “Sure. It’s done. We dismantled all our nuclear weapons yesterday. Everything’s done. Now, here’s what we would like.”

We might say, “We think the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) needs to get back in and do what it considers a full scope of safeguards.” North Koreans might hop on, maybe not. So what I’m saying here, you want to know where I see the greatest sensitivity will be, it will be on gaining agreement by the North Koreans to adequate measures to permit transparency, to permit monitoring of the agreement and ultimate verification of compliance with the agreement.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but let me remind everyone that Mr. Gallucci is the guy a few months ago that said even a deal North Korea cheats on is still a good deal.  I have so far seen no indications that the Trump administration is ready to sign up for any deal that allows North Korea to cheat.

Here is what a former nuclear negotiator with North Korea had to say recently about the Trump administration:

Robert Gallucci, the chief negotiator during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, called for dialogue with the North to make a breakthrough in the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, during his speech at Seoul’s National Assembly, Monday.

Gallucci, chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., reiterated the U.S. should negotiate with Pyongyang, if there’s room for improved circumstances through the negotiation.

“What we should not ask is a perfect deal. We should not ask how much does it cost,” Gallucci said in an event co-hosted by Reps. Kim Kyung-hyup and Lee Tae-kyu, members of the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee.

“We should rather ask are we better off with the deal,” the former special envoy noted, referring to his past experience of talking with his North Korean counterpart Kang Sok-ju in Geneva, Switzerland.

“In 1994, our intelligence community estimated North Korea was capable to produce 200 kilograms of plutonium a year. However, when President George Bush came into office in 2001, North Korea had zero nuclear weapons,” he said. “Did the North cheat us? The answer is yes. However, the deal was still a good one.”  [Korea Times]

That last paragraph is all everyone needs to see to understand the problem with past negotiations with North Korea.  Gallucci is apparently more than happy to allow the North Koreans to cheat on a deal as long as there is a deal.

Here is what else he had to say:

Touching on the heightened tension sparked by the North’s Nov. 29 launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Gallucci pointed out that it is a crisis between the North and the entire international community.

“It is a crisis because if military activity were to begin in days, indeed just days, no one in this room could be surprised, or should be surprised. That I think is a fair definition of crisis,” he said.  [Yonhap]

Who is assessing military action to happen within days except for people that don’t closely follow North Korea?  The ICBM launch was a research and development activity like their other prior test launches.  The US military has not launched any retaliatory strikes in response to these R&D activities and has instead focused on deterrence responses.  If the Kim regime fires a missile that lands in or near US territory than we will definitely have a military crisis on our hands.

The Kim regime has clearly been firing missiles in areas that are no where near US territory in order to not provoke a crisis.  Additionally the Kim regime has not shelled any islands, attacked ROK naval vessels, or murdered ROK servicemembers in quite sometime.  It is clear the Kim regime does not want a military crisis and instead is focusing on R&D of their ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities.

Why they are developing their ICBMs and nuclear capability Gallucci believes is for deterrence:

“This North Korean capability raises a question about whether the U.S. will fulfill its alliance responsibilities to its allies,” he said. “It raises a question about whether the U.S. will put Washington D.C. and New York City at risk in order to prevent North Korea from blackmailing South Korea and to deter any attack on Seoul specifically.”

But he noted the military dominance of the South Korea-U.S. alliance, saying Pyongyang cannot hold Seoul “hostage” with its artillery or nuclear weapons unless it is “suicidal.” He also voiced skepticism about the existence of a “good” military option without any cost or risk.

“Its nuclear weapons are good for one thing only to deter an effort at changing their regime. That is plausible,” he said.

“But the North cannot plausibly blackmail, it cannot deter a military response to its adventurism, it cannot compel the ROK (Republic of Korea) or the U.S. to do anything, it cannot break our alliance,” he added.   [Yonhap]

I think his remarks that North Korea is not developing nuclear weapons to blackmail the South is in direct response to ROK Drop favorite Joshua Stanton.  Stanton of One Free Korea fame has long argued that the North’s nuclear program is less about deterrence and more about driving concessions out of the South to create a confederation of the two countries on Kim’s terms.

I support Stanton’s position because reunification is a driving force within the Cult of Kim.  The Kim regime has long had deterrence through its conventional weapons that could destroy Seoul.  Most other countries in the world would have faced regime change retaliation for the provocations the North Koreans have executed over the years.  However, the Kim regime has faced little military retaliation because of the threat to Seoul.

Developing nuclear weapons allows the regime to threaten the US homeland for the first time.  It is arguable the regime wants to create a negotiating environment where it hopes to separate the ROK from the US.  This would explain why the North Koreans continuously bring up wanting to negotiate a peace treaty to end the Korean War.  If a peace treaty is signed then why would US troops be needed in South Korea any more?  The next goal for the Kim regime would be to co-opt the ROK into a confederation on North Korean terms.

Only time will tell who is right or who is wrong.

The architect behind the failed 1994 Agreed Framework, Robert Gallucci has joined the chorus to restart talks with North Korea though they have repeatedly said they don’t want to:

Former U.S. nuclear negotiator Robert Gallucci said Monday that North Korea might not be interested in talks on its nuclear and missile programs until it secures an intercontinental ballistic missile capability that levels the playing field with the U.S.

“Maybe it’s true that the North has no interest at this moment in having the negotiations that involve its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles,” Gallucci said in a lecture at Seoul’s Yonsei University.

“Some suspect in the U.S that they don’t want to enter through negotiations with the U.S… until they have demonstrated an ICMB capability that makes the U.S. vulnerable to them… so that they have leveled the playing field,” he added. “That’s possible.”  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link, but Gallucci in the article tries to blame the Trump administration for not restarting talks though he even states in the article the North Koreans are likely waiting to perfect their ICBM before wanting to pursue talks.

This was actually good advice which so far the Kim regime has been following:

A former chief U.S. nuclear negotiator with North Korea said he advised diplomats from Pyongyang to refrain from greeting a new U.S. administration with nuclear or missile tests when he met with them in Malaysia in October.

Robert Gallucci, who negotiated a now-defunct 1994 nuclear freeze deal with the North, held meetings in Kuala Lumpur on Oct. 21-22 with senior diplomats from North Korea, including Vice Foreign Minister Han Song-ryol and Deputy U.N. Ambassador Jang Il-hun.

“When I met North Korean representatives for Track II discussions in Kuala Lumpur, I took the opportunity to advise them that they should avoid greeting a new American administration with new nuclear or ballistic missile tests, or any aggressive moves towards the U.S. or its allies,” Gallucci said.

“I suggested that whomever the next president turned out to be, they would not appreciate such a greeting and would undoubtedly respond with appropriate vigor and certainly not with an inclination to negotiate any time soon,” he said in a statement prepared for a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing set for Tuesday.  [Yonhap]

Here is what else Mr. Gallucci had to say about what other North Korea experts have been advocating for:

Gallucci said that the U.S. should not seek anything short of North Korea’s complete denuclearization, voicing concern that too many analysts are now arguing that all the U.S. needs is to stop the North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs from growing.

Seeking such a freeze is “unrealistic and dangerous,” he said.

Entering into negotiations with the North without the U.S. declaring its goal of a non-nuclear North Korea would “appear to have the United States legitimize the North’s nuclear weapons status, and thus increase the likelihood that before too long South Korea and then Japan would follow suit,” Gallucci said.

The way I look at it is that Gallucci wants the US to negotiate for something the North Koreans will never give up.  What deal could the US possibly offer for the Kim regime to give up their nuclear weapons?  I have not heard one person give a realistic option on what the incentive would be for the Kim regime to give up its nukes.  This is like going into negotiations with the Taliban and asking them to give up radical Islam, that is how important the nuclear weapons are to the Kim regime.  Nuclear weapons is something that legitimizes and assures regime survival, just like radical Islam is to the Taliban.