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Principled statements for engagement with North Korea are in surprisingly short supply in the US at the moment; the last that springs quickly to mind was the Asia Society’s task force report on North Korea Inside Out. (Truth in advertising; we were a member of that task force). At Brookings' Northeast Asia site, Evans Revere casts doubt on the current pessimism about engaging the new North Korean leadership. But his endorsement of re-engagement is ringed with cautions.
So we were interested to learn that the World Economic Forum has been working on the North Korean issue through its Global Agenda Council on Korea. Under the leadership of Spencer Kim, the agenda council was reconfigured in 2011 to include a group of prominent North Korea watchers and practitioners from the US, East Asia and Europe. Among the academics are Lee Geun, Rudiger Frank, John Swenson-Wright, and Moon Chung-in, one of the most tireless and articulate defenders of the Sunshine approach. Moon and John Delury offer up robust argument for engagement for Australia’s useful East Asia Forum site.
The group was also leavened by a number of entrepreneurs, including the chairman of the council, whose participation in engagement with North Korea is sorely needed.
In an editorial in the Korea Herald, Spencer Kim summarizes some of the committee's thinking; longer papers are circulating among council members. He argues for a new model of engagement that is “holistic, sequential, sustained and consensual.” Underlying the approach is the quite obvious stalemate caused by an over-riding focus on the nuclear issue. "HSSC" also has a marketing component: to find an alternative to the CVID acronym (complete, verifiable, irreversible, dismantlement).
Mr. Kim argues for creating a denser “epistemic community” around North Korea that would build up the underlying knowledge base. But one of the most interesting suggestions is to bring North Koreans to the World Economic Forum itself. As we always say, “get people in, get people out.” If Spencer Kim’s group can facilitate this process, more power to it.
