Sharing this recent Vox interview with Markus Garlauskas who served as national intelligence officer for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2020. Garlauskas discusses the Trump administration’s DPRK policy over the last four years – particularly what he felt was done right and how the next administration should handle Kim Jung Un.
One of Garlauskas’s more unexpected takes was that the threat of war with North Korea in 2017 (amid “fire and fury” threats from the White House) was vastly overstated. He said that the gap between Trump’s rhetoric and reality was significant, and that the U.S. had actually come closer to war in 1994 and in 2015 under the Obama administration. Garlauskas said that Trump’s tough rhetoric reflected his administration’s position that “some degree of posturing was necessary to show North Korea it was serious, and that they were not going to indefinitely tolerate this level of activity.” He framed Trump’s bellicose messages as conscious and strategic rather than haphazard 3 AM tweets.
Garlauskas also praised Trump for not accepting a bad deal in Hanoi that would commit the U.S. to near full sanctions relief for DPRK. He said that Kim offered too little and asked too much at that summit. Critically, Kim wouldn’t commit to the full denuclearization of DPRK on paper. He said Trump was right to walk away.
Garlauskas says that the next president will have to make DPRK a toppling priority, demand a halt to weapons testing, and can’t be afraid of confrontation: “There has to be a willingness to confront Kim militarily — not to initiate war, not to do a bloody nose strike, but basically to make it clear to him that there are limits to what we will tolerate. And we need to make clear that if he crosses into initiating a war, the outcome will be the end of him and his regime. That’s one of the things President Trump said differently than I would have said it, but it needed to be said, frankly, in 2017.”
An interesting read from a former advisor who doesn’t come off as a total apologist for the Trump administration but makes the case that it did more right than wrong on DPRK.
Hey Shana, it was interesting reading your blog. Yea, I don’t think Kim Jong-Un is credible, he could be but I’m sure North Korea will not give up its nuclear program so easily, even if Kim expressed that he is willing to work toward a denuclearization. But I also think that the way the US has been pressuring the DPRK is not giving us anything either. There must be a real willingness to establish relations with North Korea by creating a real dialogue, starting by lifting up the travel ban, opening embassies in both countries etc,. Theodore Roosevelt once said that, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” So, yea the US must first establish relations with the North, and the end goal may come.
Hi Shana. My response will be limited, because I am still grading papers (for the other course). This IS an interesting perspective, and one that I hope you will represent during our class discussion tomorrow. It is not without merit. As we will discuss, North Korea is the “problem from hell” from a national security perspective–there is NO good answer.
–Professor Wallerstein