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Robert “Bob” Carlin is one of a small group of rare figures on the U.S.-North Korea political scene; a consistent advocate of engagement with North Korea as the best, and possibly only, way to bring an end to the threat posed by Pyongyang’s systematic development of nuclear weapons and missile-based delivery systems.
Conceptions of engagement with the North had their heyday in the 1990s with the presidencies of Bill Clinton and, in Seoul, Kim Dae Jung. The first nuclear crisis led the former to conclude the “Agreed Framework,” which froze the North Korean nuclear program in exchange for fuel, the future provision of two nuclear reactors, and the possibility of normalized relations, while the latter embarked upon the “Sunshine Policy,” which resulted in aid, development assistance, economic cooperation, and hard currency flowing to the North.
However, these types of engagement policy have, with the brief exception of the idiosyncratic and unsuccessful U.S.-North Korea Leap Day deal of 2012, fallen out of favor in recent years. To their detractors, North Korea used these twin peaks of engagement to successfully extract resources from the U.S., South Korea, Japan and others, resources that the regime of Kim Jong Il then promptly re-invested in its military programs, making the overall situation in Northeast Asia worse, not better. The Bush Administration scuttled the Agreed Framework, in Carlin’s assessment, while South Koreans had seemingly seen enough sunshine long before the late President Roh Moo Hyun went to Pyongyang in October 2007 for a second inter-Korean summit, just two months before he was swept from office by the conservative presidential challenger, Lee Myung Bak.
Nevertheless, whether or not one agrees with Carlin, he remains an astute observer of the Korean Peninsula situation with a long history of personal experiences upon which to draw. As Daily NK reported yesterday, he was recently asked to update a classic history of the peninsula since the 1970s, former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer’s “The Two Koreas.” He duly did so, and the resulting 3rd edn. was published in December 2013. To accompany that review, he also agreed to talk to Daily NK. The interview, reproduced in full below, was conducted by email over the course of a week.
