Ari Shapiro speaks with Ambassador Robert Gallucci, chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins, about North Korea's invitation to a meeting with President Trump. Gallucci was chief negotiator during the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1994 and has been involved in informal talks with North Korean officials.
Robert Gallucci, a distinguished professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and chief U.S. negotiator during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
It's been decades since a U.S. administration entertained high-level, one-on-one talks with North Korea. The leaders of the two countries have never met. Robert Gallucci is a professor at Georgetown University and a veteran diplomat. Ambassador Gallucci led bilateral talks with North Korea in 1994. They produced what's called The Agreed Framework, a plan to freeze nuclear production to eliminate all nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula eventually. That agreement came apart two years later. Ambassador Gallucci met more recently with North Korean diplomats in the fall of 2016. And he joins us now. Welcome.
ROBERT GALLUCCI: Thank you very much.
SHAPIRO: You've spent more time across the table from North Korean negotiators than most people. A meeting of these two world leaders is different from a meeting of professional negotiators. But what advice would you offer going into this?
GALLUCCI: I would advise anybody involved in any of this to keep your expectations modest. Keep your patience intact here. Look at this as a long-term process. Look at engagement as something that will continue for a while. And always remember that - you know, to keep the eye on the ball. We're looking for a material change in the situation. Material change means the capability of North Korea directly to do damage to the United States of America or its allies, explicitly concerning nuclear weapons. If you focus on that, you can end up in the right place.
SHAPIRO: Many people have asked whether anything the North Koreans say can be trusted. Given your experience negotiating with them, what do you think?
GALLUCCI: I think talking about trust in international affairs is a very iffy proposition, particularly between states that have either - experienced war - as we have with North Korea - are generally considered to be belligerents, one to the other, as we are with North Korea. We, I think, freely have ever since the late, late '90s talked about North Korea as something of an enemy. So I think to be looking for trust at this point is a tad bit outrageous, and that what we really ought to be thinking about are agreements that can be verified, arrangements that can be useful and be built upon with always expecting that the substance of those arrangements if there are to be relied upon, must be relied upon only to the extent that they can be verified.
SHAPIRO: Do you worry about the absence of lower-level people who would have been holding senior positions at the State Department if they had been nominated and confirmed, but there are now vacancies?
GALLUCCI: I generally worry about the Department of State and its capacity to do what I think most of us have understood has been the job of the Department forever. They are significantly understaffed. Staffing up for negotiations isn't that difficult. Under most circumstances, I think there are those that the Trump administration could recruit who could step up to the challenge of conducting negotiations over a protracted period. So, I think the staffing issue with this administration is nontrivial, but I think it's manageable.
SHAPIRO: Diplomacy involves important thorny issues and also just person-to-person relations. Are there aspects of working with the North Koreans different from other countries you've negotiated with?
GALLUCCI: I think the first thing for me to note is that it's been a long time since I represented the United States of America in a negotiation with the North Koreans. And when I did a quarter of a century ago, the North Koreans were not, I would say, experts at international engagement. They did not interact like an average team would. Their tactics were, at times, I would say, even crude.
SHAPIRO: What do you mean by that? Can you give us an example?
GALLUCCI: I can think of a - more than one occasion sitting in their mission in Geneva and having my opposite member, Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, yell, and then having his somewhat diminutive interpreter mimic his yelling as he translated it into English. And the combination of the two is surreal for me. The point I want to make is that it was long ago. When I met the North Koreans in Kuala Lumpur, I would say they have come a long way. They were much smoother and more polished. And I don't think there was anything hugely different between talking to a delegation from North Korea and a delegation from any other country.
SHAPIRO: Ambassador Gallucci, thank you for joining us.
GALLUCCI: Thank you for having me.
SHAPIRO: Robert Gallucci is chairman of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
NPR, Edit: KMHPF