August 31,
2000
Deputy Director David B. Shear,
Office of Korean Affairs, U.S. Department of State
In his excellent briefing, Deputy
Director David Shear
explained why the United States, in good conscious,
engaged diplomatically with North Korea, which by all
means is still one of the world’s worst regimes. He
emphasized that of all the communist countries
surviving the fall of the Soviet Union, North Korea is
probably the only remaining communist country that is
truly Stalinist. In fact, he said, North Korea’s
leader, Kim Yung-Il, the Korean Peoples Army and the
North Korean Communist Party maintain absolute control
over the North Korean population. In the name of
central economic control, the North Korean regime has
pursued an economic policy contributing to the death
by starvation of possibly hundreds of thousands of
people.
The United States never-the-less chose
in 1994, after more than four decades of hostility, to
engage North Korea diplomatically. The American
administration decided to engage the North Korean
diplomatically in the early 1990's because we judged
that we could not achieve our foreign policy and
security goals in any other way. It was a very hard
decision (sometimes a very unpopular decision given
the nature of the North Korean regime) but a decision
had to be taken, given the threat to our security,
emphasized our speaker.
The United States made some
concessions but we’ve gotten important concessions in
return: a freeze on the North Korean nuclear program
at P’yongyang and a North Korean moratorium on
long range missile testing. There is always a chance
that the North Koreans will go back on their
agreements. If they go back on their agreements, we’ll
go back on ours, concluded Director Shear his sobering
analysis of the complex U.S.-North Korean relations.
