On March 26, 2010, SPICE received the 2010 Franklin Buchanan Prize at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference in Philadelphia. The Buchanan Prize is awarded annually to an outstanding curriculum publication on Asia designed for any educational level, elementary through university. SPICE was recognized for its two-part Korea-focused series, U.S.-South Korean Relations and Uncovering North Korea. The primary authors of the series were Rylan Sekiguchi and Joon Seok Hong. Contributing authors were Rennie Moon and Gary Mukai. Rennie Moon attended the AAS conference to receive the prize on behalf of SPICE. Professors Gi-Wook Shin and John W. Lewis served as primary advisors for the two-part series.

The Buchanan Prize committee noted the following about the two-part series: "In U.S. classrooms, very little is taught about the Korean peninsula, unless it involves the Korean War. This series fills that gap by focusing on a broader perspective and looking at the social, economic, political and cultural development of this region over the past fifty years."

This is the fifth time that SPICE has won the Buchanan Prize since it was established in 1995. The Association for Asian Studies is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association open to all persons interested in Asia and the study of Asia.

THIS has been a remarkable time for the Obama administration. After a year of intense internal debate, it issued a new nuclear strategy. And after a year of intense negotiations with the Russians, President Obama signed the New Start treaty with President Dmitri Medvedev in Prague. On Monday, the president will host the leaders of more than 40 nations in a nuclear security summit meeting whose goal is to find ways of gaining control of the loose fissile material around the globe.

New Start is the first tangible product of the administration's promise to "press the reset button" on United States-Russian relations. The new treaty is welcome. But as a disarmament measure, it is a modest step, entailing a reduction of only 30 percent from the former limit - and some of that reduction is accomplished by the way the warheads are counted, not by their destruction. Perhaps the treaty's greatest accomplishment is that the negotiations leading up to its signing re-engaged Americans and Russians in a serious discussion of how to reduce nuclear dangers.

So what should come next? We look forward to a follow-on treaty that builds on the success of the previous Start treaties and leads to significantly greater arms reductions - including reductions in tactical nuclear weapons and reductions that require weapons be dismantled and not simply put in reserve.

But our discussions with Russian colleagues, including senior government officials, suggest that such a next step would be very difficult for them. Part of the reason for their reluctance to accept further reductions is that Russia considers itself to be encircled by hostile forces in Europe and in Asia. Another part results from the significant asymmetry between United States and Russian conventional military forces. For these reasons, we believe that the next round of negotiations with Russia should not focus solely on nuclear disarmament issues. These talks should encompass missile defense, Russia's relations with NATO, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, North Korea, Iran and Asian security issues.

Let's begin with missile defense. Future arms talks should make a serious exploration of a joint United States-Russia program that would provide a bulwark against Iranian missiles. We should also consider situating parts of the joint system in Russia, which in many ways offers an ideal strategic location for these defenses. Such an effort would not only improve our security, it would also further cooperation in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, including the imposition of consequential sanctions when appropriate.

NATO is a similarly complicated issue. After the cold war ended, Russia was invited to NATO meetings with the idea that the country would eventually become an integral part of European security discussions. The idea was good, but the execution failed. NATO has acted as if Russia's role is that of an observer with no say in decisions; Russia has acted as if it should have veto power.

Neither outlook is viable. But if NATO moves from consensus decisions to super-majority decisions in its governing structure, as has been considered, it would be possible to include Russia's vote as an effective way of resolving European security issues of common interest.

The Russians are also eager to revisit the two landmark cold war treaties. The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty enabled NATO and Warsaw Pact nations to make significant reductions in conventional armaments and to limit conventional deployments. Today, there is still a need for limiting conventional arms, but the features of that treaty pertaining to the old Warsaw Pact are clearly outdated. Making those provisions relevant to today's world should be a goal of new talks

Similarly, the 1987 treaty that eliminated American and Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles was a crucially important pact that helped to defuse cold war tensions. But today Russia has neighbors that have such missiles directed at its borders; for understandable reasons, it wants to renegotiate aspects of this treaty.

Future arms reductions with Russia are eminently possible. But they are unlikely to be achieved unless the United States is willing to address points of Russian concern. Given all that is at stake, we believe comprehensive discussions are a necessity as we work our way toward ever more significant nuclear disarmament.

William J. Perry, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, was the secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997. George P. Shultz, the secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, is a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution.

North Korea is usually described as the “most isolated country on earth,” its people effectively cut off from the outside world. My research tells a different story—that perhaps one million North Koreans are secretly listening to foreign radio broadcasts. The number of listeners is believed to be growing, which is all the more amazing when one considers that North Korean authorities only distribute radios with fixed dials, assiduously jam foreign broadcasts, and send citizens caught listening to foreign radio to the country’s notorious gulags for as long as ten years.

Over a dozen radio stations from the United States, South Korea, and Japan currently broadcast to North Korea. Voice of America (VOA), one of the most popular stations, has been broadcasting to the North since 1942, while the equally popular Radio Free Asia (RFA) began its Korean broadcasts soon after being created by Congress in 1997. VOA focuses on news of the United States and the world, while RFA concentrates on the two Koreas. RFA also carries commentaries by two Korean speakers who grew up in the former Soviet Union and Romania. RFA serves as a substitute for the lack of a “free” station in North Korea, but unlike a typical “surrogate station”—which would be staffed largely by émigrés—RFA only employs one North Korean defector.

South Korea’s “Global Korean Network” has been declining in popularity since it ceased to focus on North Korea and adopted a decidedly soft approach after the election of Kim Dae-jung as president in 1997. However, three stations run by North Korean defectors have sprouted up over the past few years, led by Free North Korea Radio (FRNK). These stations employ stringers in North Korea who can communicate by cell phone or smuggle out interviews through China. As a result, information is flowing in and out of the North more rapidly than ever. For example, when major economic reforms were undertaken in 2002, it was months before the rest of the world knew. In contrast, when the regime launched a disastrous currency reform on November 30, 2009, FNKR filed a report within hours.

How do we know that North Koreans are actually listening to foreign broadcasts? First, on dozens of occasions, authorities in Pyongyang have used their own media to attack foreign broadcasters. The North reserves the insult “reptile” exclusively to describe foreign broadcasters. In late March 2010, the regime likened defector broadcasters to “human trash.” Ironically, this diatribe also contained the first official mention of the currency revaluation, so broadcasters have clearly struck a nerve. If they were in fact irrelevant, the regime would ignore them instead of lavishing them with free publicity.

Broadcasters to North Korea frequently receive heartbreaking messages from North Koreans in China, thanking them for their efforts. One listener described RFA as “our one ray of hope.” More importantly, over the past several years, thousands of North Korean defectors, refugees, and visitors to China have been interviewed about their listening habits. An unpublished 2009 survey of North Koreans in China found that over 20 percent had listened to the banned broadcasts, and almost all of them had shared the information with family members and friends. Several other surveys confirm these findings. While we cannot generalize the listening habits of a self-selected group to the general population, it is not unreasonable to conclude that there are more than a million surreptitious listeners. The North Korean regime is not only losing its monopoly on the control of information; defectors also cite foreign radio listening as one of the leading motivations to defect.

Despite valiant efforts and growing impact, much more could be done to improve broadcasting to North Korea. VOA and RFA only broadcast five hours a day, and the defector stations limp along with shoestring budgets, due to a pervasive indifference within South Korea.

President Obama’s human rights envoy for North Korea, Robert King, has pledged to expand funding for Korean broadcasting. For its part, Pyongyang claims that foreign broadcasts are part of the Obama administration’s “hostile policy” toward the North. Only time will tell if these efforts will lead to change we can believe in—both in Washington and Pyongyang.

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Shorenstein APARC Dispatches are regular bulletins designed exclusively for our friends and supporters. Written by center faculty and scholars, Shorenstein APARC Dispatches deliver timely, succinct analysis on current events and trends in Asia, often discussing their potential implications for business.

The National Association of Korean Americans (NAKA) honored CISAC co-founder John Lewis March 23 for his longterm efforts to support peace and reconciliation in Northeast Asia. NAKA President Kuhn Seo visited CISAC to present a plaque honoring Lewis for his efforts promoting the Six-Party Talks and reducing political tension between North and South Korea. "This is a very, very dangerous area of the world," Seo said. "U.S. has acted as a balancing power in Northeast Asia and Professor Lewis has been a pioneer in this. It's one reason why we haven't seen war there in 60 years." The plaque recognizes Lewis for his "contribution to reconciliation and peaceful settlement on the Korean peninsula." Seo said an op-ed titled, "Activating a North Korea policy," that was published recently in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been widely circulated within the Korean-American community and helped bring Lewis' efforts to wide attention. "He is highly respected in North Korea and South Korea as an educator," Seo said.

Article Highlights

• A lot has changed since the Six-Party Talks with North Korea began almost eight years ago.

• For starters, Pyongyang has now conducted two nuclear tests, making its nuclear status much less ambiguous.

• Consequently, Washington must adjust its goals in any future negotiations with the North--especially its stance that Pyongyang must first denuclearize.

Originally created to deal with an earlier nuclear crisis in 2002, the multi-party negotiations were intended to replace, and improve upon, the 1994 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, which froze Pyongyang's fissile production program in an attempt to prevent the North from getting nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, whatever promise these talks first held vanished in October 2006 when North Korea decided to attempt a nuclear test. And any remaining shreds of promise disappeared completely last May with Pyongyang's second nuclear test.

So the North Korea we are dealing with today (i.e., a de facto nuclear weapon state) is much different than the North Korea we were dealing with in 2002 (i.e., a country whose nuclear status was ambiguous). Making matters worse, we have painted ourselves into a corner by vowing that we will never "accept" Pyongyang as a nuclear-armed state.

Escaping from this corner will require a delicate, but not impossible, diplomatic dance. We don't have to give up our ultimate goal of denuclearizing North Korea and bringing it within the confines of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But we do have to free ourselves from out-of-date thinking so we can actually tackle this challenge instead of merely posturing about it.

Without a doubt, in 2010, the diplomatic dance is far more difficult than it was before October 2006. The dilemma is that Pyongyang has likely concluded that Washington can neither wrest away its nuclear weapons status nor build enough international pressure to convince it to do so. Most critically, North Korea's two nuclear tests appear to have transformed the country's self-image and bargaining strategy. Pyongyang sees no reason to heed the call for negotiations explicitly designed to relieve the regime of what it worked so long and hard to achieve.

Put another way, the last eight years of talks may have convinced Pyongyang that Washington will never be able to force the North into giving up its tiny, but politically crucial, nuclear stockpile. This may also signal that the space for negotiations has narrowed, and that there is less room to find the golden midpoint: Giving Pyongyang enough of what it wants (i.e., prestige, security, respect, and/or material rewards) so that it will surrender its nuclear weapons.

Things never should have gotten so bad, but numerous failed policies since 2002 have produced consequences that cannot be erased by U.S. presidential cycles. In other words, simply because a new president is sworn into office doesn't mean the other players will blindly accept an offer to turn back the clock or indulge U.S. attempts to press the "reset" button.

So what do we do now? For starters, Washington needs to accept the reality that North Korea is a country with nuclear weapons; that there is--in the short term at least--little we can do about it; and that continuing to focus on denuclearizing Pyongyang gains us nothing. In fact, the only way to advance U.S. interests on the nuclear issue with North Korea is to admit that the ground has shifted. We don't have to shout it from the rooftops, but getting the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program cannot remain our overriding objective, as crucial as that might seem. Rather, it's time we refocused our work, keeping the nuclear problem on the agenda but not letting it completely dominate our approach.

To move forward constructively, we should first resume efforts by several U.S. administrations--from Reagan to Bush to Clinton--to prod the North into becoming a state more fully integrated into the global community. That will take years of hard work, conducted simultaneously on several fronts, but we had better get on with it. Next, we need to sit down and talk with the North Koreans to better refine our assumptions about what will work and what won't work.

Waiting around for significant political change in Pyongyang to solve our problems is the longest of long shots. North Korea as we know it isn't going to disappear any time soon, and the problems that flow from its anomalous policies won't lessen if Washington keeps banging its collective head against the same old wall.

Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth, the U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy, spoke March 4 at Shorenstein APARC to members of the Stanford community and invited guests. Bosworth had just returned from a round of consultations the previous week with foreign counterparts in Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo.

In his off-the-record remarks at Shorenstein APARC, Bosworth reviewed the North Korean nuclear weapons problem since his appointment as Special Representative a year ago. He discussed recent developments, including his own visit to Pyongyang in December 2009, and noted his talks with his Six Party Talks counterparts. The Six Party Talks are hosted by the People's Republic of China, and include the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia. These talks are aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons development in exchange for security guarantees and a lifting of international sanctions.

Ambassador Bosworth is concurrently dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. A former career diplomat, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines and South Korea. During this visit to Stanford, he also consulted with Stanford policy experts, including George P. Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution; William J. Perry, the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor at FSI and Engineering; and Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow Michael H. Armacost.

It is routine in U.S. foreign policy for a pot not boiling over to be moved to the back burner. Precisely because the North Korean issue is not boiling, however, might offer an all-too-rare chance to make progress with Pyongyang. Over the past several months, the North has signaled publicly and privately that it is in engagement mode. In Washington, arguments abound about whether or not this is a stall tactic or a trick, but we'll never know if we don't move ahead with serious and sustained probing of the North's position. So long as our government sticks to an all-or-nothing approach in terms of Pyongyang, the opportunity to advance vital U.S. security interests in northeast Asia could be lost.

Underlying Washington's current position are two beliefs, so firmly held that they approach dogma. The first is that we should wait until the situation with North Korea breaks in our favor or sanctions force North Korean leadership to reassess its attachment to nuclear weapons. A year into the Obama administration, this waiting borders on self-imposed paralysis even though North Korea remains capable of badly damaging regional stability as well as U.S. nonproliferation goals. So instead of positively defining and shaping the realities on the ground, we have taken shelter behind fixed positions: enforcing U.N. Security Council sanctions and demanding that the North make progress on denuclearization at the Six-Party Talks. These may be useful parts of an overall policy, but they cannot be effective by themselves and must be handled carefully.

Sanctions will inevitably get in the way of diplomatic progress, and there needs to be a way to use their loosening--as much as their tightening--in support of negotiations. Moreover, Washington's single-minded insistence that the North return to the Six-Party Talks actually has ceded to Pyongyang a great deal of tactical initiative. There is nothing the North Koreans love more than leaping over our heads to a new position just as we think we have them cornered. As such, in mid-January, they reversed their opposition to talks in the framework of the September 2005 Six-Party joint statement and have proposed that talks proceed on all fronts simultaneously.

The second part of Washington's dogma is that there is no sense in negotiating with Pyongyang because history shows that agreements with North Korea always fail and the United States ends up snookered. But the idea that our deals with the North have all been useless is based on a flawed reading of the record, a lingering misrepresentation of the accomplishments of the 1994 U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework. In fact, the utility of that agreement (which lasted from 1994 until 2002) is still evident. Without it, North Korea would have produced far more fissile material and a significantly larger arsenal of nuclear weapons. Two hulking, unfinished North Korean nuclear reactors testify to its lasting legacy.

Reinforcing the belief that we don't need to, or shouldn't, pursue an active policy toward North Korea is the Obama administration's apparent concern that it will be vulnerable to charges of being "weak" if it approaches Pyongyang from anything but the toughest position possible. Thus, on the grounds that the September 2005 joint statement calls for progress on the North's denuclearization before talks can begin on replacing the 1953 Korean Armistice with permanent peace arrangements, Washington rejected out of hand Pyongyang's recent proposals to move on both issues simultaneously. We may find it difficult to hold that position because it is neither what the joint statement actually says nor what some of the other parties (especially the Chinese) intended.

The fundamental U.S. goal is exactly right: We want North Korea to denuclearize and to return to the international nuclear nonproliferation regime. But stating the goal isn't the same as moving closer to it. To do so, we must accomplish things that can help stabilize the situation, make it less likely that the strategic threat from the North will get worse, and begin exploring with Pyongyang a range of ideas for reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in the region. A couple of mid-term steps could include a halt in nuclear testing and long-range ballistic missile launches, along with a complete freeze of the Yongbyon nuclear center, which would involve further decommissioning and a return of international inspectors.

These interim steps won't "solve" the nuclear problem, but they aren't beyond what we can accomplish. They will do considerably more to protect our interests and those of our allies than the current all-or-nothing policy, which is going nowhere fast.