On the heels of the abrupt ending of the Hanoi summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with the future of the diplomacy of denuclearization in question, the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC convened the 11th Koret Workshop, appropriately titled this year “North Korea and the World in Flux.”

The workshop, an annual gathering made possible through generous funding from the Koret Foundation, brought together international experts in Korean affairs for a full day of panel discussions. Participants assessed the U.S.-DPRK summit diplomacy, examined the challenges and opportunities in media coverage related to the negotiations between the two countries, and considered the prospects and pitfalls for summitry with North Korea in the near term. A report on the workshop proceedings is forthcoming.

At a midday public keynote, General Vincent Brooks, U.S. Army (Ret.), spoke before a packed audience about the challenges and opportunities in Korea. Brooks, who recently retired from active duty as the four-star general in command of all U.S. Forces in Korea, provided his unique and very-timely assessment of the situation on the Korean peninsula, and offered his insights on where the diplomacy of denuclearization may go next.

Gen. Brooks’ public address was followed by a conversation with Karl Eikenberry, director of APARC’s U.S.-Asia Security Initative.

Watch the video recording of Gen. Brooks’ remarks:

Secret negotiations between the U.S. government and Iran’s intelligence services over the fate of political prisoners led to a lasting friendship.

When Secretary of State John Kerry first asked Brett McGurk to lead secret negotiations with Iran to secure the release of Jason Rezaian, Brett’s initial reaction was that he did not have the time to give the new mission the attention it deserved.

“I was incredibly busy building this huge coalition [to defeat ISIS], developing a military campaign, and developing a diplomatic campaign plan,” said McGurk at a recent talk he and Jason delivered at Stanford about Jason’s new book, Prisoner.

McGurk was recently appointed the Freeman Spogli Institute’s (FSI) Payne Distinguished Lecturer. Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as the Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the U.S. Department of State, a position he held in both the Obama and Trump administrations.

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Secretary Kerry was persistent, and Brett agreed to take on the sensitive assignment to secure the release of Jason, his wife Yegi, as well as four other Americans detained in Iran.

Jason, the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tehran at the time, spent 544 days in the city’s notorious Evin Prison, much of it in solitary confinement.

Jason and Yegi’s ordeal began in June 2014. “[My wife and I] exited the apartment to go down to the garage. The elevator doors opened, and there was a guy standing there with a gun pointed directly at my face,” said Jason.

What ensued was prolonged captivity at the hands of the Iranian intelligence apparatus. But an unexpected friendship was a surprise result.

The diplomatic process to free Jason and the other American political prisoners began in the fall of 2014. Brett started by reading everything he could find about Jason and getting to know him through his brother Ali and other family members.

“As a diplomat working on these very difficult missions in the world, they’re rarely as personal as this,” said Brett. “This became very personal to me. It’s even more so now that I’ve read Jason’s book about what he was experiencing at the time, which really, honestly, I didn’t know.”

Jason was eventually released in January 2016, shortly after the historic nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, between Iran, the United States, and a number of other global powers, was implemented.

Brett boarded the Swiss plane carrying Jason and the other freed prisoners when it finally touched down in Geneva. “It was quite emotional,” said Brett. “I told Jason, ‘you don’t know who I am but we’re glad you’re home. You’re going to be taken good care of.’ Jason and I have become close friends, partially due to the experience that we both had,” he said.

As someone so directly affected by U.S. policy, Jason feels fortunate to have gotten to know Brett in return.

“It would have been impossible to predict the way our lives have criss-crossed the last couple of years,” said Jason. “Yegi and I ended up being Brett and Gina’s (Brett’s wife) neighbor, more or less, in Washington D.C. Even today, we just arrived in town and ran into Gina in the parking lot of the Stanford Mall.”

The book talk with Jason Rezaian and Brett McGurk was co-sponsored by Stanford’s Iranian Studies Program and the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s Middle East Initiative.

Structural vs. Cosmetic Changes

Allen was far less confident, however, about the prospects of addressing structural issues with China, that is, areas where the Chinese economy is an outlier to the global economy, violates WTO rules, and greatly differs from OECD norms. This is because these core dimensions touch on the role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the government and in the economy.

He counted among these structural issues the enormous role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs); the scale of subsidies going to the technology sector and their lack of transparency; prohibitions on foreign investment in sensitive industries like telecommunications and media; the unequal treatment of foreign companies; discriminatory implementation of regulations and the lack of an appeals process; uneven implementation of IP rights; the outsized role of the CCP in the economy; the dominant role of industrial policy; Xi Jinping government’s aggressive techno-nationalism, which is manifested in its calls for indigenous innovation and for self-reliance; and its excessive control over the information space.

“China is willing to make cosmetic changes to these problems,” said Allen, “even muscular changes, but no changes to the skeleton, the core, the system under which the CCP has complete control.”

A trade deal might remove the immediate threat of tariffs as a source of friction between the United States and China, noted Allen, but the essence of the conflict is not about trade: rather, it has to do with technology. “The trade war will morph into a technology war,” he predicted, and 2019 will mark a change in that direction, making life much more complicated for both American—especially Silicon Valley—and Chinese companies.

A Security Dilemma

Both the United States and China are now locked in a “security dilemma,” noted Allen. “One side takes defensive measures which the other side perceives as aggressive measures,” and “we are ratcheting up on national security.” The U.S. Department of Commerce, for instance, is looking to change the ways of dealing with Chinese companies and to expand export controls, extending their scope to a whole new category of “emerging technologies,” regarding whose definition there is intensive debate in Washington. Depending on its scope, a broad definition could jeopardize hundreds of thousands of projects and disrupt investment and global supply chains.

On the Chinese side, Allen noted, there is a parallel process going on. In 2019, we should expect China to similarly impose tightened export controls, he cautioned, cybersecurity law, personal identification information law, data localization requirements, and a strengthened national security law that, among other requirements, will ratchet up audit requirements of American companies seeking market access and the type of companies allowed to have only Chinese-origin equipment.

Both countries have given in to exaggerated security concerns that threaten the global commons, argued Allen. “American and Chinese companies have worked together in the innovation space for years in a beautiful manner. It has been a remarkably productive exercise over the last four decades that brought tremendous benefit for everyone. You can't imagine a company like Apple without China, and you can't imagine China without a company like Apple. Now all this is being put into question.”

The heightened security measures on both sides are fraught with threats to research institutions, businesses, and the innovation ecosystem at large. Academic exchanges, students, and professors will be deemed exports of knowledge subject to technology licensing laws, cautioned Allen. He asked: “How many thousands of collaborative research ventures will be impacted?”

We are entering the technology war at the wrong time, said Allen, just as China is becoming a middle-income country with hundreds of millions of middle-class citizens who want to buy American-made goods and services that U.S. companies want to sell to them. Now is the time to take advantage of China’s transitioning to a consumption-led economy, he claimed, and “become a good friend of Chinese middle-class consumers.”

China is also forging ahead with its innovative economy, particularly in areas such as AI, 5G, and aspects of the life sciences. “This isn’t a one-way street,” emphasized Allen. “We need their brains as much as they need ours […] China will remain an innovative country, and we need to deal with that.”

“This is not a time to panic,” he pointed out, “but a time to reset and ask: ‘What are the rules of the road for technology cooperation and competition? What are the rules for enforcement and how do we enforce the new rules fairly?”

“If China follows its WTO obligations then we would get there,” Allen claimed. “But if President Xi is going to be single-minded about self-reliance and cutting foreign influence on the Chinese economy, then we’re up for rough sledding and 2019 will be a definitive year in determining the course forward.”

Trade deal or no deal, in the U.S.-China race for technology supremacy, he concluded, trust is a commodity in short supply.