Transcriber: Richard Kim Reviewer: Eunice Tan
So I spent the last few weeks
hiding out in a secure, undisclosed location -
aka my house -
dodging media calls.
All these reporters were calling me up
because they wanted to know
where in the world was the young North Korean leader,
Kim Jong-un.
He's been away from public view for about 40 days,
and the Western media were hysterical.
What happened to Kim?
Was he dead?
Was there a coup d'etat?
Did the military depose him?
Was his sister running things now?
Did he fall off his designer platform shoes
and break his ankle?
I didn't want to answer these questions
because A, no one really knows what goes on inside North Korea.
It might as well be another planet.
And B, who cares?
Who cares where Kim Jong-un is
and, for that matter,
which Kim is even ruling North Korea?
We're on the third Kim now,
and North Korea is still the same repressive, dysfunctional state
that it has always been,
except now it's armed with a nuclear weapons program.
We need to stop focusing on the minutiae of the moment
and start thinking big picture.
What do we want to accomplish with North Korea over the long term?
And how should we accomplish that?
But this kind of question is seldom asked,
whether it's about North Korea
or the big pictures of ISIS, Ukraine, Russia, or Iran.
Our policymakers are always in a reactionary mode.
They are like reporters,
chasing the headlines
instead of thinking about the long-term picture.
Instead of thinking about what we can accomplish
the next decade or the decade after that,
they'll always focus on what we can do today or tomorrow, even next year.
But we need to think ahead.
And only if we plan ahead
will we be able to solve at least some of the world's most intractable problems.
At least when it comes to North Korea,
I have an idea of just what we should do.
I believe in the long term
that we should put all our efforts to reunify the two Koreas.
I believe that's the only way we can resolve the Korean problem.
And I know that to at least some of you,
thinking about regime change
either within North Korea or just regime collapse of the North
might seem unthinkable.
But we used to think it was unthinkable
when we thought about East Germany or the former Soviet Union.
Honestly, that's the only way we can solve the problem.
Now, the historical record shows that failed states cannot go on forever.
And North Korea is the most failed state in the world.
As a Korean American,
this Korean issue is a particularly personal one for me
because my entire paternal side of the family came from North Korea.
My paternal grandparents,
whom I was very close to because they helped raise me -
my father passed away when I was very young,
and they helped raise me, and I was very close to them.
But they were the lucky ones
because they happened to be
in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula
when the Korean War broke out in 1950.
But their family members were not so lucky:
they remained trapped in North Korea.
And my grandparents, unfortunately,
passed away without ever finding out what happened to their family members:
their moms, their dads, their brothers, their sisters,
their uncles, and their aunts.
And I weep at the fate that my family had to endure,
or so many divided Korean families had to endure,
or all the North Koreans right now in North Korea
who are trapped in North Korea,
who are basically prisoners for six decades now.
I hope and I wish they could have had opportunities that I had
or 50 million South Koreans have.
U.S. policy towards North Korea for the last 20 years
has been quite simple, actually.
It was all about trying to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.
And we try to negotiate,
and we try to give them incentives like food and energy supplies
just to get them to denuclearize.
But while North Korea was happy to pocket the aid,
they were not willing to follow through on the promises that they have made.
So,
in my experience, from my perspective,
because North Korea is not willing to follow through on their promises
and they kept on developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles
to deliver them
and, from my perspective, North Korea is never going to change.
It's never going to transform itself
into a country
that its citizens can live with or its neighbors can live with.
It will continue to be the worst human rights violator on the planet.
It will continue to be one of the worst weapons proliferators on the planet.
So our approach to North Korea has been very myopic and ineffective.
Only if we pursue -
and the only solution is if either the regime itself ends
or different leadership emerges in North Korea,
leading to reunification.
That's the only solution.
Now,
we have limited leverage right now,
but it's formidable if given enough time.
For example, we can do so many things,
but first, we need to start by helping the North Korean people.
We need to -
for example, information penetration.
We can step up our efforts to bring in outside information into North Korea
to break Kim Jong-un's information blockade.
We can highlight the regime's abuses,
widespread systemic abuses,
which the United Nations, this year,
in a landmark 400-page report called "crimes against humanity."
Like apartheid South Africa,
North Korea is a moral abomination.
It keeps hundreds of its own people in Soviet-style gulags,
in political prison camps,
while the rest of the population
must confront malnutrition and even starvation.
In the mid-1990s,
almost two million people died of starvation.
Human rights problems in North Korea constitute a core threat,
not only to the people of North Korea
but to peace and stability in the region.
And I would argue that this problem is as [much] of a threat to humanity
as North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Secondly, we should also continue to put economic pressure
that's aimed at the elites,
particularly going after North Korea's illicit activities,
like smuggling and money laundering,
to cut off the fund that Kim Jong-un uses
to buy luxury goods and luxury cars and cognac and resources
to get the elite's support.
We should also appeal to the regional governments,
particularly China,
which is North Korea's number one patron,
to do the same.
We know that China is not happy with North Korea.
China is not happy with Kim Jong-un,
but China supports North Korea
because it wants to keep North Korea as a buffer.
It wants to avoid instability on the border,
and it wants to make sure that U.S. forces don't go anywhere near the border.
So we could make a deal with the Chinese.
We could even offer them, say,
we will reduce U.S. presence on the Korean Peninsula
or pull out all our troops in South Korea
in case of unification
if they stop subsidizing North Korea.
Now, many of you might disagree with me.
It's okay, because many people do.
You know, Koreans do,
particularly the younger generation,
who are fearful
of having to [bear the] brunt of all this financial cost
of potential unification.
And when you look at the end of despotic regimes,
it's always ugly.
And it's true that there will be a lot of challenges and problems
associated with the end of North Korea
because it's such a desperate regime and so militaristic a regime.
There will be chaos, disorder.
There could be humanitarian problems.
There will be refugee flows.
There will be even, potentially,
the challenge of trying to secure loose nuclear weapons.
But I do believe
that with enough planning and careful preparation,
the United States and South Korea and our allies
will be able to manage these problems.
And if we manage the unification correctly,
in a right way,
there's a potential for a real upside here:
a one Korea, whole and free.
Imagine the benefit of freeing 25 million North Korean people
from where they are.
You can move an average North Korean
out of a starvation diet, literally and intellectually,
to the plentiful availability of food, information, resources, consumer goods,
and other benefits of modern capitalism.
So United Korea would basically be
a bigger version of South Korea -
think about it that way -
as free and even perhaps more prosperous.
Unified Germany in Asia.
Potential economic powerhouse and force for stability in the region.
The fact that we're not thinking about unification right now
shows you our short-term mindset,
that our governments are always thinking
about what they can just accomplish this year and next year
and not what they can accomplish in the next decade.
No official
in a presidential administration
wants to pursue a policy
that they're not going to be able to take credit for,
that might just -
why, it might even benefit an opposition party
if the benefits come out
two or three administrations down the road.
But we must start thinking long-term picture.
We have a couple of exceptions.
For example, we pursued containment against the Soviet Union.
So containment policy -
from the 1940s to about the 1990s,
every U.S. administration
patiently pursued a containment policy on the Soviet Union.
Or think about international efforts to isolate apartheid South Africa.
Eventually, all that pressure paid off
and both the Soviet Union and apartheid collapsed.
That should be a model for U.S. or any other government's foreign policy.
We need to set long-term goals and patiently adhere to them.
And if we do that,
I think you'll be surprised at how much we can truly accomplish.
Even a problem like North Korea will not look so intractable
if we set a long-term policy goal of unification
and patiently adhere to it.
Thank you.
(Applause)