Korea and Its Neighbors: Securing Regional Stability

NEW YORK, Dec. 6, 2007 - 2007 was a year of much activity on the Korean Peninsula. In early February the six-party talks resulted in an agreement to de-nuclearize the Peninsula, and the U.S. and South Korea signed a landmark free trade agreement (FTA) in June. In October, the Presidents of the two Koreas met for the first time at the second inter-Korean Summit. In addition, South Korea has elections on the horizon, which have the potential to change the political landscape at home and abroad. These issues and more were discussed during this comprehensive look at the Korean Peninsula.

Panelists, left to right: L. Gordon Flake, John Park, Victor Cha, and Charles Armstrong

Conference Program

Introduction by Jamie Metzl, Asia Society

Opening Keynote:
Alex Arvizu, Deputy Assistant Secretary, East Asian and Pacific Affairs, United States Department of State

Download the complete text of Alex Arvizu's keynote address

Session I: After the Summit: Toward Reconciliation?
Charles Armstrong, Professor of History, Columbia University
Victor Cha, Professor of International Relations, Georgetown University
John Park, Director, Korea Working Group, USIP
L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director, The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation (moderator)

Listen on Demand (2 hrs., 11 min.)

Session II: Korea at a Crossroads: Domestic Leadership and Regional Stability
Haeran Lim, Visiting Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Scott Snyder, Senior Associate, International Relations, The Asia Foundation
J.J. Suh, Associate Professor and Director of the Korea Studies Program, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University
Charles Pritchard, President, Korea Economic Institute (moderator)

Listen on Demand (1 hr., 20 min.)

Luncheon Keynote:
His Excellency Lee Tae-sik, Ambassador of Korea to the United States

Listen on Demand (49 min., 21 sec.)

Ambassador Lee Tae-sik is Korea's Ambassador to the United States. Ambassador Lee is a career diplomat whose service for his country covers four decades and four continents. After passing the High Diplomatic Service Examination and joining the Ministry in 1973, Ambassador Lee served in various locations around the globe including Liberia, the Philippines, Austria, Yugoslavia and EU, among others. He has also held several senior level positions throughout the Korean government, including Director-General of the International Trade Bureau at Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and Deputy Executive Director of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). In July of 2000 his first Ambassadorial posting was as Ambassador to Israel, where he served until February of 2002 when he was called back to serve as the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. In his capacity as the Deputy Foreign Minister, he led Korean delegations in various security negotiations and consultations, particularly those addressing North Korea's nuclear issue. In June of 2003, he became the Korean Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (United Kingdom). In January of 2005, he was posted back to Seoul as the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Ambassador Lee became Korea's Ambassador to the United States in October of 2005, presenting his credentials to President Bush in November of 2005. Ambassador Lee had served in the Korean Embassy in the United States before, as a First Secretary from 1981-1984. He pursued his academic studies in Korea and the United States, graduating from the Department of International Relations at Seoul National University in 1970 and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins in May of 1988.

Alex Arvizu is the Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, United States Department of State. He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, rank of Minister Counselor. He joined the Foreign Service in 1981 and has served in several assignments domestically and abroad related to U.S. foreign policy in East Asia and the Pacific. His overseas tours include Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he was Deputy Chief of Mission, as well as Seoul, Korea and Osaka-Kobe, Japan. In Washington, he was Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during part of the Second Clinton Administration, prior to which he was Deputy Director in the Office of Japanese Affairs in the Department of State. In 2003-04, he was a member of the 46th Senior Seminar, a U.S. Government-wide Executive Leadership Program. He also worked as a staff officer in the Department of State's Executive Secretariat earlier in his career. Mr. Arvizu was born on a U.S. Army base in Japan and grew up in Colorado. He earned a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University in 1980. Over the years he has studied several Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Khmer.

Charles K. Armstrong is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University. A specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong has published several books on contemporary Korea, including The Koreas (Routledge, 2007), The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell, 2003), Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (Routledge, second edition 2006), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. His current book projects include a study of North Korean foreign relations in the Cold War era and a history of modern East Asia. Professor Armstrong is a frequent commentator in the U.S. and international media on Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs. Professor Armstrong is also an Associate Fellow of the Asia Society.

Victor D. Cha is a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University. He left the White House in May 2007 after serving since 2004 as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. Dr. Cha was also the Deputy Head of Delegation for the United States at the Six Party Talks in Beijing. At the White House, he was responsible primarily for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand and Pacific Island nation affairs. He received two Outstanding Service Awards commendations during his tenure at the White House. He returns to Georgetown in the 2007 Fall term where he holds the D. S. Song-Korea Foundation Chair in Asian Studies in the Department of Government and the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is the award-winning author of Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Stanford University Press) (winner of the 2000 Ohira Book Prize) and co-author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (Columbia University Press, 2004). He has written articles on international relations and East Asia in journals, including Foreign Affairs, International Security, Political Science Quarterly, Survival, International Studies Quarterly, and Asian Survey. Professor Cha is a former John M. Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University, two-time Fulbright Scholar, and Hoover National Fellow and CISAC Fellow at Stanford University. He serves as an independent consultant, and has testified before Congress on Asian security issues. He has been a guest analyst for various media including CNN, ABC Nightline, CBS Morning Show, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC, and National Public Radio. Until 2004, he directed the American Alliances in Asia project at Georgetown. He is currently writing a book on Sports Diplomacy in Asia and the Beijing Olympics. From 2007 he will be Director of Asian Studies at Georgetown. Dr. Cha hold his Ph.D. from Columbia University, an MA from Oxford, and a BA from Columbia University.

L. Gordon Flake is the Executive Director of the Mansfield Foundation, which he joined in February 1999. He was previously a Senior Fellow and Associate Director of the Program on Conflict Resolution at The Atlantic Council of the United States. Before moving to The Atlantic Council, he served as Director for Research and Academic Affairs at the Korea Economic Institute of America. Mr. Flake is co-editor with Scott Snyder of Paved with Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (Praeger, 2003) and has published extensively on policy issues in Asia. He travels frequently to Japan, Korea, China and other countries in Asia as a conference participant and lecturer. He is a regular contributor on Korea issues in the U.S. and Asian press and has traveled to North Korea on four occasions. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies and serves on the Board of the United States Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (USCSCAP) as well as on the Board of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and the Advisory Council of the Korea Economic Institute of America. He received his BA degree in Korean with a minor in international relations from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He completed his MA at the David M. Kennedy Center for International and Area Studies, also at B.Y.U. His master's thesis was on the economic reforms in Laos. He lived in Korea for a number of years and speaks both fluent Korean and Laotian.

Haeran Lim is a Visiting Fellow at The Brookings Institution and on the faculty of the department of Political Science at Seoul National University. Her major areas of expertise are comparative political economy, political economy of East Asian countries—particularly Korea and Taiwan—and industrial transformation and industrial policy.

Jamie Metzl is Executive Vice President of Asia Society. He is responsible for overseeing the institution's strategic directions and overall program activities globally. An expert on Southeast Asian history and politics, Dr. Metzl has extensive government experience including service in the White House, the Department of State, and the U.S. Senate. In 2004, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri's Fifth Congressional District in Kansas City. Dr. Metzl's government appointments have included Deputy Staff Director and Senior Counselor of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senior Coordinator for International Public Information and Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the Department of State, and Director for Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs on the National Security Council. At the White House, he coordinated U.S. government international public information campaigns for Iraq, Kosovo, and other crises. A Khmer speaker, he was a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) from 1991 to 1993, where he helped establish a nation-wide human rights investigation and monitoring unit for Cambodia. Dr. Metzl has appeared widely on national media, including Meet the Press and the Today show. The author of a book on human rights in Southeast Asia, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and many other publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Founder and Co-Chair of the Board of the Partnership for a Secure America, a former White House Fellow, and a former Aspen Institute Crown Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history from Oxford University, a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School, and is a magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. Dr. Metzl has completed four ironman triathlons and 20 marathons. His novel The Depths of the Sea was published by St. Martin's Press in May 2004.

John S. Park is the Director of USIP's Korea Working Group, a consultative body comprising senior experts from the government and think tank communities. At USIP, Dr. Park focuses on Northeast Asian security issues at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to joining USIP, Park worked in Goldman Sachs's public finance group in New York. Prior to that, he was the Project Leader of the North Korea Analysis Group, a Managing the Atom working group at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Park previously worked in Goldman Sachs's M&A Advisory Group in Hong Kong and The Boston Consulting Group's Financial Services Practice in Seoul. In both positions, he specialized in post-Asian Financial Crisis economic restructuring in South Korea. Park's writings have appeared in Washington Quarterly, Far Eastern Economic Review, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the International Herald Tribune. He has also commentated on the Six-Party Talks on BBC, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, and NPR. Park received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He completed his pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

Charles L. (Jack) Pritchard is the President of the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) in Washington. Prior to joining KEI, he was a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC from September 2003 until February 2006. At Brookings, he focused on U.S. policy toward North Korea as well as the evolving nature of the United States-Japan foreign and security relationship. Ambassador Pritchard served as ambassador and special envoy for negotiations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and United States representative to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization in the administration of President George W. Bush from April 2001 until September 2003. Previously, he served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Asian Affairs in the administration of President William J. Clinton. During the Clinton administration, Ambassador Pritchard was also the Director of Asian Affairs in the National Security Council and deputy chief negotiator for the Four Party Peace Talks, which aimed at reducing the tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Ambassador Pritchard is a former United States Army officer and attaché in Tokyo, Japan. He received a B.A. in political science from Mercer University, Macon, Georgia; an M.A. in international studies from the University of Hawaii; and a diploma from the Japanese National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo. He is the recipient of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.

Evans J. R. Revere assumed the presidency of the Korea Society in New York City in January 2007. Prior to becoming president, Mr. Revere was a career U.S. diplomat and one of the U.S. Department of State's leading Asia experts. His last State Department assignment was as Cyrus Vance Fellow in Diplomatic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he helped launch CFR's Independent Task Force on U.S.-China relations and served as the Task Force's first project director. Mr. Revere previously served as acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and principal deputy assistant secretary in that bureau, managing U.S. relations with the Asia-Pacific region and leading an organization of 950 American diplomats and some 2,500 Foreign Service National employees. His diplomatic career included service in the PRC, Taiwan, the Republic of Korea, and Japan, and extensive experience in negotiations with North Korea.

Scott Snyder is a Senior Associate in the International Relations program of The Asia Foundation and Pacific Forum CSIS, and is based in Washington, DC. He spent four years in Seoul as Korea Representative of The Asia Foundation during 2000-2004. Previously, he has served as a Program officer in the Research and Studies Program of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and as Acting Director of The Asia Society's Contemporary Affairs Program. His publications include Paved With Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (2003) (co-edited with L. Gordon Flake) and Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior (1999). Snyder received his B.A. from Rice University and an M.A. from the Regional Studies East Asia Program at Harvard University. During 2005-2006, he was a Pantech Visiting Research Fellow at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC). He was the recipient of an Abe Fellowship, during 1998-99, and was a Thomas G. Watson Fellow at Yonsei University in South Korea in 1987-88.

J.J. Suh is Associate Professor and Director of the Korea Studies Program, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. A former faculty member of Cornell University's Department of Government, East Asia Program and Peace Studies Program, a recipient of Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research, SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Peace and Security in a Changing World, Smith Richardson Foundation grant, and East West Center fellowship, Jae-Jung Suh was visiting professor at Seoul National University, research professor at Yonsei University, visiting scholar at MIT, and visiting fellow at University of California, Irvine.