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Columbia Scholar, Former State Dept. Adviser Joel Wit Assesses Direct U.S. Negotiations With North Korea

Jul. 7, 2009

Joel Wit discusses strategies for U.S. diplomatic relations with North Korea. (2:26)

Since May 25, when the North Korean government tested its second nuclear weapon, the question of how to respond to that nation's provocative actions has been of increasing international concern. According to Joel Wit, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the United States should play a central role in new negotiations with North Korea.

“We should not be in the business of subcontracting our foreign policy to China, or to anyone else for that matter,” Wit said, adding that the six-party talks, started in 2003 between North Korea, the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and Russia, are now effectively dead. “The U.S. has its own special interests with respect to North Korea. And it is better to be talking than not.”

According to seismologists at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the weapon used in the most recent nuclear test appears to be roughly five times the size of the one detonated in 2006.

The U.N. Security Council on June 12 banned further nuclear tests and “any launch using ballistic missile technology,” according to a new resolution. The North Koreans on July 4 fired three ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan.

“I think North Korea has kind of hunkered down, they see themselves as surrounded by enemies in every direction,” said Wit. “To be sure the United States has to react in a very firm way to what North Korea is doing, because obviously a nuclear North Korea threatens our allies and it threatens our interests as well.”

From 1993 to 1995, Joel Wit served as senior advisor to State Department Ambassador-at-Large Robert L. Gallucci, developing strategies to help resolve the crisis over North Korea’s weapons program. From 1995 to 1999 he served as coordinator for the U.S.-North Korea talks on the latter country’s weapons program and as coordinator for the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework, for which he was the official in charge of implementation.

For nearly a decade North Korea stalled its nuclear reprocessing activities and sealed its plutonium fuel rods as a result of the Agreed Framework, reached in 1994. That agreement fell apart in 2003, Witt said, after the Bush administration adopted a more hard line approach to North Korea.

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