Susan Shirk offers insight to N. Korea's economic setbacks
Canada's Maclean's magazine asks the question, "What to do about Kim?"
08/11/2010
Michael Petrou with Patricia Treble,
Maclean's
It’s not often that the United States so candidly admits its impotence in the face of aggressive acts by hostile regimes. But there was Robert Gates, the U.S. secretary of defence, discussing options the United States and the rest of the world have to deal with Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, after an international investigation concluded North Korea torpedoed and sunk the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship, killing 46 sailors on board. “I think there is no good answer,” he told the BBC in June. “You can bring together additional pressure. You can do another resolution in the UN. But as long as the regime doesn’t care what the outside world thinks of it, as long as it doesn’t care about the well-being of its people, there’s not a lot you can do about it, to be quite frank—unless you’re willing at some point to use military force. And nobody wants to do that.”
Read the full article here.
Related Links
Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.
She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
