Researchers urge Moon Jae-in to form a close working relationship with Donald Trump and to establish a new special envoy role for North Korea policy emulating the “Perry Process”

Researchers from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) said they are optimistic about the election of South Korean president Moon Jae-in who assumed office last week following waves of protest across the country.

Now that the vacancy left in the wake of former President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment has been filled, the South Korean government needs to work to strengthen bilateral relations with the United States amid escalating tensions in Northeast Asia, they said.

The Moon administration should immediately engage U.S. President Donald Trump and his senior staff at the White House and government agencies, said Kathleen Stephens, the William J. Perry Fellow at Shorenstein APARC.

“Moon would do well to establish a personal relationship with Trump,” said Stephens, who was U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 2008 to 2011. “The new administration must set up a meeting as early as possible and be ready to engage on a range of issues.”

“In a sense, Moon has to play catch-up,” said Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, who noted that Trump already held in-person meetings with other Asian heads of state in the United States, including summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Shin added that a coherent U.S. strategy toward Asia and senior staff appointments in the State and Defense Departments would also aid in supporting the foundation upon which the South Korean and American governments work together on policy challenges, especially North Korea.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities have become more and more advanced over the past few months, and provocations have continued to ratchet up, including its firing of a ballistic missile that landed in the sea near Russia on Sunday and repeat threats to conduct a sixth nuclear test.

The Moon administration must focus on establishing trust and cooperation with the Trump administration because it is the only pathway to finding a resolution to North Korea’s program, said Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, an additional center in the Freeman Spogli Institute.

“Any solution must be compatible with the interests of Seoul, but it has to be done in concert with Washington to get Pyongyang’s attention,” said Hecker, who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and has traveled to North Korea seven times since 2004 to survey its nuclear facilities.

During the campaign, Moon repeatedly spoke of his proposals to reengage the North Korean regime, such as holding talks with its leader Kim Jong-un and re-opening Kaesong Industrial Complex, a joint economic zone on the North Korean side of the border.

Stephens and Shin said Moon’s proposals for North Korean engagement would be a step in the right direction if pursued in due time and led under the direction of a special envoy from South Korea emulating the American “Perry Process.”

The Perry Process, proposed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry and implemented in the late 1990s under the Clinton administration, entails the appointment of a senior-level, bipartisan representative to pursue a two-track approach of engagement through joint projects and of continued dialogue on denuclearization with North Korea.

Appointing one person in South Korea to lead North Korea policy would help centralize and streamline its organization, which currently, requires coordination of activities across dozens of government agencies, the two researchers noted.

“We recognize that establishing such a position and filling the position would be far from easy,” said Shin, co-author of the study Tailored Engagement. “But the magnitude of the nuclear crisis requires restructuring the way in which the South Korean government deals with North Korea, achieving domestic consensus, and shoring up international support for its efforts.”

The United States, China, Japan and Russia are the key international countries concerned with the peace and stability of Northeast Asia, yet South Korea has both an acute need and the potential to assume greater leadership of North Korea policy, said Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar.

China, as North Korea’s largest trade partner, exercises influence over North Korea by maintaining a commercial relationship in the hope of avoiding a collapse of the regime, however its leverage only goes so far, he added.

The Moon administration should consider the limits of Chinese influence before making policy decisions regarding North Korea, Fingar said, for example, whether to freeze or remove the U.S. anti-ballistic missile system, Thermal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), deployed last April in South Korea, which the Chinese government strongly opposed.

“There is little that Beijing can or will do that would persuade Pyongyang to be more receptive to initiatives from Seoul than it would otherwise be,” said Fingar, a China specialist who served as chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. “Seoul should not ‘pay’ much to obtain Chinese assistance because China already supports reengagement and would not do more no matter what Seoul offered as an inducement.”

It is of vital importance the Moon administration seeks to strengthen trilateral cooperation between South Korea, Japan and the United States, and to consider holding a summit to address areas of collaboration, all of which would function alongside the China-Japan-South Korea trilateral structure toward creating stability in the region, according to Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC.

“Such cooperation is essential to the security of the region – without it, the United States cannot fulfill its obligation to defend South Korea against the threat posed by North Korea,” said Sneider, who leads the Divided Memories and Reconciliation research project. “Moreover, it’s in the interest of all three countries to tighten such cooperation to balance the rise of China.”

The Moon administration should, above all else, take time to consider its first steps despite pressures to perform early, said Michael Armacost, a fellow at Shorenstein APARC who held a 24-year career in the U.S. government.

“Getting things right is more important than making a quick splash,” said Armacost, a former U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. “I would advise any new president to proceed at a deliberate pace, focusing particularly on the key personal issues first, and consulting widely before enunciating major policy departures.”

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This talk was given during the Stanford's "Disruption: Challenges of a New Era" conference organized by Fundacion RAP,  in March 2017. Beatriz Magaloni, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, presents results of her work on social order and violence in Latin America, with a focus on her research in Brazil and Mexico.

Production: Roger Winkelman, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford. 

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The Convention on Genocide defined the term as a variety of “acts against committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” Can you take us back to this moment in history—what was the context surrounding the convention and the origin of the term?

On the one hand, the convention reflected the intense lobbying, fervent commitment, and long-time interest of the Polish-Jewish international legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1944, after having escaped the Nazi takeover of Poland. On the other, it spoke to the needs of “international society” to outlaw the kinds of crimes committed by the Nazis against national and ethnic groups. In many ways, it was a backward looking document. It took a very long time for it to be ratified by the UN member nations (the U.S. ratified it only in 1988) and to become a part of international law in the way we think about it today. In fact, the convention was mostly forgotten and shelved until the 1990s with the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan Genocide.

What sparked your interest in this topic and inspired you to write this book?

I first began thinking seriously about questions related to genocide during the Balkan Wars of the early and mid-1990s. The murderous events in Bosnia, in particular, really shook me up, since I had spent quite a bit of time in the region as a graduate student and did not expect in the least the severe ethnic tensions that fueled war and genocide.

I tried to think comparatively about the historical phenomenon of genocide, and that led to a series of books about genocide in the twentieth century: Fires of Hatred; Stalin’s Genocides; and A Question of Genocide. After engaging the questions of students and scholarly audiences, I realized that genocide did not belong just to the twentieth century or just to Europe, but rather was the product of the enduring character of human societies. As a result, I started teaching a frosh seminar on “The World History of Genocide,” which, in turn, became the basis for this new book.

This book is really driven by student questions, discussions, and papers from that class. I dedicated the book to my students, many of whom have gone on to study human rights and international affairs at Stanford and beyond. The students really dug into the material and helped me understand how relevant it was to their own lives and their future.

In the book, you explore different cases of genocide throughout history. How has genocide changed over time? In what ways has it stayed the same?

From the beginning of human history, genocide has involved a political entity targeting a specifically designated group of people, sometimes within one’s territory and/or in another territory, and seeking their physical elimination. The motives for killing off a group, in the UN definition “in whole or in part” are less important in this view than the crucial question of intent.

There are several important “moments” in the history of genocide. One might be considered the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century, where the beginnings of “racial” thinking influenced the conquistadores’ massacres of indigenous peoples; another might be considered the development of the modern state following the French Revolution. The state, even in its democratic forms, can give rise to genocide.

The ideologies of communism and fascism in the mid-twentieth centuries played crucial roles in the development of genocide, and the interconnected complex of colonialism and post-colonialism also were important to the development of modern genocide. What scholars classify as “settler genocide” – when thinking about North America, the Antipodes, and Africa – was intimately linked to colonialism.

[[{"fid":"224942","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Book cover for \"Genocide: A World History\"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Book cover for \"Genocide: A World History\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Book cover for \"Genocide: A World History\"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Book cover for \\\"Genocide: A World History"","title":"Book cover for \\\"Genocide: A World History"","style":"width: 200px; height: 289px; margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 15px; float: left;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]What are some of the challenges you’ve observed of reconciliation and forgiveness in societies that have experienced genocide?

Some scholars suggest that the history of genocide is best “forgotten,” as a way to help societies rebuild from the fierce blood-letting that genocide always involves. Revenge for past genocides sometimes provokes new conflicts. Most observers believe, however, that truth telling of one form or another—in courts, in local institutions, in cultural expression, and in historical and public discourse—is the best way to allow societies to recover.

Denial is almost always a part of genocide and its memory, which in turn makes reconciliation and forgiveness extraordinarily difficult. The involvement of international courts in convicting perpetrators of genocide has been, on balance, a positive development during the past quarter century. But the courts are frequently accused by the perpetrator populations of reflecting “victors’ justice” and political one-sidedness, which also impedes reconciliation.

Does your research shed any light on why such horrific events continue to take place, despite efforts to prevent them? Any silver linings or hope for the future?

There has been some empirical work on the incidence of violence and genocide over human history that demonstrates an overall downward trend in the percentage of people who die from violence and mass killing. The argument is that changing international norms about genocide have served to impede political leaders from turning to mass murder as a weapon of dealing with subject groups.

There are warning signs for genocide that range from increasing racism and xenophobia among societies and their political leaders to the ever-present threat of authoritarianism and the construction of police states, which make carrying out mass killing easier than in decentralized and democratic states.

The bottom line is that international institutions, laws, and norms do help impede the eruption of genocidal situations, but there are few guarantees and the international system works very slowly – think about the mass murder of the Yazidi Kurds or the bombardment of Aleppo now – when there is little agreement about how to intercede.

What additional questions did your research raise?

There is a deep gender component to genocide that needs to be explored further. Perpetrators do not treat women and men the same. There are important issues of rape and sexual exploitation involved in genocide, and, especially in the early history of genocide, women are more often than not captured and enslaved, rather than eliminated. The perpetrators themselves are almost always men – though there are frequently also women involved.

There are other dynamics of genocide that need to be studied more carefully. For example, genocide is a process, usually unleashed by war, not a distinct “event” with a beginning and an end. It tends to accelerate to a crescendo and then slows down. It frequently spreads from one targeted people or group to another, with methods that evolve and change over time. The perpetrators “learn” in the process of genocide, which ends up causing much more damage to societies than might be anticipated. These are all very good reasons for interdiction, that is, stopping genocide before it accelerates and spreads.

How do you hope this book will inform discourse or perceptions about the subject?

I define genocide rather more broadly than most scholars, including social and political groups into a concept of genocide that was initially articulated by Raphael Lemkin, but deleted, primarily for political reasons, from the 1948 Genocide Convention itself. This allows us to look at communist genocides (in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia), as well as anti-communist ones (in Indonesia, East Timor, and Guatemala.) Approaching genocide in this way also helps us think about genocide as a historical and potential threat to groups within societies that are frequently subjected to stereotypes, de-humanization and “othering,” and sometimes to state discrimination and even mass killing, like homosexuals and the disabled during Nazi Germany.

In the end, I believe that improving our understanding of these processes can help identify warning signs of genocide and deter, if not always prevent, attacks on minority populations of various origins.

This article was originally published in Stanford Global Studies online news on December 8, 2016 and also appears on the Stanford Global Studies Medium page. 

For more information about the book, visit the Oxford University Press website.

Norman Naimark quoted in USA Today News on Aleppo.