North Korea: A Problem of Fading Margins
Robert Carlin will explore how details of precedent and history are supremely important, whether in face-to-face contact with North Koreans or working from afar, yet how inattention to such detail has led off cliffs, into swamps. A perfect case study is the 2018-2019 exchange of letters between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump, illustrating how turn signals were missed and brake lights ignored. In Carlin's experience, this problem has not been confined to any one administration or political party in power. Over the years, Washington has been understandably anxious to get somewhere (defined variously by different people at different times), but the goal has receded just as we thought we were moving towards it. The North Korean issue needs a new framing—some better understanding of the "where" as weak as what it means when our margins fade, forever and forever when we move. (Tennyson). Otherwise, dusty arguments and old, badly drawn road maps will lead nowhere good, or nowhere at all.
Robert Carlin is a consultant at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. In and out of government, he has been closely following North Korea since 1974. From 2002-2006 he was political advisor at the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), building light water reactors in North Korea. From 1989-2002, he was chief of the State Department Intelligence Bureau's Northeast Asia Division. For much of that period, he served concurrently as senior advisor to the chief US negotiators to US-DPRK talks, attending all the major negotiations with the DPRK during those years. Since his first trip in 1996, Carlin has visited the North over 30 times. From 1971-1989, he was a CIA analyst, largely engaged in studying North Korean media. In 2013, he updated and revised Don Oberdorfer's indispensable contemporary history, The Two Koreas. Mr. Carlin has a Master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University (1971) and a BA in political science from Claremont Men's College (1969).
