Mitchell Reiss
Mitchell Reiss
Mitchell B. Reissis a senior American diplomat who is now the President and CEO of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia. Immediately prior to this post, he served a tenure of four years as the 27th president of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He served as Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State under Colin Powell. He also served as the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, with the diplomatic rank of Ambassador, until stepping...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDiplomat
CountryUnited States of America
The Nuclear Suppliers Group is one area the president highlighted in his speech that's extremely important and that needs to be improved.
It is fundamentally, existentially, in their own interest that they and their neighbors do not acquire nuclear weapons.
And I think they realize that the other five countries are lined up against them, because all five are opposed to North Korea having nuclear weapons.
The nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons, or even nuclear material, is obviously a current concern.
The other countries did not share the same concern the United States had in the early '90's - that North Korea actually had an ongoing nuclear weapons program.
First of all we have to recognize that despite all the problems - and in some cases failures - that this regime has been much more successful, much more resilient, than people had anticipated.
First of all, I think the situation today is different. We're in a different place than we were in '93, '94.
Or perhaps they didn't share it at all, but they were happy that the United States wanted to go ahead and deal with North Korea, that was fine.
Sometimes we tend to focus more on the personalities and the conflicts, and it really caricatures the issues.
We have a model that we're following, and it's the Libya model.
So, in a sense, the verification piece is irrelevant to the format issue.
No political party, and certainly no responsible political leadership, deserves to serve in a government unless it cooperates and supports fully and unconditionally the police, and calls on its supporters to do so.
We need to do a lot more thinking about how the regime is going to evolve, how the bad guys are going to adapt their tactics, and what measures we're going to need in order to go forward.
It's up to Kim Jong Il to make that decision, and we can't make that for him.