The New Yorker Radio Hour - Diplomacy on the Rocks in Iran and North Korea

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker based in Washington, speaks with Wendy Sherman about the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran deal. As the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Obama Administration, Sherman helped write that agreement, and led the U.S. negotiating team in complex multilateral talks. She also has first-hand experience negotiating with the North Korean government, having visited Pyongyang with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the Clinton Presidency.   The Iran deal seemed to be working: in exchange for curbing its nuclear program, as the International Atomic Energy Agency subsequently verified, Iran got relief from sanctions. But Donald Trump lambasted the deal throughout his campaign and Presidency; he called it overly generous and vowed to withdraw from it. John Bolton, his recently appointed national security adviser, opposed the deal on the grounds that verification was not “infallible.” Sherman has a sobering question for the Trump Administration, which now wishes to negotiate with Kim Jong Un about North Korea’s nuclear program: “How in God’s name can any verification or monitoring of North Korea be infallible?” And Evan Osnos speaks with Victor Cha, the top North Korea adviser to George W. Bush, about the mixed signals on diplomacy coming from Pyongyang.  Might the Trump Administration, eager for a foreign-policy win, be led into giving up too much? New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a road trade to the block to West Boulevard and make that right? They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people. They're subconsciously mocked that lineage. So that's happening. It seems like an incredible story here on a many front.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Today we're going to take a look at two huge disruptions in the state of the world, the consequences of our withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal on the one hand, and the possibilities for diplomacy with North Korea on the other. So Iran, what now? We've learned that in the president's inner circle, even among hawks like Mike Pompeo, there was an effort to salvage or at least renegotiate the Iran deal up until the last minute. Because we're

Whether you like the deal or not, withdrawing from it creates problems on a global scale. The deal itself seemed to be working. In exchange for curbing its nuclear program, Iran got relief from sanctions. But Donald Trump decided to keep the promise he had made all along on the campaign trail. This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made. Therefore, I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw for, from the Iran nuclear deal. The withdrawal will have diplomatic and psychological consequences,

not just in the Middle East, but all over the world. Among other things, it will certainly complicate Trump's hope to get a deal done with North Korea. Wendy Sherman could fairly be called the architect of the Iran agreement. She led the United States in six rounds of talks with Iran and other nations, and she's also had firsthand experience of diplomacy with the North Koreans. Sherman went with Madeline Albright to Pyongyang during the Clinton years. She spoke with Susan Glasser, who recently joined the New Yorker as a staff writer based in Washington.

So the Iran deal in many ways was the capstone of both what you were doing in the U.S. government in this last go-around in the Obama administration. Of course, many people saw it as the signature achievement of President Obama's story. Now, I want you to take people a little bit inside the arduous pains taking at times, I'm sure, makes you want to scream, agonizingly slow progress, years of your life and that of many other people it took to get to this deal. So before we talk about the impact of blowing it up, let's talk about how on earth you made it. I tease that I negotiated inside the administration. I negotiated with the U.S. Congress. I negotiated with think tankers in Washington. I negotiated, of course, with my interagency colleagues. I negotiated with Israel, with the Gulf states, with everybody who had a stake in Iranian oil, Iranian business in the world. And oh, yeah, occasionally I negotiated with Iran. It's an complex process if you do it correctly. And you indeed have to be ready to walk away from the table on John Kerry, who, of course, this and towards the end with Secretary Moniz from the Department of Energy who joined us, brought extraordinary technical expertise. I did this with a core team of 15, but with hundreds, literally

hundreds, in the U.S. administration. And Secretary Kerry was ready to walk away from this several times during the negotiation, as was I. But at the end of the day, we got a deal. You then had President Trump almost from the very beginning when he was just candidate Donald Trump saying this is the worst deal ever. You had in Congress enormous resistance from Republicans in the Senate from the very beginning. They were publicly undermining it. You had Tom Cotton, for example, the Arkansas senator who's emerged as a close advisor to Donald Trump, organizing a letter of his colleagues right in the middle of your negotiations,

basically saying, don't take them seriously, we're going to undo this. How seriously did you take that as a possibility while you're negotiating it, that it might not stick? Well, we certainly knew that was a possibility, and my Iranian counterparts would constantly say to me, how do we know you won't undo the deal? And I said, there's no way to know that just as there's no way for me to know whether you will undo the deal. The deal has to be as good as it possibly can be. So it is durable and sustainable. That's interesting, though. They were pressing you even at the time. Absolutely. Saying America might not be good at its word. Absolutely. Is America good for its word? Well, you know, we are as good as our word as our politics allow us to be, and the same is true for Iran. It's true for any country. So you broke your nose at one point in these negotiations. Like that kind of reminds me of when my son got a concussion at science camp. How do you break your nose while negotiating with Iranians? I trust they didn't punch you.

No, no, no. So what happened was our delegation room, the United States delegation room, it was on the top floor. of the Palais Coburg in Vienna. And we had secure communications equipment there. And the elevator opened up into a foyer and then to a glass conference room. And generally, that glass door was kept open. I was rushing to get to a secure conference call with Secretary Kerry at about 11 p.m. one evening. That door, however, was closed. And I hadn't paid any attention. I went smack into that glass door, blood all over the place. Some of my male colleagues said, call for an ambulance, get someone here immediately. I said, clearly none of you were mothers. When your kid bluddies their nose, there's a lot of blood. So get me an ice pack. I put the ice pack on, a lot of Kleenex,

had the conference call with Secretary Kerry. He didn't find out about this until months later. I went to, had a CT scan the next day and went to a doctor, an earnose and throat doctor in Vienna. He walked out and said in English, shit happens. So he packed up my nose. I used a lot of good makeup and went on with my work. You know, you've heard over and over again President Trump and those who are allied with him call it the worst deal ever, a terrible deal, an awful deal. You heard it at the time. Have you rethought any aspects of this in the wake of where we are now?

Look, the president and the opponents now have said because it didn't cover ballistic missiles, it didn't cover their nefarious action. But what everyone needs to understand is when you're in the midst of a negotiation, this deal is 110 pages long. It's filled with technical detail that if we had all of those other issues on the table, which of course Iran wasn't willing to negotiate. But let's say they were. If you had them all on the table, what it might mean is Iran would say, okay, I'll do something over here on ballistic missiles, but that means I want to keep more centrifuges, or I want to creep this underground facility on enrichment. So you're negotiating against yourself on the thing that matters the most, and that is Iran never being able to obtain a nuclear weapon. Because as bad as what they're doing in the region is now, if they had a nuclear weapon, their ability to project power and to deter our

actions and our allies and partners' actions would be profound. So why would you have a negotiation where you would negotiate trades between a nuclear program and other issues? We needed to get the nuclear weapons off the table. All of the sanctions remained on their ballistic missiles, on their arms dealing, on their humans' rights, on what they're doing in the region. And quite frankly, our efforts to get Americans who still remain in Iran detained and missing in Iran, we need to be. to have that part of our negotiating frame going forward as well. There are ways one can do that, but if you have them all on the table, one gets negotiated against the other, and that is not

in our national security interest. Do you have any sense that the Europeans are willing to keep going forward in what seemed to be clearly not a real process? The Europeans have been quite stalwart in the last few days saying that they want to try to keep the deal together with out the United States. I think that's going to be very difficult to do. I applaud them for trying because I believe that the deal is in our national security interest. You know, at the end of the day, this is about what will keep Americans secure. And for the life of me, I've never figured out how allowing Iran to go back to enriching uranium and trying to get weapons-grade plutonium to build a nuclear weapon is in our national security interest. But somehow, the president seems to

believe that it is. And John Bolton's becoming national security advisor, Secretary Pompeo, although I think he wants to now try to be a diplomat. He is still a hardliner when it comes to Iran. And it appears that the president may lead us down a path toward conflict with Iran war. That is not a good outcome for the United States. And in the short to medium term, Iran turning back to the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon is certainly not our national security. interest. So quite frankly, none of this makes any sense in terms of America's security. It only makes sense in the sense that the president said he was going to do this. So have you kept up with the Iranians that you spent months and months locked in a room with? I have. You know,

when you make diplomatic relationships, you don't give them away. And so I have, as many Americans have, seen Foreign Minister Zarif when he's been in the United States. And he was just here right before President Trump's decision. He was, and I did see him. And, you know, when I see him, I represent as a patriotic American that he should do whatever he can to stop the malign behavior in the Middle East, that it doesn't help to hold on to this deal, that he should continue the compliance to the deal, which the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed 11 times is the case. So, you know, when we see foreign leaders, we are true to what is in America's national security interest. This isn't about politics. This is about our security interest. Well, of course, look, Wendy, I mean, unfortunately, it's become so politicized that even a conversation is now interpreted in different ways depending on which team you're on. But I'm interested in the putting aside the politics. You saw Javad Zarif.

You've presumably talked with other Iranians as well in the run up to this. What are they telling you? What do they make of it? Did they have a realistic assessment in your view of President Trump? I think they had a realistic assessment. And we've seen enormous diplomacy just after this decision, Foreign Minister Zarif went to China, went to Moscow, met with the European leaders in Brussels, along with the European Union. Certainly, Zerif is nonstop in trying to find a way forward here,

but I want to make sure to make one really important point. National Security Advisor Bolton has said that the Iran deal had to end because even though the International Climate Energy Agency said there was compliance, that he didn't believe that it was infallible compliance. And I would say to National Security Advisor Bolton, how in the United States? in God's name, can any verification of monitoring North Korea be infallible? I can't think of almost anyone else who would have this unique set of experiences in the Rome, intensively in the Rome, with both the North Koreans and the Iranians. You and Secretary Madeline Albright actually traveled to Pyongyang,

and you met this current Kim, Kim Jong-un's father as part of that. At that time, you are Secretary Madeline Albright's counselor. You are a very close advisor to her. You two are still working together all these years later today. So is there a North Korean style of negotiating? And is it different than the Iranian style of negotiating? I see North Korea's approach to negotiations is pretty transactional. And in that way, they're a little bit like the president.

in that everything is possible or up for sale and up for leverage. Iran is a very complex negotiator. They are a negotiator of resistance, which is the mantra of their country, just as in North Korea, the mantra is Juche, which is self-reliance, and one has to understand those cultural frames for negotiations. Iranians are superb negotiators, very tough, very patient, see all the pieces on the table. And so it is a very complex kind of negotiating style, somewhat different than the North Koreans. So, Wendy, how do you see this hitting the Iranian economy? And will we ever be talking directly to Iran again? I certainly think it will have an impact on the Iranian economy.

It's interesting, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is so responsible for what is happening in the Middle East and Iran's presence in the Middle East, was never for the Iran deal because they had the corner on the black market when sanctions are in place. So I think they will be ecstatic that now all the gloves are off. Rahani's trying to keep the deal together. I call Rahani the hardliner and I call the IRGC, the hard hard liners. So I think the hard-hard-liners are going to win out here. That's not good for the future of Iran. That's not good for the United States. And that gives me great concern and great pause. Thank you so much, Ambassador Wendy Sherman.

Thank you, Susan. Wendy Sherman now works at the Albright Stonebridge Group. Susan Glasser writes about Trump's Washington for us every week and you can find her work at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. No American president has ever met a leader of North Korea, the DPRK. But there are so many things that our current president has done that are without precedent.

After more than a year of insults and schoolyard taunts, Trump and Kim now hope to reach a historic agreement. We will both try to make it a very special moment for world peace, Trump declared on Twitter. But not long after that, North Korea suspended its talks with the Saturday. and has threatened to cancel the upcoming summit with the United States. So what is Pyongyang up to here? The New Yorkers Evan Osnos has reported from North Korea, and he recently spoke with an American expert, Victor Cha. Chao was George W. Bush's top advisor on North Korea,

and he works at a foreign policy think tank in Washington. Evan Osnos reached Victor Chao last week in Seoul. Victor, we're talking on a day in which North Korea has postponed talks with the South that we're scheduled to begin. And it's threatening to cancel the upcoming summit with Donald Trump. What do you think's going on here? Well, I wouldn't be completely panicked just yet. I think right now what we have is the restart of U.S. air exercises that the North Koreans clearly don't like. And so they've canceled a process-related inter-Korean meeting, which is really trying, I think, to lay down a marker that, these military exercises are on the negotiating table as far as the North Koreans are concerned.

But there are hardliners inside the North Korean government that are probably not as excited about this dramatic turn of events and probably are dragging their feet a little bit. How do you make sense of it? Well, I think a number of us experts have met with North Koreans in Track 2 for the Track 2 diplomacy, which is unofficial dialogue over the last two years where they were, they had a sing, message, which was they weren't interested in dialogue. They were focused on their nuclear program. But now all of that has changed. And first of all, I think they really are looking for some sort of sanctions relief. There is no denying that the market has taken over in North Korea.

And that market mentality has created a desire both for the government and the people to do better. And that could be another positive reason why they are seeking reform and negotiations with the outside world. And so when they need to explain to people that they've gone from a year of the talk of fire and fury and of threats and so on, which did feature in the North Korean media and it was part of the propaganda, they will now frame this as an opportunity to develop the country, to rejoin the world? Is that how it's framed to the public? Yeah, I mean, I think it is, I think They try to define what is happening now in terms of success of the leadership and their nuclear program and the world coming to them now that they are a great power, a great country.

So the U.S. has talked for months about the need for full denuclearization. Is that in the realm of plausibility now? Well, I think the whole concept is an important principle. But practically and logically speaking, it's very difficult to confirm now and into the future that North Korea will never ever develop, either give away all of their weapons today or develop ones in the future. They still have the technical expertise. This is a country with thousands of miles of underground tunnels. And if they have a dozen bombs hiding somewhere 50 miles underground in a tunnel somewhere, it's going to be. very hard to know that. Do you think the Trump administration would settle for a deal that would allow

North Korea to keep some of its missiles and nuclear capability? I certainly think that rhetorically and in terms of policy statements, they would never acknowledge accepting something like that. And the most obvious piece of evidence in that regard was the decision to walk away from the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran. from President Trump's perspective, that was probably seen as something that signaled to the North Koreans, that an Iran-type deal, as you just described, that would acknowledge them being able to keep a portion of their programs, is not on the table. So, you know, as you said, the U.S. pulled out recently of the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. You know, the obvious implication would be, does Kim Jong-un have any reasonable assurance that if he enters into an agreement with the United States, that that will survive?

this administration and maybe not even survive this administration. Do you think that this casts a shadow over his ability to sign a deal with the U.S.? I think that's a very fair question from a North Korean perspective. I mean, the last two deals that they negotiated with the United States, in both cases, you know, as administrations changed, these agreements sort of fell apart. And so I think from a North Korean perspective, there probably is concerned that a deal with Trump, if he's not there two years from now, might not stick. Having said that, I do think that North Koreans believe that if they make deals with Republican governments on security issues, that's more likely to stick.

I think the North Koreans also understand this is the most unconventional president that we've seen in perhaps in history. One of the concerns that people have about the negotiations is that as the president gets into the room, he's got a lot riding on his ability to, make the deal, to come home with a big success. There's concern among some analysts that that could lead him to give things away that the United States should not give away. It's security posture in Asia. It's commitment to South Korea, to Japan. Are you sensing that there's concern in the region that Donald Trump, in his determination to get something in this summit might give away

more than he should? Yeah, I do sense that there is some concern about that. Um, you, You know, when I was in government, the one sort of cardinal rule we always told herself is we can't let our North Korea policy dictate our broader policy in Asia, particularly with our allies. Our policy with our allies has to dictate our North Korea policy. So, yeah, I do sense some concern in the region about that, not just from the South Koreans and the Japanese who are allies, but also from the Chinese. I think that's one of the reasons why we've seen the Chinese have two meetings with the North Green leader in the last 40 years. days when they had refused to meet with him for the last six years. So when you look ahead to the day, maybe June 12th in Singapore, when they're scheduled to get together, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, what should we be looking for that tells us this thing

has worked on its own terms? There are a couple of things. The foremost issue for Trump has been the intercontinental ballistic missile program. These are the long-range missiles that are believed to be able to reach the entire United States. So I think it's very important that something happened on that issue. The second thing has to do with some sort of peace declaration on the peninsula. The Inter-Korean summit that took place last April already laid out an ambition that the two Koreas would no longer be at war with each other, that there should be a peace regime.

But that cannot happen without the United States and, and, China supporting that and agreeing to that. So that would be the second thing. And then the third thing would be something definitive in terms of the nuclear weapons program, something that looked more like commitment to abandon this program. Now, getting all those things is not going to be easy. It is a high bar, but unfortunately it is the bar that the president has set for himself. it will be a real test of his negotiating skills and how well the North Korean leader can think and act on his feet. And I do feel like we are potentially on the brink of something quite historic.

On the one hand, it could lead to something fantastic. On the other hand, it could collapse spectacularly. Victor Cha, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Cha was in Seoul last week when he spoke with the New Yorkers. Evanosnos. I'm David Remnick. Thank you so much for joining me today. And I hope you'll sign up for our newsletter

and subscribe to our podcast so you never miss a thing. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I hope you'll join us next time.