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
First of all, I think the situation today is different. We're in a different place than we were in '93, '94.
The negotiations are continuing now through the media.
Then the final thing is enforcement. What happens when we actually catch somebody who has violated international law, rules, and regulations?
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.
The Nuclear Suppliers Group is one area the president highlighted in his speech that's extremely important and that needs to be improved.
They would rather the United States play the bad cop, and they could play the good cop - let the United States do all the heavy lifting here.
Sometimes we tend to focus more on the personalities and the conflicts, and it really caricatures the issues.
All the options are pretty unattractive right now except for continuing to talk.
I think all of us are pretty disappointed with the abdication of responsibility by many unionist leaders, ... 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.
And so there has been a lot of diplomatic movement.
We have a model that we're following, and it's the Libya model.
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.
We are hopeful that the North Koreans can show a little bit more realism, a little bit more flexibility.
Any agreement that you have isn't going to be based on North Korea's intentions or trust.