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
What Libya did was make a strategic determination that it would have a better future-a more secure, a more prosperous future-if it abandoned its weapons of mass destruction.
What we can do is to explain as clearly as possible what the benefits would be of him going down one path, and what the potential consequences would be if he chooses another path.
We are hopeful that the North Koreans can show a little bit more realism, a little bit more flexibility.
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.
So, in a sense, the verification piece is irrelevant to the format issue.
I'm not sure you can do anything quickly or easily with the North.
First of all, I think the situation today is different. We're in a different place than we were in '93, '94.
The format's better because it gives us a much stronger hand to play when going to the North Koreans unified, with our allies and partners in the region, all of us saying the same thing: telling them their current course is unacceptable.
It is fundamentally, existentially, in their own interest that they and their neighbors do not acquire nuclear weapons.
We have a model that we're following, and it's the Libya model.
The nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons, or even nuclear material, is obviously a current concern.