The East Asian Studies Center 50th Anniversary Conference presents:
Mitchell Lerner
The Ohio State University
**THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED**
Title: North Korea and the United States in the Past, Present, and Future
Time: 2:30-3:30 PM
Abstract: Walter Mondale, the former American vice-president and ambassador to Japan, once noted that “Anyone who tells you that they are an expert on North Korea is either a liar or a fool.” It is a sentiment that is frequently echoed by frustrated policymakers across the world, particularly those within the United States, where a half-century of unequalled military and economic power has nevertheless proven unable to silence the DPRK’s challenge. American leaders have typically explained the North’s behavior as either: 1) a part of a larger communist offensive directed by Moscow or Beijing; 2) a reflection of the North’s insatiable quest to conquer the Republic of Korea; or 3) a product of an irrational and unreasonable DPRK leadership that simply cannot be understood. The headline of a recent article by Stratfor, one of America’s leading private intelligence groups, perhaps put it best: “Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy.” These assumptions diminish the perception of North Korea as an independent and rational actor in the international arena, and hence they inevitably undercut diplomatic efforts. This presentation uses new materials obtained from the North’s former communist bloc allies to examine the US-DPRK relationship in the Cold War, with a particular focus on the tensions of the 1960s. It concludes that the North is in fact both rational and independent, and is driven primarily by internal values and domestic political needs. Only by recognizing the true imperatives at the heart of North Korean behavior can policymakers begin to re-shape their foreign policy approaches in ways that can advance the best interests of the US, the Korean Peninsula, and the world.
Bio: Mitchell Lerner is professor of history at The Ohio State University, where he is a faculty associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and director of the Institute for Korean Studies. He is currently the associate editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, and a member of the Association for Asian Studies’ Distinguished Speakers Bureau. He has been a fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, served on the governing council of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and is on the advisory board of the North Korea International Documentation Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. He has also held the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Fulbright Chair at University College-Dublin, and has won both the OSU Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Ohio Academy of History's Distinguished Teacher Award.
Free and Open to the Public
This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center. Additional sponsors include: East Asian Studies Center, Institute for Chinese Studies, Institute for Japanese Studies, Institute for Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Office of International Affairs.