Thank you very much. Just by way of interesting comment, I'm a lawyer, a former ambassador, and president of a very small independent think tank, but I am not an academic. I'm a practitioner.
In my written submission, I made the following arguments. I'll list them because of course there's no time to go into them in detail, and the submission has been circulated.
One, North Korea seeks nuclear weapons for defensive purposes.
Two, there is no effective military means to denuclearize North Korea.
Three, dialogue with North Korea without preconditions has not yet been tried.
Four, there is a role for Canada in promoting a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
Five, which I spoke at length on the last time the committee looked into this issue in May of 2016, American strategic ballistic missile defence does not work, undermines strategic stability, puts at risk civilian satellites and, indeed, the peaceful uses of outer space, and is exorbitantly expensive, all of that notwithstanding one—in quotes—“successful” test in May of 2017 in highly artificial circumstances.
My sixth point is not a point I made last time basically because of the timing; I was concerned about the official possibly being identified. Given the toxic history in Canada-U.S. relations of potential Canadian participation in American strategic ballistic missile defence, it is not only futile but risky to raise it again. As I said in my written submission, the word “toxic” is the description of the history of Canadian participation by a senior American official.
Time is short and I wish now to focus in my oral comments mainly on the prospects for a diplomatic approach—given my background, this won't be a surprise—as the only effective way forward.
Dialogue with North Korea without preconditions has not yet been tried. We've heard a lot on the news in particular and in statements not so much from the President of the United States, but certainly from the U.S. Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, who have voiced their openness to dialogue and diplomacy on more than one occasion. What we haven't heard on the media is that so has North Korea, over and over again.
Former senior American official and now visiting professor Robert Carlin recently catalogued... Of course, we're all dependent on translations. If the media doesn't give it to us, most of us can't go and read read the original North Korean statement, but that's why this is such a great service: a real American expert, as I said, a former senior official, has catalogued recent North Korean offers to negotiate. He's gone through a whole series of them throughout this period of crisis, essentially, through the various tests of missiles and the nuclear tests.
Here is how the formulation typically goes. This is the translation from the North Korean statement:
We will, under no circumstances, put the nukes and ballistic rockets on the negotiating table. Neither shall we flinch even an inch from the road to bolstering up the nuclear forces chosen by ourselves—
That's the part we hear over and over. The part we don't hear is the rest of the statement, which is as follows:
—unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the U.S. against the D.P.R.K. are fundamentally eliminated.
As I said, troublingly, we hear the first part reported, but often not the second part.
Also less well known is the fact that the U.S.A. has yet to offer dialogue that is not conditional on North Korea first renouncing nuclear weapons before the talks can begin, clearly a non-starter insofar as North Korea is concerned. That is why Senator Dianne Feinstein, a senior senator and Democrat from California, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, issued a statement on August 8—it took a while before it started getting attention—urging the United States government “to quickly engage North Korea in a high-level dialogue without any preconditions”.
To put this another way, this is incredibly optimistic, because it means that diplomacy, far from having failed, in fact has not been given a meaningful chance to work.
Sorry. You're giving me a....