The ongoing nuclear impasses with both North Korea and Iran reflect a persisting tension in U.S. policy: Should diplomacy be transactional, focused narrowly on the discrete nuclear challenge, or transformational, comprehensively addressing these regimes’ objectionable behavior? Rhetorically, with both North Korea and Iran, the Trump administration aspires for the transformational. Breaking the impasses requires a pivot from a transformational strategy to the transactional. Transactional diplomacy with limited objectives offers a plausible pathway for constraining, not eliminating, these states’ threatening capabilities.
Register here: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/book-launch-nuclear-crises-north-korea-and-iran-transformational-to-transactional-diplomacy
Speakers
Robert Litwak, Senior Vice President and Director of International Security Studies
David Sanger, National Security Correspondent, The New York Times; and former Public Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center
Jane Harman (introduction), Director, President, and CEO, Wilson Center