U.S. should engage North Korea

Ploughshares Fund grantee Leon Sigal testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a hearing subtitled “North Korea, Back at the Brink?”, along with Ambassador Stephen Bosworth and others.  The discussion, chaired by Senator John Kerry, was focused on what the next steps should be.  In his testimony, Sigal suggested that in the longer term there can be no progress without leverage, and no leverage without engaging North Korea. Engagement, Sigal argued, "gets them dependant on us over time, and then we have leverage.” Sigal used the example of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing in Pyongyang and thus “undercutting years of North Korean propaganda.”