John H. Kim, a Korean American attorney who served in the U.S. Army in South Korea, and Indong Oh, a Korean American Medical Doctor and co-chair of the June 15th Korean American Committee for Peace and Reunification of Korea, write, “As a candidate who got elected on a campaign promise of “change,” President Obama has a unique mandate and opportunity to shape a new U.S. policy toward Korea, including ending the long, costly Korean War finally and normalizing our relations with North Korea. However, it is not clear whether he recognizes the golden opportunity to bring a real change to the old, misguided U.S. policy toward Korea.”

Kawasaki Akira, Peace Boat Executive Committee member and ICNND NGO Advisor, writes, “There are several evident tasks for Japanese civil society in relation to its upcoming engagement with the ICNND. Firstly… civil society efforts to ensure the participation of Diet members and key party policy-makers as part of its engagement with the ICNND will be key… The second task is to utilise ICNND debates as the first step towards a reexamination of Japan’s nuclear disarmament policy in the leadup to the 2010 NPT Review Conference… The third task is… [that] civil society engagement with the ICNND must not be limited to just Japan, but also spread to Korea, China, and the whole of Northeast Asia.”

Rudiger Frank, Chair of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna, writes, “If we want to discourage the DPRK from reprocessing more fuel rods, from further refining their ICMBs and from developing a functioning nuclear warhead, we should stop telling them that all their efforts so far are not enough. By ridiculing these attempts, we win a small propaganda victory but also demonstrate to Pyongyang that they must work harder on these issues.”