North Korea Update | The Capital Cable #122

North Korea is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Workers' Party of Korea this Friday, October 10 with a series of events, including a potential military parade. This year's celebration will include high-ranking foreign leaders, including Chinese premier Li Qiang, the most senior Chinese official to visit the country since 2019, and Vietnamese Communist Party chief To Lam, the first Vietnamese leader to visit in almost 20 years. 

What should we expect from North Korea this week? Join us for a timely update on the latest developments in North Korea with Victor Cha, Mark Lippert and Sydney Seiler of CSIS, and Markus Garlauskas of the Atlantic Council.

Sydney Seiler was the national intelligence officer for North Korea at the National Intelligence Council from 2020 to 2023 and is one of the nation’s top experts on North Korea. He has over 40 years of experience focusing on Korean Peninsula affairs, 17 of them in South Korea. Previously, he was the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) senior analyst and senior defense intelligence expert for North Korea from 2016 to 2020, serving as the principal adviser and senior expert on Korean Peninsula security issues to the USFK commander and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Enterprise. Mr. Seiler also served as the U.S. special envoy for Six Party Talks (2014–2015), where he coordinated U.S. diplomacy and policy on the DPRK and led negotiations with North Korea.

Markus Garlauskas is the director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He leads this initiative’s efforts focused on conflict and nuclear deterrence, United States strategy, and building cooperation with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region. He led projects focused on deterrence and defense issues in East Asia as a nonresident senior fellow from August 2020 until assuming his duties as director in January 2023. Garlauskas served in the US government for nearly twenty years. He was appointed to the Senior National Intelligence Service as the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council from July 2014 to June 2020. As NIO, he led the US intelligence community’s strategic analysis on North Korea issues and expanded analytic outreach to non-government experts. He also provided direct analytic support to top-level policy deliberations, including the presidential transition, as well as the Singapore and Hanoi summits with North Korea.
 

This event is made possible by general support to CSIS.