The Leaderboard: Thomas Countryman

The Leaderboard profiles the people behind the policies of the Asia-Pacific.

Who is he?

Thomas Countryman has been the assistant secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation since September 2011. He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and holds the rank of Minister-Counselor with 30 years’ experience in political-military affairs.

Countryman served as principal deputy assistant secretary for Political-Military Affairs during President Obama’s first term, and he has also served on the National Security Council as the Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs from 1997 to 1998. Mr. Countryman graduated with a degree in economics and political science from the Washington University in St. Louis, and he also studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Thomas Countryman. Source: U.S. Government Work.

Thomas Countryman. Source: U.S. Government Work.

Why has he been in the news?

On May 28, it was revealed that Robert Einhorn, the State Department’s Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control was departing and joining the Brookings Institution. Countryman was subsequently tapped to take over Einhorn’s responsibility to negotiate a new successor civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the Republic of Korea. He wasted no time and made a trip the following week to Seoul on June 3 to 4, where he held the first bilateral talks on the 123 agreement since late April with his South Korean counterpart, Ambassador Park Ro-byug. The two-day talks failed to reach any breakthroughs however, with the South Koreans renewing their “firm commitment” to their position. The next round of negotiations is expected to be held this September in Washington, which gives him time to adjust to his new portfolio.

What can we expect from him?

Mr. Countryman now has the tremendous task of negotiating a new agreement with the ROK within the next 24 months. On April 24, 2013 the United States and the ROK decided to extend the current 123 agreement, which was set to expire in March 2014, with a two-year extension. The extension ostensibly bought time by moving the deadline to March 2016, but the negotiations revealed how far apart the two allies remained on this issue. The South Koreans held adamantly to their demands for an agreement granting them advanced consent for the enrichment of uranium fuel on the front-end and reprocessing rights at the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Americans on the other hand remained committed to their position of not providing reprocessing and enrichment rights to South Korea.

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