02/19/16 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up, it's our friend John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus.
He runs it.
He's the...
I don't know what he's called exactly, but he's the runner of Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's at fpif.org, Institute for Policy Studies.
And where in the world is my link?
I lost it, but it's about the DPRK.
It's right around here somewhere.
Darkness at high noon in Korea.
You know, I don't like the sound of that, John.
Welcome back to my show.
Great to be back on.
Well, I'm very happy to talk to you, and especially about Korea issues, as always.
You have insightful things to say, but this is all just bad news.
Although you're a pretty kind of sunny guy to be talking about the sunshine policy, so maybe we'll get a little bit of silver lining out of you here.
But what's your worry?
Well, I think most of your listeners are probably aware of what...generally what's been happening.
We had a fourth nuclear test from North Korea back in 2015, the end of 2015.
And then more recently, another long-range missile test that maybe or maybe not put a satellite into orbit.
And as a result, the international community has again applied another round of sanctions against North Korea.
That includes the United States, which passed legislation pretty unanimously in the Senate and the House, which the president signed another round of sanctions.
But the more serious issue, from my point of view, is what's happened between North and South Korea.
South Korea, in addition to sanctions and negative rhetoric toward the North, finally canceled the one last project that connected the two Koreas.
And that was called the Kaesong Industrial Complex.
And it's an industrial complex that was located just north of the demilitarized zone in the North Korean city of Kaesong.
And it employed over 50,000 North Korean workers in about 125 factories run by South Koreans, produced a lot of stuff on sale, mostly in South Korea.
But beyond what it produced, it was mostly important as a symbol of continued North-South economic cooperation.
And unfortunately, South Korea basically shut it down.
And so it's just domestic politics in the South or what?
I mean, everybody doesn't want to have a real war.
So why ratchet up the tensions when they could try to de-escalate them?
Well, it's a good question.
I mean, it's especially because it's Park Geun-hye, the South Korean president, who has, since she took office, basically promoted a kind of engagement policy with the North, not a full scale one, but a kind of reasonably half-hearted attempt to restart relations between North and South after five years of a very, very conservative anti-North policy coming from Lee Myung-bak, previous leader of South Korea.
And Park Geun-hye came out with this kind of article on foreign affairs calling for trustpolitik, a kind of we'll, you know, work with you if you're willing to work with us kind of policy.
And, you know, there was some indication that that trustpolitik was moving forward.
There were some divided families, reunions, in other words, reunions of families divided by the Korean War.
There was some humanitarian aid shipments to the North.
There was talk of restarting a number of different tourism projects.
Unfortunately, I think Park Geun-hye was isolated within her party, within the conservative party in South Korea.
And I think she felt that she had to really demonstrate that she was not going to be pushed around.
And, you know, part of it is her being, you know, a conservative that has to, you know, emphasize her credentials.
And part of it, I think, is being a woman as well and indicating that she, as a woman, is not going to be pushed around.
So I think there were a number of factors.
There was probably some pressure as well coming from outside South Korea.
I mean, the Kaesong Industrial Complex is not exactly a popular project outside of the Korean Peninsula.
The United States, for instance, you know, bent over backwards to prevent any kind of products produced by the Kaesong Industrial Complex from entering the United States and put pressure on its allies to do the same.
And there was basically no other interest from any other countries in investing in the Kaesong Industrial Complex.
Well, why is that exactly?
Just for business reasons, for cronies or because they hate any kind of sunshine at all and they want the Cold War with the North to continue forever or both?
Well, I think there are a couple of reasons.
I mean, in general, it's been kind of a risky proposition to invest in North Korea.
A number of countries and a number of countries have seen, companies rather, have seen their investments basically disappear.
Either as a result of simply that investment decisions or because the North Korean government decided it ultimately didn't want to work with that partner.
So that's one reason why there's been reluctance.
I think another reason is, again, because of free trade agreement regulations.
Any country that has a free trade agreement with South Korea, there was additional scrutiny.
Again, this is pressure from the United States, in part, to ensure that any products produced in Kaesong would not be labeled as South Korean products and therefore would not be subject to preferential trade treatment.
So that meant that anything produced in Kaesong was not going to be treated like a South Korean product and it was going to be more difficult to sell it.
So I think that also is a reason why companies and countries didn't want to invest in Kaesong.
And then finally, I think there might have been some political decisions as well.
In other words, as you said, a decision that a country or a company simply did not want to have engagement with North Korea on its record, that that was a stigma that it wanted to avoid.
Yeah.
Now, so here's the thing.
Ever since Nixon went to China, pretty much everybody agrees that, hey, that was the right thing to do, man.
Why have a Cold War with Russia and China when you could just have a Cold War with Russia only?
That makes sense.
Maybe not have a Cold War with anybody, you know?
And so that argument has actually prevailed in the case of Cuba, which is giving up a lot less, I guess.
Well, I don't know.
It's giving up more, really, than North Korea, because obviously Cuba's right off the shore and there's a lot more so-called American nationalist pride wrapped up in the Cuba issue, that kind of thing.
But we can go ahead and say, ah, you know what?
Let's begin, at least, to try to let bygones be bygones with Cuba.
And yet that same, again, consensus, right?
Ever since Nixon and Kissinger, this is a consensus.
This is the way to take on totalitarianism, is engage them and show them how great it can be to get rich and this kind of thing.
And yet they won't ever do that with North Korea.
And I guess, see, the music's about to start playing, John, and so I'm not going to be able to give you enough time to answer.
So when we get back from this break, can you imagine that, me actually looking at the clock and sort of, kind of timing out the segment correctly?
Not really?
Yeah.
On the other side of this break, we're going to let John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org, answer my question as to what's up with that anyway?
I want engagement, man.
I want the Harlem Globe Trotters to go back to North Korea and stay there until everybody's friends.
Darkness at High Noon in Korea, fpif.org.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Jon Pfeffer on the line.
He's from Foreign Policy and Focus, and he wrote this thing, Darkness at High Noon in Korea.
Of course, we still don't have a peace deal left over from 1952 just to cease fire, and now they've even closed down the joint office park.
I think you say they shut down the hotlines.
The North retaliated by shutting down the hotlines between the two countries in this.
So my question before the break, Jon, was what is Washington, D.C.'s problem here?
And then after that, I've got other things I want to ask you, too.
Okay.
Well, you brought up both China and Cuba as examples of where the United States has promoted economic engagement in the past with countries that it might have geopolitical or political differences with, and that's absolutely correct.
But the numbers are very different than the case with North Korea.
So, for instance, with China, we're talking about the potential of a billion consumers, a billion buyers of American goods, and that was an incredible incentive in the 1970s and had been previously.
For the better part of 100 years, American businessmen had imagined what it would be like to have Chinese market at their disposal.
So that pushed detente with China, in addition to the possibility of having a split between the two major communist powers at the time, Russia and China.
With Cuba, of course, the Cuban market is not anywhere near the size of the Chinese market, but already there was a strong push coming from the American business community to have some kind of a rapprochement with Cuba, largely because Cuba was a major potential market for agricultural supplies, agricultural sales.
And so we saw individual states already making economic deals with Cuba before the Obama administration even decided to make an overture to Raul Pastra.
So in both cases, in both the case of Cuba and in China, you had strong push from the business community.
With North Korea, you have no push whatsoever.
First of all, we're talking about a very small population of about 25 million people compared to, of course, a billion people in China, and we're talking about absolutely zero connection right now between the U.S. business community and North Korea.
Plus, no imagination from the American business community about what they could do in North Korea economically.
So I think that's a major difference between what we had with China and what we're currently experiencing with Cuba and the situation in North Korea.
Yeah, well, I guess that makes a lot of sense.
But then on the other hand, they got fission bombs.
I mean, I don't know how well they can deliver them or how far or even how well the damn things work.
But still, that's a pretty big reason why we could advance the ceasefire one more step to a peace treaty.
Why not?
Come on, it's not like we got to give them the store.
I would agree.
But that's not the perception here in Washington, D.C.
The perception in Washington, D.C., among policymakers, is basically the United States tried to sit down with North Korea to negotiate on its nuclear program.
It attempted during the Clinton administration and achieved an ideal, in some sense, on the plutonium side of things.
But North Korea reneged and went ahead with its uranium side of developing a nuclear weapon.
Tried again under George W. Bush.
Same, more or less, end to that particular story.
And then finally, even with the Obama administration, around the leap day agreement.
And that North Korea, again, kind of decided only a few days afterwards that it was going to go ahead and test its long-range missiles anyway.
So the perception here in Washington is, hey, we tried in order to neutralize North Korea's nuclear program, and North Korea was not interested.
Now, I wouldn't agree entirely with that narrative.
I mean, there are elements of truth there, of course.
But there's also any number of examples in each of those three, the Clinton, the Bush, and the Obama overtures, where the United States was basically not negotiating with full good faith.
Would we be able to get some kind of an agreement with North Korea if the United States said, OK, look, we're going to honor our side of the bargain as well?
I think there's a good possibility.
And that should motivate the Obama administration to do that.
But I don't think it's going to do it in its last year of office, because that's probably a bridge too far for a president who has a number of other items on his legacy agenda.
And like you said, who has no real domestic political incentive to make that a priority at all.
But it's really unfortunate, because as you go through the list, obviously, there's a lot of, as you said, a lot of places where caveats could be included in their side of the story here, the War Party side of the story.
But most especially, it seems to me like the way that the Bush thing fell apart was such an obvious USA fault type situation, where it was what Christopher Hill went over there and had this deal, and they were going to take him off the terrorist list, and they took the Yongbyong reactor offline.
And then Bush came out.
And I think I forget now exactly, John, but help me out, maybe.
Didn't Bush just put him back on the terrorist list for no reason?
Or did some other thing where he just broke the deal?
So obviously, and regardless, I'm right overall, whether my specific detail there is wrong.
But my point being that then that would be a great, it could have been a great way for the Democrats to, you know, for Obama to have this for part of his legacy, that this is a place where Bush failed and make it a partisan thing.
This is a thing that the Republicans couldn't do, but he could.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, Bush didn't actually put him back on the terrorism list, but he didn't follow through on some of the other, in some cases, unstated expectations that the North Koreans had.
And that was largely around moving toward some form of political rapprochement.
And that just didn't happen.
And partly it was opposition within Congress to any kind of effort by the administration at that time.
Partly it was an expectation that it would be picked up by the Obama administration when it came into office in 2009.
And that didn't happen either, because the Obama administration immediately ordered a kind of reappraisal with North Korea policy.
And that year, essentially, in which nothing happened, was taken by the North Koreans as an indication that the United States is simply not interested in following up.
So some of it was just, you know, lack of good intentions on our part.
Some of it was the craziness of our democratic political process.
When I say craziness, it's craziness from the point of view of the North Koreans, who simply don't understand why we don't have a unified approach.
And part of it was dropping the ball, going from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.
And so there's lots of bad blood between the two sides, simply on the diplomatic end, not to mention all the other stuff in our history of bad blood between the two countries.
Nevertheless, I do think it is possible for the Obama administration to at least get the ball rolling, so that a subsequent administration would have a kind of a ground laid for some kind of return to the negotiated example.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
It seems like it'd be easy enough, too, when you look at, you know, the degree to which the ice was broken just by sending Madeleine Albright, of all people.
I mean, I guess it was her job at the time.
Don't get me wrong.
But still, just sending her to engage in some cultural things, you know, that made a world of difference.
And when we talked about this at the time when, oh, what's his name, took the Harlem Globetrotters over there.
And that's a great way.
In fact, I just saw Globetrotters game over the weekend, a part of one.
They're great, man.
That's a great way to begin.
You know, I would say the North Koreans, you guys can have a team in the NBA.
Let's do that.
What do we got to do?
We have so many carrots to offer that don't cost us anything to be able to get along.
If we had someone who was really or some people who were really interested in peace, you know, in charge of making these decisions.
Absolutely.
But, I mean, you can imagine, you know, what kind of a political backlash would ensue in this election year, given what the kind of dynamics are in Congress.
If President Obama were to even make the slightest gesture of good faith toward North Korea at this moment.
Now, that's why I say publicly it would be very difficult.
And I don't think the president is going to try to jeopardize, you know, his party's standing at this point by doing that in the same way that Bill Clinton didn't make that trip to Pyongyang.
That was scheduled at the end of 2000.
I'm sorry, at the end of right before George Bush.
In the same way that Hillary Biden, Kerry voted for the Iraq war politics.
Exactly.
It's a shame.
And of course, the flip side of it being they could have been heroic to stand against it.
They could have done great politically if they'd done the right thing.
Same with Obama and the Afghan surge.
And any of these times they cave on these terrible policies.
They could win by doing right, but they won't.
That's Jon Pfeffer, FPIF.org.
Darkness at high noon.
Thanks, Jon.
Thank you.
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