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Okay, you guys, I'm Scott Horton.
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Okay, introducing John Pfeffer.
He's our friend, and he's the director of foreign policy in Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Terrifying.
Before that, he wrote a thing.
What is it called?
Islam 2.0?
Something like that.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, John?
Great to be on your show again, Scott.
What was the Islam book?
Crusade 2.0.
Crusade 2.0.
Sorry.
Yeah, I knew that wasn't right when I said it, but I just didn't know what it was.
I got the color scheme right in the picture of my brain, but not the text.
Great.
Hey, listen, welcome back to the show.
It's been too long since we've spoken.
Appreciate you joining us today.
It's a pleasure.
We're going to talk about North Korea, yes?
Yeah, afraid so.
This article says, what does Kim Jong-un want?
So that's my question to you.
Go ahead.
Well, I think the conventional wisdom is that Kim Jong-un is either insane or an infant.
And insane people and infants don't have rational wants.
They are either irrational or non-rational.
And therefore, if Kim Jong-un is an infant or a madman, there's no point in actually dealing with him because it's impossible to come up with any kind of rational negotiating framework or set of demands.
Now, wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
I brought you on the show today to talk about North Korea, not the anniversary of the Waco massacre.
Why are you talking about what they did to David Koresh?
Saying that he was crazy and that he couldn't be dealt with and that he had illegal weapons and they had to send the Delta Force to kill him.
I'm sorry.
I was hoping that your audience would recognize the context within which I was speaking.
But maybe I should have been more clear.
I got you.
No, I'm just screwing around.
But yeah, no, I've seen this movie before.
It's the exact same thing that they did to Saddam Hussein.
And of course, this is the great quote of Ayman al-Zawahiri talking about the United States of America.
They only understand one thing force because they're crazy because they're infants, because there's only one way to deal with them.
Exactly.
So that's that's basically the kind of narrative that Kim Jong Un has been injected into.
And so what I was arguing basically in my article is that, no, in fact, Kim Jong Un has some very rational goals.
And I tried to set those out.
First would be to preserve his own position and the position of his government.
In other words, kind of regime continuity.
And that's not unusual.
I mean, you would find that's the case for most leaders around the world, even democratically elected ones who want to preserve the at least the position of their party in power.
Second is in order to kind of strengthen his regime and his legitimacy as a leader, he's got to get his economy back in good shape.
And it's not in good shape.
It hasn't been in good shape since basically the 1990s, if not earlier.
And that means, well, it actually means getting some injection of capital.
I would argue that North Korea is not a communist country.
It's basically a capitalist wannabe country, but it lacks that one key element of capitalism, and that is capital.
So in order to get his government back in the good graces of the population, he's got to, well, he's got to get the economy functioning again, manufacturing, agriculture.
But in order to do that, well, he's got to deal with the United States, because the United States basically holds the key to ending the isolation of North Korea.
It's economic isolation.
It's diplomatic isolation.
It's political and cultural isolation.
That's basically the argument of the article.
So, you know, I don't know, man.
This is my bias.
It's my confirmation bias straight out of the dictionary.
Every time I hear anybody say anything about North Korea, all I hear is, look at all these grand opportunities for peace.
All we have to do is, we have so much to offer and so much aggression to cease that, you know what, we'll quit threatening to kill you, and we'll open up some trade relations.
If you'll go back to your 2008 shutdown the Pyongyang reactor type situation, let's start there.
Why not?
Why not send Rex Tillerson to Pyongyang right now?
Mm-hmm.
Why not?
Indeed.
I mean, I think that there is a good possibility that of all the governments we've had here in the United States over the last three decades, the Trump administration is perhaps best positioned to make that kind of deal.
And I say that because, number one, Donald Trump more than anything else wants to demonstrate that he's better than Barack Obama.
And that means basically demonstrating very concretely that Obama's North Korea policy was a failure.
And to do that, he's got to somehow distinguish his policy from what took place over the last 80 years.
And that means somehow demonstrating that, A, strategic patience isn't going to work.
B, tightening of sanctions is not going to be the big game changer.
There's got to be something else.
I mean, and he has two options.
One is to, well, take the Islamic State approach to North Korea and bomb the S out of them or negotiate with them.
And I think that, you know, given all the advice Trump has gotten over the last couple of months about North Korea, they did a strategic review.
He's had some experts come in.
He's talked to the military.
And the consensus is that a military strike would be counterproductive on every single level for the U.S., not only the U.S., but also the countries in the region, which leaves negotiations.
So your confirmation bias in this case is absolutely correct.
But of course, you know, there are, quote unquote, political realities that the Trump administration has to deal with.
But it has ignored those political realities with other countries and in other situations.
There's no reason why it can't ignore those political realities in this case as well.
Yeah, well, it's too bad he's such a buffoon and has no ideas or doctrines or policies or anything to even change.
I mean, he just he's like he's lost in the dark.
He's he's the prisoner of his military commander advisers, basically.
And I don't even think he's smart enough to understand the dynamic that, you know, weak, liberal, sissy Barack Obama never could do this.
A big, tough Republican like Trump could go and easily shake hands with and make friends with our enemies.
And it's OK, because he's Nixon.
He can go to China.
No one could go to China or Nixon would call him a commie.
But Nixon can go and there's nobody left to call him a commie.
He's Nixon.
Same thing here.
So he could go to I think he could go to Pyongyang.
He could go to Moscow.
He could go to Beijing.
He could go to Tehran and say enough of this.
The 20th century is over.
Let's all be friends and trade.
He could do that.
And in fact, you know, I think, you know, your characterization of Trump is is correct, but he is capable of changing his position.
Now, he changes his position, you know, in part because Ivanka tells him something or shows him a photograph or he gets a mini lecture from Xi Jinping about the relationship between North Korea and China.
And as a result, he he realizes that things are more complicated than he hitherto realized.
So it's very possible that someone will give him a 10 minute lecture on, you know, what opportunities the United States could take advantage of by sitting down with the North Korean leadership.
And he'll say, huh, hadn't really thought of that.
Hadn't really envisioned, say, a Trump Tower in downtown Pyongyang.
Hadn't really envisioned the United States extracting, you know, rare earth elements from North Korea the way China is right now.
That could be really fantastic.
Really, really classy.
So, I mean, this is something that he could pivot, you know, to to to understanding.
I mean, I don't I don't expect a sophisticated, well-planned out, you know, geopolitically complex approach to North Korea, you know, comparable to what Nixon and Kissinger did with China.
They required all sorts of moving parts and, you know, negotiations on several continents and middlemen, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't really expect that from Trump.
I expect a kind of vulgar, in-your-face, splashy announcement followed by, you know, a kind of Dennis Rodman-like flourish, you know.
But hey, if it if it means that we move away from the current confrontation and we take a few steps toward some form of engagement with North Korea, so be it.
Yeah.
I'm glad you brought up Dennis Rodman.
I mean, I think that was the greatest thing that happened since they sent the...
Didn't they send the Symphony Orchestra over there in 1995 or something like that?
Correct.
1996.
You know, this is how you do it.
Here's how we get to Trump.
Memes.
We need to make Frederick Bastiat memes.
Where goods do not cross borders, armies will.
And because somebody could read that to him and he could understand it, maybe.
Absolutely.
This is what keeps the peace between us and China, right, is that there's way too much invested.
They have to export a bazillion dollars worth of stuff to us every single day or their regime falls apart.
And the American corporations who have the trillions of dollars invested in China that they have in producing all of that junk, they got to keep the peace, too.
Keep everything going.
It's not like we can rely on their Christianity and kind spirit to keep the peace, John.
We need them to have a vested financial interest in keeping the peace.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I think the upcoming elections in South Korea, basically South Korea was under 10 years of pretty hard line policy toward North Korea.
And that is coming to the end with the impeachment and imprisonment of Park Geun-hye.
We got two candidates who are fighting it out in South Korea.
And I think whoever wins, either Moon Jae-in or Ahn Chol-soo, we're going to see a change in South Korea and their policy toward North Korea.
And I think we'll see the resumption of some form of economic cooperation between the two countries.
And I think that might stimulate some thinking here in the United States about the relative benefits of economic cooperation with North Korea.
And once we have that kind of leverage, you know, that kind of economic investment, it makes it a lot easier to build on that for a variety of different purposes, but definitely for the purpose of dealing with the nuclear issue.
So now there were previous governments in South Korea that had this sunshine policy with North Korea.
Was that something that the Clinton administration had endorsed?
Initially, I think they were skeptical about it.
And, you know, the sunshine policy basically began near the end of the Clinton administration, so 98, 99.
But I think ultimately they saw the advantages of it.
They saw how it did fit in with their own agreed framework agreement with North Korea.
And it was really only with the advent of the George W. Bush administration that we saw some real divergence of opinion between the United States and South Korea.
And, of course, George W. Bush, not happy with the agreed framework, not happy with North Korea, includes it in the axis of evil.
And South Korea is still adhering, you know, to the sunshine policy and does so basically until approximately 2004, 2005.
So you have a good five years there of a lot of daylight between the United States and South Korea on how to deal with North Korea.
And I would say that the Obama administration and the Park Geun-hye administration, they were pretty much on the same page when it came to strategic patience and kind of turning the screws on North Korea.
We'll see what happens with a new South Korean administration.
I think maybe this kind of transactional economic engagement approach with North Korea has a real shot if the South Koreans endorse it.
Obviously, China's on board with that.
And maybe Trump can be persuaded of its efficacy.
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All right.
Now, would you do me a favor and tell him real quick about what happened with Chris Hill, the State Department negotiator in 2008?
Because it seemed like that was really instructive as far as the possibility, kind of debunking what you were saying at the beginning about how this guy is such a nut that he can't possibly be dealt with.
And I know that was the father, but still, same regime, that they actually made more progress than they thought they could.
And then they sort of freaked out.
They didn't mean to make that much progress, right?
Right.
Well, it was in the second term of the Bush administration.
So there had been about six years of hardline policy toward North Korea.
And I think the Bush administration had expected, frankly, that the Kim Jong Il administration would collapse.
And there was some reason to expect that.
I mean, obviously, when the Bush administration came in, North Korea was still suffering from pretty significant famine, collapse of its industrial and agricultural production.
It was not in good shape.
And Kim Jong Il himself didn't have the charismatic authority of his father, Kim Il-sung.
So there were lots of kind of indicators that maybe North Korea was teetering on the edge.
And all it needed was a good kind of kick from the United States.
So the United States gives it a couple of really good kicks, and it doesn't collapse.
And so six years into the administration, Chris Hill and a couple other people, including Victor Cha and the National Security Council, come up with another plan.
They say, well, look, North Korea hasn't collapsed.
Let's see if we can negotiate this kind of nascent nuclear program negotiated away.
And we know what North Korea needs.
And it's the same things I mentioned at the top of the show about capital and access to the international economy, diplomatic recognition, et cetera, et cetera.
Let's see if we can come up with a negotiating framework.
Now, the problem was, of course, that the Bush administration had a kind of stated policy that anything had to be multilateral rather than bilateral.
So the negotiators, including Chris Hill, had to figure out a way around that.
They called together the so-called Six-Party Talks, which was China, Russia, North and South Korea, Japan, the United States.
And they kind of set up this negotiating framework.
But beforehand, the United States sat down in a set of secret bilateral discussions with North Korea to essentially establish the agenda and also give North Korea what it wanted, which was a sit-down with the United States one-on-one.
So once that was out of the way, it cleared the path for the Six-Party Talks to really get going and to address North Korea's nuclear program.
But not just that.
It also addressed economic, political, regional security issues.
And as you said, it got much further than anyone expected.
And in fact, on the eve of Barack Obama taking office, it looked like it could move on from the nuclear issue to address even North Korea's missile program, which was another area of concern for the United States.
Barack Obama comes in, and as with all other incoming administrations, expresses some skepticism about its predecessor's approach to North Korea, undertakes a review, doesn't really reach out to North Korea to indicate that it's still interested in following up on the Six-Party Talks.
North Korea kind of gets pissed off.
So by the time the Obama administration kind of gets back into the negotiating framework set of mind, it's too late.
I mean, the two sides do manage to get an agreement called the Leap Day Agreement, but that didn't last very long.
It lasted like a couple days, because there was basically no trust between the two sides.
And that's when we kind of went to a default position of strategic patience.
And that lasted for a good six years, unfortunately.
All right.
Now, so they've tested, what, six A-bombs so far?
They've had five tests.
Oh, five tests.
Sorry.
And they're getting ready for a sixth.
And now, so the Trump administration is saying, and Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting has done a real good job of pointing out how no one in official media even questions the premise at all, that it would be okay to launch a war in response to a, quote, test of a nuclear bomb.
And that, yeah, that just goes without saying.
That's perfectly within the president's power to do that.
Just had Gene Healy on to talk about what everyone pretends the War Powers Resolution says, as opposed to what it really says, on questions like this, a president starting wars.
And, you know, there's a lot of loose talk.
There was one in NBC, based on intelligence sources, said they're preparing a preemptive war.
DOD and State Department walked that back pretty severely the next day.
And I tend to believe them more, because intelligence sources talking about what the Navy's doing, but no Navy sources.
It didn't sound like a good story in the first place.
But still, you know, I don't know.
They're messing around.
Donald Trump is, I guess, giving us his best drunk Richard Nixon impersonation.
And maybe he's crazy.
Maybe he'll do it.
Maybe he won't.
This kind of thing.
You think there's a real threat of war?
Or, on the other hand, everybody knows, as you said at the beginning here, that any war with North Korea would be a disaster for everyone involved.
And there's just no question about that.
The people with the power in D.C. and in Virginia, they must know that they just can't.
Right?
Well, you know, when was the last time two sides began a war for rational reasons, or as the kind of end point of a rational set of calculations?
I mean, wars begin for irrational reasons.
And it's entirely possible that a conflict between the United States and North Korea could break out even though both sides recognize that it's not in their rational self-interest to do so.
That's how wars begin.
And so I don't want to discount that possibility.
And, you know, it could be even just a matter of personal prestige, which is often the case with these kinds of conflicts.
In other words, you know, the two sides escalate, and for fear of backing down and looking weak, which, you know, for North Korea it's a question of survival.
You know, if they look weak, then, you know, they're basically the wounded gazelle at the back of the pack, and they'll be set upon by wolves very quickly.
For the United States, or for Donald Trump, a sign of weakness is a sign of his own personal weakness, and therefore he would definitely not want to back down and show the world that he is weaker than, God forbid, Barack Obama.
So war is always a possibility, but, you know, I at the moment tend to be relatively optimistic only because I think we've been here before at this particular junction, and at every point in the past when we've been at this point, we've stepped back.
And despite the rhetoric, despite the leaks, despite the preparations, it just, it's not a part of the world that is so important to the United States that it would put itself in a position where a misstep would be more likely than not.
I would feel a little differently if this was, say, Ukraine, and we were escalating with the Russians, or we were escalating with Iran.
In North Korea, it's not really been at the top of the priority list for the United States, except on a very occasional basis when, you know, the North Koreans are preparing for a nuclear test, or there's been excessive rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang, or Congress or hawks elsewhere pushing the president to make a stand, to draw a red line, to say, you know, from their point of view, nonproliferation requires the United States to stop North Korea's nuclear program by any means necessary.
Yeah.
Well, now, so the good news is that their missiles are a bunch of junk, and there's really not as much hurry, even if you accepted the premise that we can't let them achieve the ability to hit North America with a nuke.
Look, it's expensive to put together a good missile program, as well as a functioning nuclear program.
And I don't discount the technical expertise of North Korea.
I think that, you know, given enough time, they can, with pretty great certainty, put together some kind of a nuclear program and missile program that one day, maybe 40 years from now, could threaten the United States.
But it's extraordinarily expensive, and they don't have the resources to do that.
At the moment, you know, they can display as many missiles as they like, but their missile tests have failed.
Now, whether those missile tests have failed because the United States has managed to hack into them somehow and make those missiles go awry in test conditions, or simply because it is actually very difficult to do missile launches and make them successful.
But even if they were to make those successful, that's still a big jump from being able to target something effectively.
You know, to actually send a missile to its intended target and deliver that payload, that's extraordinarily difficult.
And North Korea is, at least with respect to long-range missiles, very far from achieving that goal.
All right, now, so here's the thing, is that there's no such thing as the national interest, it's just the interest of the people in charge.
And so I wonder if something as stupid as missile defense from Chinese missiles, based in South Korea, that in the event of a real nuclear war with China, would end up making the most marginal difference of anything at all, anyway.
Whether some ridiculous, you know, corporate welfare program, like missile defense, basically is all it is.
Whether something like that could be an important enough project is actually a big part of why we never make peace.
We need the North Koreans to be the excuse for our anti-Chinese, bogus, doesn't-ever-work-and-will-never-work missile defense system that costs so much.
Is that possible, that priorities could be that screwed up, incentives could be that screwed up in the choices being made here in the policy?
I think there is some truth to that.
I mean, we have a set of military contractors that are producing systems, weapons, missile defense, that attain their own logic, that attain their own kind of inertial momentum.
In other words, once started, they will continue on their path unless they meet something of equal and opposite power.
And, you know, it's extraordinarily difficult to stop these programs.
So, given the fact that they do fulfill, at least formally, some international ambitions for the United States, they strengthen the alliance with South Korea.
I'm talking about THAAD here, the missile defense system that we just introduced into South Korea.
So, they send an important signal to our allies, South Korea and Japan.
They have, at least formally, some capability for shooting down some long-range missiles.
They, because of their radar capabilities, provide a little bit more intelligence about what's going on in China.
So, I mean, they meet certain formal requirements for a system to go forward.
It's going to go forward.
I don't think it's going to, it doesn't really require a lot of thinking in Washington about, you know, does this, you know, is this just a boondoggle that helps, you know, keep the military-industrial complex humming.
Yeah, well, it does, but I don't think anybody really talks about it that way or consciously promotes it in that sense.
It just happens to do so because it's part of the system.
I do think that there is a possibility for missile defense to be defeated, at least this particular form of it, THAAD in South Korea, because the recent frontrunner, Moon Jae-in, very skeptical about THAAD.
He said that he thought that the negatives overwhelmed the positives when it came to that system, and he would reconsider it.
So, you know, it's not a done deal.
South Korean opposition would be that equal and opposite force that could derail this particular locomotive.
Yeah.
All right, well, it's funny, you know, as we're talking here, David Axe has one in the Daily Beast about the massive, what is it, the massive ordnance penetrator.
It makes the MOAB look like an M-80, he says, and this is made to get all those underground bunkers.
I guess, you know, at first glance, we're talking about all the artillery within range of Seoul there and rockets and stuff, but I guess we're also talking about wherever they have there are a dozen or so nuclear bombs hidden in whichever mountains or underground bunkers that they want to be able to take that out to.
Do you get the idea that maybe the military guys are pretty confident that if they launched a big first strike Lockheed commercial air war against North Korea that it would, quote, work and it'd be fine, they have enough of these MOPs that they can take care of, whatever we need to take care of kind of thing?
I think most people in the U.S. military don't believe that.
There may be a couple of starry-eyed, you know...
So the Air Force and the Navy's opinion that matters the most, their leaders, whether they really think their planes are up to handling all this in the first six hours so that it's not a problem after that.
I mean, right?
That's what we're talking about, and that sounds crazy to me.
The problem is they don't really...
It's not a question of being able to drop the things.
They don't know exactly where to drop them.
I mean, these are underground facilities that are very difficult to locate.
It's possible to find the testing site.
It's possible, of course, to take out missile launch sites.
But the full extent of the nuclear program, probably not.
And then what about all those artillery positions facing Seoul?
It would be tough to take all of those out and prevent North Korea from retaliating.
And I think that's uppermost in the considerations of the military, just the sheer difficulty of eliminating North Korea's retaliatory capacity.
All right, and then I'm sorry I'm keeping you so long, but just one more thing.
Can you tell me again about the new guys and how whoever wins, it's either going to be the liberal or the leftist that wins and that they're pretty much guaranteed to have a better policy than the lady that's just been kicked out and is facing prison here?
Correct.
So the progressive candidate is Moon Jae-in.
He's been around for a while.
He ran against Park Geun-hye in the last presidential election about five years ago.
Ahn Chol-su is a kind of independent.
He's center-left, made his money in computers.
He's considered kind of a political outsider in South Korea.
But he too, I think, shares Moon Jae-in's perspective that South Korea's foreign policy has not been particularly effective over the last few years with respect to North Korea.
So whichever one wins, and it will be one or the other because the conservatives are divided and they're also in quite a funk after the impeachment imprisonment of their party leader, either one of those who wins, Moon or Ahn, will see a pretty significant change, I think, in South Korea's foreign policy.
And then how much effect will that have because Donald Trump's driving this thing anyway, right, or not?
Well, again, it's a question of changing facts on the ground.
As much as the United States is the ultimate determinant of what goes on in Northeast Asia on security issues, South Korea's proximity, its location, and its economic power and its on-again, off-again relationship with North Korea and its pretty strong, until recently, economic relationship with China, all of those factors mean that South Korea can play an important role in changing a dynamic on the ground that the United States has to acknowledge, has to adapt to.
In other words, if they institute a new sunshine policy, Trump would, I mean, George W. Bush was willing to quash it, but it'd be hard to stop from D.C. if they went ahead, sort of, is what you're saying.
There are real levers.
I mean, it is, for instance, the Kaesong Industrial Complex.
It's tough to reconstitute that given the sanctions regime, especially the financial sanctions, but there are ways around that, and I think the South Koreans could do that.
If they were to do it, yeah, I mean, the United States could lobby as hard as it could, but because it's a business deal, there is a good possibility that the South Koreans could persuade Trump of its value and even, perhaps, persuade Trump that the United States should do something similar.
Right.
Yep, I mean, you're absolutely right.
Speak his language, you know, put it all in terms of business, and actually, in his terms of business, he doesn't understand that business is supposed to be a mutual beneficial exchange.
He thinks it's all about one side crushing the other, but so you just explain it to him that way.
This is like winning in a business deal, Donald, and see if you can get him to go for that.
Exactly.
All right.
Hey, listen, thank you for coming back on the show, John.
It's good to talk to you again.
It's been a pleasure.
All right, y'all.
That is John Pfeffer, the director of Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's fpif.org.
He's the author of the new novel Splinterlands.
Find him at fpif.org.
And we re-ran this one also at antiwar.com.
What Does Kim Jong-un Want?
from April the 10th.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org slash interviews and libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow and follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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