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He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and was a senior policy advisor to the Energy Department Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment from 1993 to 1999.
And he's got a very important piece at CommonDreams.org.
Korea.
End the 67-Year War.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me on your show.
Very happy to have you here.
And great piece that you wrote.
Now, I think everybody knows this, but if they don't, hey, guys, did you know this?
That we still don't have a peace.
We don't have a real end to the Korean War of 1951 through 53.
How can that be?
Well, there's never been a will on either side to end this war, and it's just sort of one of these things that's become a fact of life.
And to a large extent, it's been used both by North Korea and by the United States and its allies to maintain military regimes in this area.
But now it's sort of reaching a point where we're getting into a level of brinksmanship involving the buildup of nuclear weapons that we have to really think about how do we back away from this in a way that makes the world a safer place.
Yeah, it seems like the Americans are used to just threatening the North Koreans however they like or whenever they like, and yet now they can hit back for the first time.
Well, I mean, the United States basically built up a lot of nuclear weapons in the Korean Peninsula starting in the late 1950s, and these nuclear weapons were not only aimed at North Korea but also China.
People don't also remember that the war in Korea involved a very, very bloody war with China, and it was China that pushed the American military forces back across the 38th parallel at great sacrifice to their armies.
So this is something that's been there for quite a long time, and it's had occasional flare-ups.
There was what is known as the Little Korean War that occurred in the 60s to the mid-70s where there was sort of a low-level conflict that went on between the United States and South Korea, and it's now called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
But what we're looking at right now is the risk of failure of brinksmanship and what this will mean if the United States in particular decides to proceed with what you would call a preventative war and what that will mean for that region and what it will mean for the United States in terms of its safety and security.
Now I don't want to play down the actual danger, but then again I'm not sure I believe that the North Koreans can detonate H-bombs and or especially miniaturize A-bombs or H-bombs and really put them on the head of a missile, but maybe I'm just being a...
Well, assuming they can, they don't have that many to begin with, and they're still a ways away from really developing a thermal nuclear device that could be put on a warhead and much less an intercontinental ballistic missile that could accurately hit a target.
I mean it's one thing to be able to shoot up an ICBM and recognize that it can go so far.
It's another thing for it to be accurate and what its chances are.
And when you put a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile, it shoots up into essentially into low space and then re-enters and undergoes a great bit of what we call shake, rattle, roll, and heat.
And these are very difficult conditions that you have to control in order for the weapon to work and for the missile to be actually accurate.
I think that what we're seeing here are really provocations going on between, particularly between the United States and North Korea.
I mean we hear a lot in the news about North Korea setting off nuclear weapons, firing missiles, but what we don't hear a lot of is that the United States, South Korea, and Japan have been engaged in a stepped up number of war game preparations in order to wage war with North Korea for the last decade or so.
And the other thing is that the stated policy, or actually the unstated policy, but it's been pretty clear, is to throw this regime out.
And so it's almost a perennial situation.
Whenever these war games go on, they've increased in length and duration and intensity.
It provokes the North Koreans into doing things like blowing off nuclear weapons and shooting off missiles as a way of reciprocating this.
So we're getting into this rather spiral.
And the American public is largely unaware of the fact that we remain formally in a state of war, that we do these things, we have a policy of trying to get rid of their regime, and we continue to build up our military forces there in a way that just provokes and makes the situation worse.
China is another situation that we are kind of not paying that much attention to because we always hear our politicians arguing, well, it's really up to China to fix this problem.
China shares an 800-mile border with North Korea.
And they don't want to see an unraveling of this regime or an unraveling of the political social order on the Korean Peninsula be caused by a war because it's going to destabilize a significant portion of their country.
So this really boils down to the United States and North Korea sitting down and hashing it out and working out some sort of arrangement whereby we can maybe find a path to end this war that's been going on for 67 years.
The big problem that we face is that we had a good chance of ending this war and also the North Koreans not having nuclear weapons in the 1990s.
Hang on, because I want to ask you all about that in a second.
But before we get into the agreed framework and all, because I really like when I started reading your article to approve it for Antiwar.com, I got to the paragraph where it says, when I went to North Korea to negotiate the agreed framework around that time, wow, all right, I can't wait to talk to you about that.
But give me a second because let's stick with 2017 here.
There's a great piece by my friend John Schwartz at The Intercept.
North Korea says it might negotiate on nuclear weapons, but The Washington Post isn't reporting that.
And this is just, I try to mention this in every interview about North Korea now to bring this up.
The North Koreans put out a statement that said, as long as the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat continue, no matter who may say what, will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiation table.
In other words, they are willing to negotiate, or at least they're leaving the door open to their willingness to even negotiate their possession of nuclear weapons if America would quit threatening them.
And yet when The Washington Post reports it, all they say is the current regime has made it clear it will never place its nuclear weapons on the negotiating table.
Leaving out the part where they said, as long as you keep threatening us and practicing invading our country and flying B-1 bombers over the DMZ, etc.
Well, I think that's correct.
That's essentially the case.
I mean, North Korea has for years advocated a non-aggression pact with the United States.
And the United States has spurned it, largely arguing that this is just a dirty trick on their part to have us leave the country so they can resume their effort to take over the South.
That's not really a realistic situation.
What we are now, we're stuck with a very large military presence in that region of the world, and we don't want to remove that presence, especially with respect to the looming and growing power of China.
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So, well, so let me ask you about this then before we go back to 1994.
There was a piece, I need to memorize the name of the author, but anyway, it was a piece by a Hoover Institution fellow from Stanford, so a very prominent think tanker type person, writer of studies.
And it was in the Los Angeles Times.
And it said, and this was at the worst of when Trump was threatening fire and fury like the world has never seen, even though the world has seen the U.S. use nuclear weapons in the past, so that's a pretty high threshold.
But anyway, right at the height of this brinksmanship, this author wrote a piece in the LA Times saying, well, you see, we could make peace with North Korea, no problem.
Give them a security guarantee, drop the sanctions, open negotiations, treat them, you know, reasonably, and figure out a way to work these things out.
Yeah, of course, we could, but we don't want to do that.
Because if we don't have the danger of North Korea to threaten South Korea and Japan with, well, then they don't need us.
And if we made peace with North Korea, they might spin off and become independent, or God forbid, even become closer to China and under China's orbit, which would threaten the interests not really of the American people, but of the American government and its hegemony in Asia.
Well, I mean, I think there's a grain of truth in all that.
Oh, and by the way, it wasn't an accusation.
He was saying it was a rationalization, why this is perfectly acceptable.
No, I understand.
I understand.
I think that that's really a very clear-cut way and path that I would tend to agree with, and an analysis I would tend to agree with.
So he's just being more abruptly honest than most.
Because that was really where you ended your last statement there, right?
It was, yeah, but what about China?
We'd rather have our military force there with Korea as the excuse so that we can stay right there off of China's coast.
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, we need to have a large force bristling with weapons because of the geopolitics of that region of the world now, and who's the big dog these days, and what better thing to have is to have somebody who you can paint as a crazy enemy.
What do you think the danger is of war right now?
Eric Margulies was on the show, and he was saying, well, it's not like when Bush marched us into Iraq and no one was going to stop him.
This is more like no one really wants war, but we might just stumble into it anyway with our blowhard president.
I'm nuts up there.
Well, this is what happens in terms of the product of what I call failed brinksmanship.
There's only a certain point at which you can rattle the saber before you pull it out and start to use it, and these provocations don't help much.
And so what we see happening, at least, is an increase in intensity and duration of these war games that go on twice a year, which then create this provocation by North Korea to do more things.
And by the way, these provocations are also, I think, served as the purpose of North Korea to brutally coerce its people because it keeps their people under a state of fear and constant fear of war.
So it's a double-edged sword that's being wielded here.
And to a large extent, the folks at— I mean, today, David Ignatius from the Washington Post actually dipped his toe in the water about whether or not maybe we ought to pull back here on what we're doing in North Korea and the Washington Post, and I began to see that these guys are recognizing that maybe there's a bright line we're approaching, that maybe we should step back.
Was it apparent in that piece that maybe he was speaking for his CIA friends?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I can't speculate about— Sometimes that's more obvious than other times.
But when you're in Washington, D.C., and you've got this— you're an op-ed writer in the area of national security, you, of course, have to cultivate sources in the intelligence and national security system.
Well, and Ignatius especially is known, really, as a mouthpiece of the CIA.
And a lot of times he's very open about it.
Well, I was talking to my CIA friends, and they wanted me to tell you this and that.
I tend to think that that's probably the case.
But, you know, we have to be very, very careful here.
And I think that I was very heartened by the fact that in August of this year, Secretary of State Tillerson made it very clear that the U.S. was not interested in regime change or doing things to undermine the North Koreans' legitimacy.
And, of course, this was then stomped down by Trump in his tweets, you know, throttling the saber.
So at the heart of this issue is really a debate over whether we can— I mean, we're at a stage where we have to think about— we have to understand that I don't think that it's a realistic assumption that North Korea is going to remove its nuclear weapons and end this.
There was a chance to do this in the 90s.
We were well on our way to working that out.
That's over.
And now we're going to have to look at what I call a nuclear arms control agreement, where, you know, our side will take certain actions, perhaps reduce the level of intensity or the number of troops or the war games that we engage in, and the other side will refrain from their missile testing and also maybe agree to certain limits on their arsenal.
All right.
Now, so, I mean, I guess this is crazy.
It's not even part of the debate, but I like it.
What if, I don't know, Ron Paul was the president by some black magic or Donald Trump hit his head and got smart or something happened and he just said, you know what?
I want to be friends.
I'm getting on Air Force One.
I'm flying to Pyongyang.
Don't shoot me down.
I'm coming to hug you.
And then just go over there, drop the sanctions, open up trade relations, go and shake hands like they did with Mao Zedong.
If they can shake hands with Mao Zedong, the worst single human that ever existed, then they can make friends with anybody, right?
The Clinton administration was very close to doing that towards the end of their second term.
There was a real serious effort of setting the stage for a normalization of relationships.
And the North Koreans were willing to give up their development of their missile technology and other things in exchange for recognition, a non-aggression pact, and also money, financial aid from the United States.
And this was all overtaken by the 2000 elections.
And then George W. Bush was president and immediately pulled the plug on all of this work and basically went on the path of regime change.
Now, let's talk about that because, of course, the Agreed Framework, it's a framework, right?
It was a good start on an unfinished negotiation, even by its title, right?
But what exactly did the Agreed Framework do?
And keep in mind that some of the audience is only 20 years old, right?
They were born after the Agreed Framework deal.
I mean, what happened is that in the spring and summer of 1994, the U.S. was on a collision course with North Korea over its efforts to produce plutonium to fuel its very first nuclear weapons.
And thanks to a large part to the diplomacy of former President Jimmy Carter, who met face-to-face with Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, who was the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, they agreed to an outline of an Agreed Framework, and the United States then followed up on that with the bilateral negotiations that were signed in October of 1994.
And what the framework was, it was the very first government-to-government agreement between the United States and North Korea.
There was an actual, you know, when you have a government-to-government agreement, there is a fact that you're actually recognizing that this government is legitimate and it's worth doing business with.
So it opened the door to a possible end of the Korean War.
North Korea agreed to freeze its plutonium production program in exchange for heavy fuel oil, economic cooperation, and construction of two modern light-water nuclear power plants.
And eventually, North Korea's existing nuclear facilities were to be dismantled, and the used reactor fuel, which contained the plutonium, which was a business I was involved with trying to secure, would be taken out of the country.
South Korea at that time also played an active role in helping prepare for the construction of two reactors and was trying to pave the way towards more of a rapprochement.
And so things were moving in this direction, and as I said, the Clinton administration was poised to have a really dramatic Nixon-visits-China moment with North Korea, but it was overtaken by the 2000 elections.
So then what happened, of course, is George W. Bush enrolled North Korea into the Axis of Evil, set up a national security policy to call for preemptive attacks against countries singling out North Korea.
They were developing weapons of mass destruction.
They had their first sit-down with North Korea in October of 2002, and if you recall, this was shortly before the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, and basically laid out an all-or-nothing demand to the North Koreans that they had this secret uranium enrichment program.
It was no secret.
Everyone knew about it for years, and it was addressed in the agreed framework, but it wasn't given a priority at the time and could have been fixed.
And the North Koreans saw this going on.
First of all, it was pretty clear that the new administration didn't want anything to do with having any kind of relationship with them, wanted to overthrow their regime.
Well, and Bush outright abrogated the deal over the uranium enrichment.
They actually thought that the North Koreans would somehow back down, and they were surprised when they quickly came back and said, you know, we're good.
See, this is the answer I never heard before, was what the hell did they think they were doing other than forcing them out of the non-proliferation treaty and into new weapons when they were busy invading Iraq at the time?
Well, it made no sense, and I think that they overestimated the power of wielding a stick with the North Koreans because, you know, here they are poised to invade Iraq, and the North Koreans basically create another huge crisis right on the eve of their invasion.
They were not anticipating this.
Well, like you're saying, though, that they were the ones who created the crisis by making a big deal out of this uranium program, which, as far as we know, never produced any weapons-grade uranium anyway.
Well, it was actually addressed in the agreed framework, but it was not a priority because it was sort of a, you know, a next step kind of thing.
It could have been elevated to a higher level.
But you're saying that when they announced that they were, when the Americans announced they were abrogating the agreed framework based on the uranium accusation, that they didn't think, I mean, because when I go back in hindsight, when we go back in hindsight, you go through the list of things, the national security strategy and the PSI and the breaking of the framework, it seems like they were deliberately trying to force them out of the NPT.
But you're saying that, no, they thought that the North Koreans would capitulate further and say, okay, okay, okay, we'll give up our uranium program, too?
Well, I think that's what they were thinking.
I think they have this attitude that the only thing that works with the North Koreans is a stick, and they don't understand is that when you use a stick with the North Koreans, they then hit you back with a stick.
And there's give and take in these negotiations.
And I was involved, you know, in peripheral ways with the agreed framework, and what I noticed is that this was really a series of threats and concessions going on between the United States and North Korea where it was moving sort of in the right, eventually moved in the right direction.
And the Bush administration people from the get-go said, no, it's our way or the highway, and the North Koreans said, okay, you know, if that's the way it's going to be, we're throwing out the inspectors, we're going to start to develop a group of nuclear weapons.
And what happened was that this set the North Koreans on the path of amassing a nuclear arsenal and eventually developing missiles that eventually will be capable perhaps of reaching the United States, but certainly weaponry that would be able to reach Japan and South Korea as well in the near term.
Wait, go back to 2002 for a second, if it's okay.
Sorry.
This is kind of a thing of mine, and I'm sorry.
For the life of me, I can't remember who it was, but I swear that within the last six months, I've interviewed someone on this show who completely debunked the Korean 2002 uranium enrichment program.
Yeah, they'd bought some aluminum tubes from AQ Khan, but they hadn't used them, and there's really no evidence of it.
And for years and years, I've had different experts of different opinions about the uranium enrichment program.
So I was wondering if you could please, sir, just tell me every single thing that you know in the world that you can think of about what all is known and unknown about what North Korea was actually doing with uranium in the fall of 2002.
Well, I think they were definitely pursuing a uranium enrichment program.
Whether they were doing it for weapons or not is an issue that should have been explored and opened up for debate and discussion with the North Koreans.
I mean, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, every country actually has the right to have a uranium enrichment capability.
The United States basically uses its muscle to prevent countries from taking that path if they can.
So the North Koreans could logically argue that, well, if we're going to have these two light water reactors that require slightly enriched uranium, we want to be self-sufficient and have our own capacity to enrich uranium.
These were the light water reactors that Rumsfeld's company was supposed to provide them under the deal.
Well, actually, that was something that was sort of an open problem because the Republicans didn't want to spend a nickel on any of that.
The South Koreans were actually spending a great deal of money and effort to prepare the sites and help build these reactors.
There was much more heavy lifting going on by the South than the United States on the reactors.
I mean, I personally didn't think that the reactors was a good deal, but it was something that we had to go along with because the North Koreans wouldn't back off on it.
Because if you're going to build these two large modern nuclear reactors on an electrical grid system, of which maybe 30-40% of it was built by the Japanese in the 1930s, it makes no sense unless you're going to have to rebuild the grid, which will effectively double the price.
But we sort of felt this is a door opener.
This is a way for us to sort of open the door to begin to establish a more trustful relationship.
All right, now, so how did you know before the Bush team even knew that they were developing— because we do know that they bought some aluminum tubes for making— You're saying they did build their own atomic facility?
I can only say that we knew about it within the Department of Energy through our intelligence capability.
And the Republican Party in the Congress actually issued a report denouncing the North Koreans for publicly developing uranium enrichment in 1999.
So it was no big secret.
It was in the news media.
It was not something that, you know, aha, we discovered you're cheating.
We all knew about it, and we knew that there was a way to fix this in the context of the agreed framework.
But the Republican Party, the George W. Bush administration, wanted nothing to do with this agreement.
They wanted to maintain—they wanted to overthrow this regime and felt that that was more important than having a rapprochement with this regime.
This business of regime change has continued, even through the Obama administration, by his passive behavior about it.
That is, I think, a serious flaw in U.S. policy.
And I was—like I said, I was very surprised to hear Rex Tillerson basically explicitly say, look, we're not out to overthrow you guys and we're not into undermining your regime.
We want to—and, of course, Trump sort of suddenly, you know, blew him out of the water on that through his tweets and, you know, created a— sort of created a situation where, you know, how can you trust these guys?
The other problem you have to understand is that, you know, we had this agreement with North Korea that went on from October of 1994 until October of 2002.
And they did comply with the terms of that agreement.
You know, we had safeguards, we had security.
They did not—they were taking apart their reactor.
They weren't going to be producing plutonium for weapons.
And that all got tossed out.
And what we're now looking at is, instead of having a nonproliferation agreement, it's a bilateral agreement.
We're looking at some sort of perhaps multilateral, but at least bilateral agreement with arms control to limit the number of weapons they can have and the number of delivery vehicles they have in exchange for U.S. concessions.
Right.
That's sort of where we're at right now, and so— Well, and that's why you're here on the show today, because when I turn on TV, they go, oh, look, the North Koreans, they've got nukes, they've got missiles.
But they always truncate the antecedents.
That's Robert Higgs' phrase.
I like stealing it and using it.
They always just pretend—I don't know, North Korea, I guess, has always had nukes or something, or it's a crisis now, but they never explain why this is America's fault in the first place.
Just like when they say, oh, Iran, Iran, Iran, but they never explain that it was the Republicans that gave Iraq to Iran.
And so they are the ones in the weakest position to be demonizing Iran right now or saying, oh, no, look at the terrible consequences of what I did.
Now we have to do another horrible thing.
If they ever explain that context, then maybe we would stop digging this pit that much deeper.
Well, the other thing that I think is sort of the bad aftermath of pulling the plug on the agreed framework is that North Koreans are going to be looking skeptically at any agreement because they don't— what they learned was that these agreements tend to have a lifespan of one presidential administration.
And what happens if the next administration comes in and pulls the plug on that and they get back on a war footing?
Right, and I shouldn't pick on the Republicans, right, but that's the exact same thing that happened when Bush made a deal with Qaddafi to give up his aluminum tubes that he had bought from AQ Khan, and it was Obama that backstabbed him.
Right.
So same difference.
And yeah, especially with the nuclear deal with Iran now, which you talk about a nuclear deal, this makes the agreed framework look like nothing.
They've double-extra safeguarded Iran's nuclear program beyond all reason.
That is the nuclear arms agreement.
Right, yeah, that doesn't even approach arms because they're not even anywhere near arms yet, and Trump wants to destroy that?
Surrender's not good enough.
Right.
So— And so— Yeah, if you were the North Koreans' audience, you would be making nukes too, else the USA's coming.
Well, see, I was over there on several occasions to— one of my jobs was to put together the project to secure the spent fuel at the Yongbyon site and to bring teams of American experts in to help do this and work collaboratively with the North Koreans to get the spent fuel and put it into canisters and have it subjected to international inspections to make sure that the plutonium that was in there would not be extracted.
And what sort of came out of those visits was the fact that I hadn't realized it.
You know, I was a little kid when the Korean War was going on, but we leveled almost all standing structures in that country over a period of two or three years and used an enormous amount of napalm.
And this has left a deep, deep scar in the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
The North Korean regime uses this constantly to remind its citizens of the enormous harm caused by the United States.
You know, I went out jogging one morning in Pyongyang, and people wouldn't look at me.
They would avoid me.
I thought, how strange is this?
I discovered that in their daily newspaper they were warning people that the American devils are coming, not to look at them, not to relate to them.
There has been a steady spoon-feeding of the North Korean government to the public about the enormous harm that was caused, and it was enormous.
I'm really glad you brought that up, and in the article, too, I think more and more, when I read about North Korea, people are mentioning this.
The scholarship is getting, you know, out there in the public a little broader.
It was a terrible, terrible war.
I mean, the United States suffered humiliating defeats.
I mean, most people, when they think of Korea, if they think of Korea at all, all they know is Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan, and that show was really about Vietnam, not Korea anyway.
But anyway, that's all we know of it, because they don't ever really talk about it on TV.
Most Americans don't read.
We just watch TV, and they hardly ever discuss it at all.
Maybe some people know about the Inchon Landing and this kind of thing, the Chinese volunteers coming across the border, but what you said about, oh yeah, no, we burnt down the entire northern half of that peninsula and killed millions of people, Americans don't know that.
Americans have never been asked, Americans have never been asked, hey, think about, what if in some sci-fi fantasy, some Asian country came and killed everybody in Washington State, all of them?
Would you be over that?
Would you think that, well, you know, that was a long time ago when they killed millions of us.
It was also, I mean, domestically, it was a war that politicians wanted to move on and hopefully the public would forget about, because it led to a bloodbath and a sort of a standoff where there was no victory.
And a lot of our GIs were coming back severely wounded, and actually, there wasn't any formal declaration of war made.
It was a police action that was run through the United Nations, which the United States had held sway over.
But Dean Russ, who was Secretary of State during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said several years later that bombs were dropped on, quote, everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.
And over the years, the North Korean regime has developed a vast system of underground tunnels and are constantly doing civil defense drills and have, for years and years, have inundated their population with the fear of another such, you know, carpet bombing problem going on.
And it sounds silly to us, right, as Americans who live in a pretty nice country.
I mean, I live in Austin, Texas, which is just a really nice town.
I mean, what can I say?
It sounds crazy to think that some military dictator with his garrison totalitarian state over there in Korea would tell the people of Korea that Americans are devils, that we're some, you know, supernatural demon thing.
But I'm saying that that's because we don't have the imagination to put ourselves in their shoes.
That if, in other words, if we really did look at it from their point of view, knowing the true history of what America has done to them before, if you were just the subject, the propagandized subject of a totalitarian state, and they are saying these very worst things about the Americans, you would have every reason to believe them.
It wouldn't just be that they say it all the time.
It would be that you know that this is the history of your family, is the time the Americans came and killed everybody.
And we have almost totally erased this history in terms of Americans, you know, the subsequent generations of Americans.
And even, you know, I'm an old man baby boomer now, and all I remember is listening to radio shows of F-86 Sabre jets fighting Russian MiGs in Korea and seeing relatives coming back who were severely wounded.
But no one talked about it much because it wasn't the kind of war that you could compare to World War II where, you know, we were fighting people who there was a general consensus we were fighting an evil force for the purpose of trying to make the world a safer place, and we won.
And except this was a war that turned into a standoff.
We suffered enormous military defeats at the hands of the Chinese.
It wasn't really even a war.
It forced President Truman to not run for re-election.
It took Dwight Eisenhower to go in and put a stop to it through the Armistice Agreement.
Now having said this about the Armistice Agreement, the other point I would like to make is that the United States also, I think, planted the seeds for the North Koreans to pursue nuclear weapons when it decided to violate a fundamental provision of the Armistice Agreement, Section 13D, which barred any of the parties from introducing more destructive weapons.
And the United States decided to bring in, over a period of several years, thousands of nuclear weapons which were not just aimed at North Korea, but also at China.
And that, by the late 1980s, early 90s, all those weapons were removed.
But in the meantime, the United States pretty much shredded that Armistice Agreement by ignoring one of the fundamental features of it, which is you shouldn't have a big arms buildup on the Korean Peninsula, which the United States decided to do with nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know, I keep thinking that, I mean, in my gut, it says that, look, we've had this sort of, I mean, my eyes tell me, my history knows, we've had relative peace there for all these decades.
As you said, there was that mini kind of war in the 70s.
Well, I mean, people don't remember things like the Pueblo, where an entire ship was seized.
Yeah.
But I mean, that's been a while.
I guess I'm just saying It's on display in North Korea.
I'm just saying it seems unthinkable that Trump would just start dropping H-bombs on people or that this kind of thing really, I mean, or that a skirmish could escalate into something like that, and yet it seems like a lot of, you know, real experts, people like William Perry, are saying, hey, we gotta, you know, Charles Kruthammer, he's another one who came and said, you know what, I think we're going to have to accept North Korea's nuclear weapons capability and ratchet this thing back down again.
And he's known, of course, as a hardcore war hawk, led the parade into Iraq.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think there's a growing consensus about that.
I mean, the other thing that's sort of there but not being discussed is, I do not believe for a moment that if we have a major war with North Korea, that China will stand idly by and allow that regime to be destroyed.
You think they would just outright intervene or they would demand the Americans stop first?
Well, I mean, we owe them $20 trillion.
Yeah, that's true.
I guess there's all kinds of leverage they might want to use, but they're just not going to, you know, they have an 800-mile border in Manchuria with millions and millions of ethnic Koreans.
And the last thing they want to have is to have that part of their country and that part of the world destabilized and turned into a huge war zone, where you have the prospect now of nuclear-armed warlords roaming around.
Well, and you have Vladivostok is just up the way, too.
Yeah, and the Russians also share some of that border as well.
And the Russians have had a long-standing client relationship with North Korea until the end of the Cold War, which we also don't pay much attention to.
But I also think, you know, that we risk having a very serious confrontation with China if we get into a so-called preventative war with South Korea.
And there's hardly any mention of that right now.
The only mention of China is that it's their job to fix this for us.
And that's totally wrong.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I guess maybe I am starting to get a bad feeling about this.
I mean, clearly the whole situation, the theme of this whole interview is that it doesn't have to be this way at all.
It doesn't have to be this way at all.
And yet we're talking about the possibility of a full-scale genocide.
Well, I think that there are, I mean, I always...
And maybe Japan got moot, too.
One of my favorite hobbies is building hopes.
Yeah.
And I think that...
You're doing a great job.
The people who understand the consequences more than anybody else is our military.
The last thing, you know, they're there.
They're doing what they're told.
But they also understand what it will mean when you get into a serious ground war on the Korean Peninsula.
You're talking about wiping out nearly all the population of Seoul, Japan being attacked.
You know, these are...
These are serious issues.
And I think our military is very cognizant of this.
Yeah.
Well, James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general, now Secretary of Defense, was quoted recently saying...
It sounded like a warning.
Didn't sound like he was chomping at the bit there.
But he said, look, this would be the most bitter fighting of our lifetimes, period.
That's it.
And so he's including Vietnam in the previous Korean War.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean...
It's not World War II, I guess.
It's not World War II, I guess.
I mean...
The...
The North Koreans have been preparing for another war with the United States since the 1950s.
And...
And one of the things that they've done is that they have one of the most extensive systems of tunnels in the world.
And getting into a ground war in North Korea is going to be a nightmare.
I mean, this is not Hollywood we're talking about here.
Or, you know, the SEAL Team 6 or that kind of stuff.
This is serious...
A serious ground war that would turn into a major carnage.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry that I kept you so long, but I'm glad that I did.
Thank you very much, Robert.
I really appreciate it.
You're very welcome.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that is Robert Alvarez.
He's at the Institute for Policy Studies, a senior scholar there, and was Senior Policy Advisor at the Energy Department from 1993 to 1999.
And you can read this one here at Common Dreams, Korea, End the 67-Year War.
And you know me, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, and foolserend.us for my book, Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
