War is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Clausewitz, for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today I authorize the Armed Forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of arms in the world today.
My own government.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute.
He's been all around the world a hundred times, and he's good on just about everything far as I can tell.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you?
Happy to be on.
Happy to have you here.
Oh, I should mention that you write for the National Interest and for Forbes as well as Cato.org there.
Listen, so North Korea.
Uh, well, you think there's really going to be a war or we're going to get close?
It seems like Donald Trump has drawn, like Barack Obama, a red line that's unenforceable without a major catastrophe.
Well, that's the scary thing, is that if you listen to what he said, you know, it sounds like we're going to have one.
You know, basically he says he's not going to let the North build nuclear weapons and missiles, but the North says they want them for defense.
You put those two statements together, it looks pretty bad.
My hope is that he's bluffing, that he's trying to intimidate them, but we don't know.
I mean, nobody really is inside the head of Donald Trump, so exactly what he plans on doing, we just don't know.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so, I mean, the parallel to a rock war, too, is not there, right?
Where they're hell-bent on, they're going to lie us into that regime change policy one way or the other kind of thing.
It doesn't seem like that.
You know, Eric Margulies was on the show and said, I'm really afraid they're going to blunder into this thing, that Trump thinks he knows what he's doing, but he doesn't know what he's doing, and he's going to end up making a series of mistakes that cause this thing to ignite.
Yeah, I think that the greatest danger here probably is mistaken misjudgment.
It's not like they're going out and selling this to the American people, making a case for why, you know, they need to do this.
You know, I mean, the Bush folks did that, you know, very strongly.
I mean, you know, they went out of their way to mislead and to lie about everything, and they kind of get us into that war.
My sense is that Trump seems to assume if he talks tough, everything will work out.
And I worry that what he's going to do is he's going to convince the North Koreans that war is coming, and if they think it's about to happen, then they have an incentive to strike first.
The worst thing they can do is to wait, you know, for the U.S. to attack.
So he could very well trigger a war that nobody wants simply because of his kind of blundering, his kind of blustering.
Mm-hmm.
All right, now, so good cop, bad cop makes sense, right?
Nixon telling Kissinger, Tell him I'm drunk, Henry, and I'm gonna do something crazy.
Okay, like I don't approve of that, but I understand it, right?
But so if Trump is playing bad cop, and he sends Tillerson over there to play good cop, then what sense does it make to tweet, ah, don't bother Tillerson, which is another way of saying, North Korea, don't bother listening to him.
He doesn't have my confidence, and so he can't really make any promises on my behalf.
Yeah, that's obviously the problem, that a good cop, bad cop works only if you actually believe the good cop has some authority.
If you believe that the good cop is irrelevant, then it doesn't matter.
So, you know, that suggests that if that is his strategy, he's blowing it.
So I suspect it's probably not his strategy.
He just, you know, he doesn't think talking actually will help, though.
During the campaign, he said he'd be happy to sit down with, uh, you know, Kim Jong-un.
So, you know, this is somebody who I think he gets up one morning and has one feeling.
Maybe he gets up another morning and has something very different.
Again, if you're trying to figure this out, and frankly, if you're, you know, South Koreans or North Koreans trying to figure this out, you have no idea.
It's kind of scary because you just don't know what might happen.
Yeah.
Well, so, I mean, Trump and Tillerson, you also have Madison McMaster up there.
I mean, they must have some kind of policy that they've agreed on.
Not that they can necessarily get the president to stay within it, but they have had some, at least back-channeled, direct talks with the North Koreans, right?
I mean, there is a policy.
Apparently, they've been primarily through, you know, the, uh, basically the human rights ambassador, who's a holdover for Obama, so he doesn't have much authority.
You know, there's been some kind of informal stuff with, you know, kind of private Americans talking, but it's not at all clear, you know, what comes of that.
You know, unless you have the decision-makers sit down, it's not clear you can make much progress.
So, you send in, you know, somebody from the previous administration who doesn't, you know, meet with the president.
What can he achieve in those talks?
And then, of course, the whole thing with Warmbier, you know, the college student.
You know, really kind of, you know, set things off there as well.
So, I don't know if we're getting very much talking going on, and that's scary to me.
You know, we talked with the Soviets through the Cold War.
Nasty people, but it would have been dumb not to.
But, as far as I can tell, we don't have anything regular going on with the North.
Yeah.
Well, I don't understand.
Why not, Doug?
I mean, it seems like, you know, Donald Trump, he's not a Clinton or a Bush.
He's, he ran on being divorced from their stupid policies, and wants to do things different.
As you said, he said he would talk to Kim Jong-un, said he was a smart cookie.
You know, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but it was a compliment.
It was, he was trying to thaw the ice a little bit there, but then what happened?
I think that Trump is somebody who kind of has feelings, but not policies.
So, he's somebody who, during the campaign, rightly talked about the importance of diplomacy, but then also clearly has this kind of urge to go mono-a-mono, you know, and be the tough guy, and perhaps feels that that's the only way he can sell his presidency, you know, is by appearing to be the tough guy.
But you look at what he said on Europe and other things.
I mean, he's complained about the Europeans kind of living off the United States on defense, and then Tillerson and Mattis kind of do all the same stuff.
He recently gave a speech, and he again complained about the Europeans not doing enough.
And you wonder, well, it's a year after you've been elected, you're president, why don't you do something?
Very hard to understand.
So, I think there's a sense, there's nothing coherent going on.
Certain things bug him, he gets up one day, wants to emphasize that, he talks about it, but there's no follow-through, there's no strategizing.
You know, he's very good, in a sense, to playing to the public in certain ways, and kind of recognizing what bugs people, you know, a willingness to say what he thinks, and not, you know, feel the need to filter himself, gains a certain amount of public appeal.
But I don't think he has a strategy, I don't think he's ever sat down and thought, I want to achieve X, whatever X is, now how do I do it?
Instead, he just kind of does this stuff, people pay attention, they applaud, and he moves on to the next one.
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It just seems like, you know, all he ever does really, though, is ratchet tensions up by one degree or two, and then move on to the next thing.
He could be ratcheting them down and then get distracted, but anyway.
That's right.
I agree.
Unfortunately, it seems to all go in the wrong direction.
Yeah.
All right.
So talk to me about North Korea's new missiles, because this is really the thing, right?
Is it used to be that, well, you know, maybe they can detonate a nuke if they dig a hole real deep in their own country, but they can't deliver it.
And so, yeah, but now all that's changed.
Now they have a true deterrent.
Supposedly now they can even hit Austin, Texas or Washington, DC.
Well, probably not.
I mean, the missile they set up didn't have a, a regular warhead on it, which would have been a lot heavier and would have had an impact on its range.
But the other thing is it's not at all clear that they have missiles that, you know, can hold together well enough that won't fall apart after reentry.
So they, and we also don't know how they're targeting.
I mean, at least until recently, we don't think they have very good targeting.
So there's still not at a point where they can drop one, you know, down the white house into the oval office.
But I mean, that's coming.
I mean, the point here is the North has shown that it's done a lot better than people predicted.
So it's serious and it's going to continue.
And I don't think they're going to give that up, you know, by negotiation.
I just cannot believe that they're going to say, Oh, after all that effort, we're going to give it away, especially because what's the guarantee for them?
You know, they've watched the movie in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya.
They don't like what happens to the guy in the country that the U S attacks.
So they really do have an incentive to continue with the program.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so Jonathan Schwartz keeps pointing out that the Washington post and the, you know, the politicians and the media too, they keep mis-paraphrasing this one particular statement.
I mean, they could just, you know, refer to something in a more general way, but they quote this one statement where they say, we will not negotiate our nuclear program with the Americans, but the rest of the sentences, as long as they continue to make threats like this.
In fact, I think that's even first, as long as the Americans continue to threaten us, we will not, uh, put nukes on the table for discussion.
And I'm thinking, well, you know, not to be too utopian about it, but doesn't it sort of sound like they're even willing to negotiate their possession of nuclear weapons or at least talk about talking about it.
I visited in June.
Their answer to that was no.
Uh, or the, the answer was, you know, that basically if everybody else is willing to give up their nuclear weapons, they'd be happy to negotiate it.
Now, obviously, you know, the Supreme leader is Kim Jong-un is known, you know, can change that.
It's tough.
It's in the constitution.
They declare themselves to be a nuclear weapons state.
You know, he has invested a lot in this, all the imagery of him with missiles and nukes.
But the point is, unless you sit down and talk to them, you don't know.
So if we come up, you know, and demand that they concede everything before we start talking, that's a non-starter.
I mean, Tillerson at least now has said, well, we'd be happy to talk without preconditions.
It's kind of talks about talks, you know, but at least sitting down would start because if you don't talk to the other side, you don't even know what they're willing to discuss and where they might be willing to go.
And that really is stupid because you really cut everything off.
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Well, so, um, I don't know.
How many nukes do you think they have by now?
Or do you think, is there some kind of reasonable estimate that you can rely on?
Do you think?
Well, I mean a common estimate is 20 to 30.
You know, that seems reasonable.
I mean it, what it tells, it's based on not that we've seen the weapons.
It's based on how much plutonium we think they probably have, how many weapons that might make.
So, you know, it's a, it's a small arsenal by, you know, kind of standards of most nuclear powers, but it's real.
And if there was a war and assuming they could deliver them, they could do a huge amount of damage, which is why we certainly don't want to start a war because you have to imagine if they could drop one of those on Seoul and one of those on Tokyo, one of those on Guam, one of those on Okinawa, you know, that sort of a thing, it'd be all pretty ugly.
Even if they couldn't reach the United States.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's say that, um, you know, to, to spin it in a positive way, how about they can't deliver any of their nukes yet?
They can't make them small enough.
They don't have a trebuchet big enough.
So all they can do is sit on their nukes, but war breaks out.
What kind of damage do you think the North could do to the South before the Americans were done?
Carpet bombing them off the face of the earth?
Well, the major damage they could go, they could do would be to Seoul.
Seoul is about 35 miles from the border.
The North Koreans have a lot of scuds.
They have a lot of artillery.
They have chemical weapons, biological weapons.
You know, they could use all of that so they could do mass destruction.
So they have a lot of tanks.
I mean, they're older tanks.
They're critical if they struck first, it's possible they might be able to take Seoul, you know what I mean?
That would be a kind of a catastrophic mess.
The Seoul metropolitan area, you know, the overall area has about half the population has something like 25 million or more people there.
So you can imagine the chaos, the devastation that would come from that.
You know, they would lose any war, but even, you know, most hawks admit that this would be a protracted fight if we wanted to conquer the North.
You look at the terrain, you look at the mountainous territory.
I mean, this would be a real mess.
It'd take a real effort.
There'd probably be an insurgency.
No one wants to do this.
I mean, this would be crazy to start it out for no reason.
Yeah.
Well, of course.
So now reason, your problem is you think that the North Koreans possess it, right?
But the American narrative, and we've seen this before, whether it's David Koresh or Saddam Hussein or whoever they want to target, they go, well, no, this guy's crazy.
He can't be dealt with.
The only way to deal with them is by fighting them.
Because if you talk to him, he's going to say something crazy.
And if you make an agreement and he's not going to keep it, and he's an irrational actor, geez, he might start a nuclear war with the global superpower, Doug.
Well, the irony is that our South Korean friends are probably more worried about Donald Trump than they are Kim Jong-un.
I mean, they've heard North Korean rhetoric for years, you know, about turning Seoul into a lake of fire and it never happens because, you know, they're not going to start a war they're going to lose.
Even the U S intelligence agencies, you know, think that, uh, you know, Kim is a rational actor.
Everybody's worried about, you know, what kind of judgment does he have?
And of course, who wants to tell him, you know, bad news that he can't do what he wants to do, but there's no evidence that he or anybody else there is suicidal.
I tell everybody, you look at the behavior of him, his father and his grandfather, they all wanted their virgins in this world.
They live very good lives compared to their compatriots.
You know, there's no evidence.
They want to go out and kind of a funeral pyre lit by American nuclear weapons.
That's simply not on their agenda.
Their agenda is survival.
And in that way, our nuclear weapons make a lot of sense.
And that's, that's the point that in many ways shows the rationality they wanted to tear it.
And they want it for rational reasons.
So Doug, here's my thing.
Um, and I'll let you go after this one.
I know you're in a hurry, but, um, so, you know, obviously hot war B complete catastrophe, but even this cold war in this state of tensions and the high likelihood of an accidental war breaking out at this point with all these red lines being drawn and crossed everywhere and all this, but how about I'm president Horton and you're my secretary of state and I give you orders, fix it, Doug.
I don't want, you know, not just no war.
I want to solve this problem.
What's your program?
Well, the first is I'd say you talk to the North Koreans.
I mean, at the very least that helps reduce the tensions a bit.
The fact you isolate them, refuse to talk to them, you know, itself in certain ways, you know, seems threatening to them.
I mean, the second thing I would do is I would certainly sit down and talk to the Chinese and say, look, how do we work together on this?
We know you have interests.
We're not going to tell you what we want.
We're going to sit down and figure out what are you willing to do?
How does that work with us?
I mean, you come up with kind of the attractive set of carrots backed by the Chinese to offer to the North Koreans as part of negotiations.
Now you can try to use sanctions as part of that, but don't have any illusions.
You know, that's enough.
And then you basically you step back from the military option.
You make clear, you know, we will defend ourselves, but we're not going to start a war.
And that's something where, you know, you're going to basically make it easier to work with say the South Koreans who don't want a war started.
So, and you know, this is going to be a longterm thing, but I think the starting point, one of the things I would advocate is what the Chinese have been pushing is the freeze for freeze.
North Koreans stop missile and nuclear testing.
We stop military exercises.
Again, you've toned down the tensions, you step back and if you stop the testing, you've suddenly stopped the urgency.
You know, so when we have a moment to breathe and to think about how do we solve this as opposed to this seeming relentless rush towards confrontation.
Yeah.
Well then, but so do you see a possible agreed framework in the future for really normalizing relations and making peace or it's just too much in the American empire's interest to keep the conflict and too much in the interests of the regime in North Korea to keep the conflict going?
I would love to see that.
I'm not going to hold my breath, but I do think one of the possibilities here is that Kim Jong-un has actually talked about a parallel policy of economic development and nuclear development.
So he wants economic development.
So I do think that's an interest of his.
And if you get China on board, we're trying to, to some degree, you know, can credibly offer some security guarantees in there that you might very well be able to, you know, put together something that works.
Again, I'm not going to hold my breath because I think everybody here, there's a lot of distrust and there are a lot of interests.
There are reasons why the North would like to have nuclear weapons and the reasons why a lot of American hawks would never want to deal with the North Koreans.
Nevertheless, I think it's worth a try.
So I don't think it's hopeless, but you know, I do, I do think we have to move quickly.
You know, otherwise we might get this war through mistake or misjudgment and that really would be unfortunate.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you for coming back on the show, Doug.
I sure appreciate it.
Hey, happy to be on.
All right, you guys, that's the great Doug Bandow.
He writes at Forbes and at the National Interest and is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
And they've got a great bunch, five, six, seven, really great guys on foreign policy there at Cato.
Doug is their leader.
All right.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, and foolserend.us for my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
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