Hey y'all, next Wednesday, January the 3rd, I'm giving a talk for Thaddeus Russell's Renegade University at thaddeusrussell.com on the history of the war in Afghanistan.
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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line is our friend John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus.
And man, he's really good on Korea issues.
And that's why he's here.
So, let me see here, John, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Merry Christmas.
Pretty good, how are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
You wrote this really important article about North Korea.
And you know, I'm the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, so I read a North Korea article a day, every day, or sometimes five.
But I really like yours because you are really meticulous.
You asked the right question.
What exactly would this thing look like, as best we could tell?
And what would it cost?
What would it cost North Korea?
What would it cost the South?
What would it cost the United States of America?
What kind of consequences would the world be looking at in the event of a war with Korea?
And, you know, I really want to emphasize, I guess, as we start here, and you can differ with me if you want to, I'm interested in what you think about this.
But it seems like this is very much not like, as Bandow said on the show, this is very much not like George Bush steamrolling us into Iraq.
This is the kind of thing where Trump might just blunder us into this thing unnecessarily by drawing red lines like we will not allow you to have nukes and missiles when they already have nukes and missiles, and things like this.
And so it doesn't seem like Trump is hell-bent on doing this, but it does seem like more and more people in his administration, he clearly has instructed his generals, bring me options.
And this kind of thing.
So I don't know what color alert level you think it is, but I want to know.
And then take it from there.
Okay, well, yeah, I would agree.
I mean, I think the parallel to the Iraq war would be what the Trump administration is doing now with Iran, doctoring intelligence, you know, making a case somehow that Iran is in violation of agreements that it signed, you know, generally preparing the ground, if you will, for what might be a conflict with the country.
With North Korea, on the other hand, I think Trump and maybe one or two other people in his administration are the only ones who are enthusiastic about any kind of military solution.
And that comes largely from their ignorance of what the consequences would be.
I mean, their ignorance probably of the geography of the region.
I mean, remember, Trump visited Korea and he was gonna go up to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, but he got turned back, his helicopter got turned back because of weather conditions.
And a Korea watcher told me, and I thought this was quite interesting, you know, it was really too bad that the helicopter got turned back because this was an opportunity for Donald Trump to discover exactly how close the city of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is to the demilitarized zone.
I mean, it's like a couple minutes to go by helicopter ride and thereby understand exactly how vulnerable South Korea is to artillery positions just north of the DMZ.
Because, you know, this is the moment when American presidents come to understand the kind of tyranny of geography, if you will, on the Korean Peninsula.
So absent that, I think Trump is still, you know, under some illusions about what a war could accomplish and what its effects would be.
Pretty much everybody else in the administration, I mean, you know, obviously the folks in the Pentagon know very, very well what would happen and the impact not only on Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, but also on American military personnel.
The military is very clear about what the consequences would be.
And I think, you know, the State Department, Tillerson has been pushing forward, you know, with various diplomatic options.
It's really only, you know, a handful of people who are pushing for a military solution.
And they're often on the edges of the policy discourse.
People like John Bolton or Lindsey Graham in the Senate.
Everybody else here in the United States, I think, is very clear.
But as you said, the threat isn't so much that there is going to be a concerted campaign to go to war with North Korea.
The threat is that either Donald Trump will do something precipitous, thinking, if he thinks perhaps that our missile defense system can take out any kind of North Korean retaliatory strike, he feels like there will be a kind of cost-free military intervention to take out North Korea's nuclear capabilities.
Or there's a mistake or a misinterpretation or a miscalculation by either side.
So that, for instance, a military exercise that the United States is conducting with South Korea is taken to be, you know, an actual attack by North Korea or a North Korean missile test is taken to be the beginning of a North Korean strike.
Or any other kind of, you know, small incident that then becomes blown out of proportion and escalates into actual warfare.
So I think those are the two major threats.
Where would I put that on the color index?
You know, orange, probably.
We're not at red yet, but certainly we should be worried.
Yeah.
Well, we do have this tendency to conflate unthinkable with not gonna happen, which, you know, nukes have deterred great powers and small ones from attacking each other so far.
So, you know, there's an argument there, but then again, there's World War I and II happened.
So, and Vietnam and Iraq War II and I and Afghanistan and all the rest of this.
I mean, you can't really compare, I mean, unless you're Yemeni, you can't compare bombing Yemen to these kind of wars in terms of their effect on our side.
But yeah, it looks like mess with North Korea, even though it is a poor country in darkness up there, they have the capacity to hurdle a nuke or two at Tokyo.
So I don't know.
I guess I can't really figure out, even from Trump and McMaster's point of view, why they don't just make nice and just drop sanctions and drop threats and cool this thing off.
And what's even the point of this?
They're not gonna get their way anyway.
Yeah, I mean, this has been the dilemma for pretty much every administration, even going back to administrations that ultimately dealt with North Korea, like the Clinton administration.
And that is that there is a perception that if the United States capitulates, so-called, to North Korea, that sets a dangerous precedent that other countries will use some incipient nuclear program to blackmail the United States or the world community.
It's far-fetched, because of course, there are any number of ways that the United States and the world community can pressure a country to abandon nuclear weapons.
And it's only a country like North Korea that has the kind of stranglehold that the government holds over the population that permits it to resist economic sanctions for the better part of half a century or more, and continue to forge ahead with its nuclear program, regardless of consequences.
So it's a somewhat unique position to defy both the United States and the international community.
So I don't think that ultimately any kind of deal with North Korea over its nuclear program, and even an acknowledgment of North Korea's nuclear status, will set any precedent at all for other countries around the world.
It doesn't matter at all that they have said that they're willing to talk with us, and that they say things like, it's a pretty obvious thing, they say, we are not willing to negotiate our nuclear weapons, as long as the Americans continue making these threats against us.
Now, I'm not saying I take that, oh, at face value, they're willing to give up every last nuke.
But it sounds like really what they're saying is we're willing to negotiate even our nuclear weapons, something about them, if you're willing to sit down with us and stop threatening us for a minute.
And, you know, there's been Tim Shorrock and a couple of others have, John Schwartz, have made a point of how often that part of the statement, the important part of that statement, is cut out when you read it in the Washington Post or the New York Times.
They go, oh, see, they say they'll never negotiate their nuclear program, their nuclear weapons.
But the rest of the sentence was, as long as we keep threatening to attack them.
So, I don't know, how much of an opening do you think that that is?
Well, I mean, it's hard to say, because, of course, you know, North Korea has, as you say, said that it would support, for instance, a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, and that that's their goal.
But, realistically speaking, you know, nuclear weapons capability is their major insurance policy to prevent any foreign power from trying to affect regime change.
And while it's true that, you know, the United States could extend some security guarantees, North Korea is realistic enough to understand the American political system.
So, for instance, the Obama administration extends security guarantees to, I don't know, Iran, Cuba, and then the Trump administration comes in and completely reverses that.
So, you know, North Koreans are pragmatic, and I think they're gonna hold on to their nuclear capabilities, as long as there is not only a viable threat coming from the United States or another country, but the potential for that threat to return if there is a political sea change or just a decision on the part of any given administration to do 180-degree turn on its positions globally.
That said, you know, there's a big difference between a country having a deterrent nuclear capability and a country that has a robust and growing nuclear arsenal.
And I think that's, you know, the distinction the United States has to make when it enters into negotiations with North Korea.
It has, in the past, insisted on, you know, complete, verifiable, irreversible nuclear disarmament.
That was the formula during the Bush years.
But dealing with North Korea today, when it obviously already has nuclear weapons, and we don't know the extent of the arsenal or actually their ability to truly weaponize the nuclear material that they have, we're dealing with a different set of negotiating parameters.
So, you know, the United States has to enter into those negotiations with a, I think a different set of goals, and that is at least for the short and even medium term to kind of freeze North Korea's capabilities.
I think North Korea also understands that and understands that that's going to be the first step that the United States is going to insist on, ultimately, and so North Korea wants to be in a position where the freeze leaves it with what it considers to be a sufficient deterrent, which explains why, over the last months, North Korea has continued to test, particularly its long-range missile capability, because at that moment, when it freezes those capabilities, it wants to have as strong a capability as possible.
So that's the rub.
I mean, whether North Korea will be, honestly, willing to freeze in any negotiating framework in the next couple of months is hard to say.
Once it achieves what it feels it is bare minimum, then I think, yes, absolutely it will deal.
All right, hang on just one second.
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And yeah, thanks.
All right, so, and sorry to skip back to the previous discussion there about the actual conflict and why it's so worth avoiding.
But in your article, you talk about these Pentagon studies and estimates and actually had a guy on the show who'd been in some war games about this.
So first of all, I want to ask you if you think that if a war did break out, what's the likelihood that they could keep it conventional and that it wouldn't necessarily mean atom bombs going off on either and or both sides.
I guess if it's either, it would be both.
But do you think that that's just automatic that if there's a war, it'll be a nuclear war?
And then I guess you have different estimates compared on whether it was a state conventional or not, right?
Correct.
It's hard to know, obviously, what would happen.
Because as you said, there's never been a situation in the past in which two nuclear powers went to war with one another in any serious way.
I mean, obviously there have been skirmishes between India and Pakistan, even as nuclear powers, but nothing really in terms of a major conflict.
So all speculation kind of goes out the window because we have nothing to base it on.
However, I think it's safe to say that both the United States and North Korea understand the risks of going from, well, first, they understand the risks of launching a conventional attack, the risk that that conventional attack could escalate into a nuclear exchange.
And then, of course, they understand the risk of a nuclear exchange.
Given that, I think there would be strong pressure that if a conflict were to break out, it would begin conventionally, especially if it happened as a result of an accident as opposed to something that was planned.
From North Korea's side, I mean, let's face it.
They have a nuclear capability, but it's untested.
And it's not even clear whether they can, they have nuclear warheads.
I mean, there is speculation that they do, that they've been able to miniaturize their capability to warhead size that can fit at the end of a missile.
But we have no proof of that, really.
Also, you know, there's no guarantee that any of their missiles would go anywhere near the targets that they have established.
So I think North Korean government knows that it has a kind of aspirational nuclear capability that it really doesn't want to test in any serious way, unless it's attacked, and then it has to do so defensively.
Am I right when I say that their nuclear tests, the ones that there was enough information about them to really know they were basically fizzles or at least a half a fizzle or so, and then all the ones since then that were apparently successful were buried so deep underground that they don't really have a way to measure whether they were successful or not?
Yeah, I mean, basically the first couple were not successful, at least they did not yield the kind of results that either we or perhaps the North Koreans expected.
They claim H-bombs now, right?
Do you believe that?
That's correct.
I don't know.
Honestly, I mean, we just don't have enough information to say with any degree of certainty what they have and whether these tests have satisfied their requirements.
But all of which is to say that it's a big question mark.
And I think the question mark hangs over their program on their side, not just on our side.
United States, on the other hand, well, we have, I think, a variety of delusions connected to our nuclear program, a delusion that we can use them in a tactical way, for instance, a delusion that, for instance, we could use nuclear weapons to take out North Korea's underground nuclear facilities without causing harm beyond what harm is caused within North Korea.
We have a delusion that we can do that without precipitating either a North Korean response or a Chinese response.
And the Chinese have said that they would not come to North Korea's assistance if North Korea attacked first.
But if North Korea was not attacked first and somebody else attacked first, then China would come to North Korea's defense.
So all of that has to play into any kind of scenario building.
The challenge, of course, for the United States is if it decides it wants to take out North Korea's nuclear facilities without actually affecting regime change, well, it has to do one of two things.
It either has to have a ground invasion and have actual soldiers heading into the country to secure those nuclear sites, or it has to try to take them out with missiles.
And as I said, because North Korea's nuclear capabilities are, a large part of them, buried underground, conventional missile strikes probably not do the trick, according to experts in the military.
It might require nuclear strikes from submarines located off the shore from North Korea.
So that suggests that there is a possibility that the United States would initiate nuclear exchange first, even though there's this enormous taboo associated with the use of nuclear weapons and even though the United States refuses to sign any kind of no first use pledge, there has been a kind of unofficial, if you like, adherence to this no first use doctrine.
So those are the kind of considerations to look at when thinking about whether it would go from conventional to nuclear.
But lastly, I would just say that even if it doesn't escalate to nuclear level, a conventional war on the Korean Peninsula involving conventional strikes by both United States and North Korea could have equally devastating effects, upwards of a million plus people dying in and around the Korean Peninsula without the use of nuclear weapons.
And that was the estimate given way back in 1994 to the Clinton administration by the Pentagon.
When the Clinton administration was considering missile strikes against North Korea to take out its limited nuclear program at that time, the Pentagon basically said, look, we're looking at a million casualties in and around the Korean Peninsula.
And that was a strong signal dissuading the Clinton administration from moving more quickly in that direction.
So obviously that was more than 20 years ago and the capabilities of both sides have increased.
And so we'll be looking at a million plus in terms of casualties from a conventional war.
And in case Lindsey Graham is listening, that includes all the American Army and Air Force and I guess Navy and Marines, I don't know, there too.
And all their families who were all there.
Tens of thousands of them, right?
That's correct.
So we have- The Lindsey Graham references, he said, yeah, well, if there's a war, it'll be over there.
Yeah, well, it'll be a bunch of lily white people dying in it too.
Yes, yes, there's, you know, any about between 38,000, 40,000 US personnel, military personnel based in South Korea.
But then there's another 100,000 non-military personnel, Americans living in South Korea.
And all of those would be vulnerable.
And as I write my article, that's basically we're talking about Waco, Texas, city the size of Waco, Texas.
Would it be in play?
That's the number of Americans living in Korea.
Boy, and what a great metaphor too, because think about how mad I still am about 90 people being murdered by the government there.
That's right.
Think about what would happen if they lost that whole town.
That's right.
All right, so, and that brings up the question here.
Please help to educate my perspective and imagination about the North Koreans' point of view on all this.
And maybe you could start with what do we ever do to them?
I know I'm beating a dead horse.
I probably say this every time I interview you, but my entire conception of the war with Korea in the 1950s for decades of my life, fully ingrained into my life, is Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan and good old Colonel Potter holding the fort down and making sure everything is all right.
I watched this during dinnertime my entire childhood long.
So that's what I know about North Korea, is, you know, making martinis and Radar O'Reilly.
So, but what am I missing here?
What's important for Americans to understand, John?
Well, you know, without going into what the actual American experience was in the Korean War, I think it's important for Americans to understand that North Korea itself was basically destroyed, leveled.
You know, the city of Pyongyang reduced to rubble.
All the major cities devastated.
Huge casualties in North Korea during the war.
And effects that can still be seen today.
And North Koreans are very conscious of how many people died and what the kind of the effects on the landscape of the country were as a result of saturation American bombing and the first use of napalm.
Bombing of civilian infrastructure, like dams, in order to have maximum impact on civilian population, not just military personnel.
Here in this country, we talk about the Korean War as the forgotten war, but obviously it's not forgotten within North Korea itself.
It's living history.
And that informs their perspective on the world today.
I mean, they are braced for a repeat of that kind of ferocious attack.
I mean, the country is honeycombed with underground facilities for people to take cover in the case of another aerial assault.
And they're basically suspicious of not just the United States, but remember it was under the UN flag that the war took place.
So they're somewhat suspicious of even international institutions as being perhaps a cover for either US aggression or just a kind of a collective attack on the country.
So all of that contributes to their suspicions, their paranoia, if you will, of US intentions and the potential for the United States to do something very similar again.
Yeah.
You know what it is, man?
I think that if you just say to me Vietnam, one of the first few slides in my head is that aerial footage of the carpet bombing.
They just, I've seen a lot of that my whole life.
You know, I was born right after Vietnam kind of thing.
So, but I don't think I've ever seen footage of the air war against North Korea.
I've seen a few still pictures, but is any of that footage?
I mean, there's gotta be footage of it.
They just never seem to show that on any Discovery Channel or anything, do they?
Well, there isn't as much.
And I think, you know, it has to do with the timing, of course, it has to do with the fact that Vietnam was, you know, the first televised war.
So those images are much more part of public consciousness.
But it's, you know, it's also the fact that there was an anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, and there really wasn't an anti-war movement of any significant size during the Korean War, an anti-war movement that would use those images to kind of protest US actions and to a certain extent humanize the folks that the United States was bombing.
That just did not take place during the Korean War.
Yeah.
Yeah, it took two of them, right?
It took a second of Vietnam replicated, only worse in Vietnam, and then a decade of that before people finally came out and had enough.
So, man.
All right, well, listen now.
So you mentioned what may be bearing the lead in the most important thing here about them lying us into war with Iran.
And on one hand, I mean, it's almost a problem, right?
That Trump is such a clown that when him and Haley come out and say, oh, yeah, everybody knows that Iran is the leading sponsor of terrorism in the region, and everybody knows that they're the enemy, and everybody knows that nuclear deal or not their nuclear program, their civilian one, is still some kind of threat and whatever.
It's ridiculous.
We don't take them seriously.
But then I think, well, I mean, from their point of view, as I think you were intimating there at the beginning, they're laying the groundwork for an attack or at least the ability to launch one to claim that they have a costus belli here.
And then again, they gotta know better.
So square my circle then.
Well, you know, with Iran, the situation is more complicated because, of course, the United States could launch an attack against an Iranian proxy and not Iran, the government.
And so obviously the most recent kind of information about the Obama administration supposedly suppressing investigation of Hezbollah, preparing the ground for perhaps the United States to take on Hezbollah, not in Lebanon, of course, but its fighters elsewhere in the region, perhaps most prominently in Syria.
That, I think, is a concern.
There is, of course, been conflict in various waterways between US Navy and Iranian Navy.
And there's also other wrinkles in the region, if you will.
For instance, the potential for Kurds in Iran to serve as a kind of a wedge used by either the United States or some other country to try to destabilize the Iranian government.
There are other kind of anti-Iranian forces in the neighborhood of Iran that could be used in such a fashion.
So Iran is a far more diverse and heterogeneous society with considerably more complex interests in the region as a whole than North Korea.
North Korea is basically like a sealed box without any significant divisions within the country to exploit and no significant regional proxies.
I mean, actually, none, now that the Choson-Sor and the North Koreans in Japan have been reduced to virtually non-entity.
So that's why we have such a different situation between the two.
I mean, there are any number of different ways that the United States can provoke conflict with Iran short of sending missiles into Iranian territory.
Yeah, well, these kinds of things can get out of hand.
I remember back 10 years ago, Gareth said, here's why we're gonna not attack Iran, because the military has a doctrine where they want what they call escalation dominance, meaning that at least they believe that the Mike Tyson rule does not apply, that once you get punched in the mouth, it doesn't matter.
The plan is still gonna work.
The war plan stays the same and that they will dominate each stage of the war and that they don't wanna get into any fight where they think that there are enough variables that they might have a setback of any kind.
They want complete dominance over every stage of every part of it with what they determine to be very little risk before they'll do anything.
And yet, if they do, if things do get heated, I don't know, say it starts with Hezbollah or whatever, but it does end up escalating to threats and red lines and all these things and an attack on Iran, they really do have the ability to hit back against American assets in the region.
I mean, almost unending, right?
How many missiles they got?
Because I got an unending list of targets, you know, an obvious list of targets for them to hit.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the Iran is in many ways a far more, I don't wanna say dangerous, I would say a far more capable, perhaps, adversary to the United States in the sense that it is well anchored in the region.
It is, it has the support of Russia and China.
It is, at the moment, trading reasonably well with the European Union.
It, as an economic power, is far more significant than North Korea, which is dropped to practically the bottom of the list of world economic powers.
Iran has an extremely strong commercial sector and a middle class.
And that's why it's a threat, not to the United States, but it's a threat to, for instance, Saudi Arabia, which would like to think of itself as the dominant hegemon in the region.
But it's up against, you know, a far more, a far worthier competitor, if you will, in Iran.
So the stakes are entirely different there.
I mean, the United States has basically been drawn into a conflict that it simply does not understand.
And can't really manipulate, because these are far, these are dynamics far beyond our control.
And it's not just Shia versus Sunni, or just Saudi versus Iranian.
It has to do with a whole complex of different actors in the region.
And it's, I think, to a certain extent, the initial, you know, to a certain extent, the initial insight that the military is risk-averse, the Pentagon is risk-averse, and doesn't want to do anything that could ultimately harm U.S. military interests in the region or elsewhere.
That's true.
And it certainly explains a lot up to a certain point.
And that point is when you have a different set of actors in Washington who are not risk-averse.
So for instance, the George W. Bush administration for a period of time was not risk-averse when it came to meddling in the Middle East.
The Trump administration, as it's proven with, for instance, its decision on Jerusalem, its upcoming decision again on the Iran nuclear agreement, it is not risk-averse in the least.
And so that's the real challenge moving forward.
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All right, now, so I wanna ask you about an interesting article you wrote about the Koch brothers.
What happens when bad money supports good foreign policy?
So I'm a libertarian and I've got a little old institute, but I haven't gotten any Koch money.
My partner, Sheldon Richman, used to work for Cato back years ago.
But so the Koch brothers, they're a very interesting thing.
You know, I don't know if you know, but they used to be ideological anarchists.
They helped bankroll the movement to abolish the draft under Richard Nixon back then.
And you know, their father was a bircher, but they were really Rothbardian libertarians.
But then, according to one of the guilty, who I know this firsthand knowledge, it's basically my friends who used and abused these guys and their money so bad that they ended up saying, well, piss off, we're gonna go become conservative Republicans because they are businessmen after all.
And so they have supported libertarian causes and great ones, the Institute for Justice, Reason, and Cato.
I mean, I got seven guys at Cato on their foreign policy team over there who are just absolutely great on everything.
And they back defense priorities, which has a lot of good people there too.
And so, and I even talked with Stephen Walt on the show about how they're putting up money.
Now, Walt isn't a libertarian.
He's a realist, kind of a conservative.
And I guess I don't know as much about Barry Posen.
But anyway, so these guys are very much, well, I don't know.
Yeah, they're very much supporters of libertarian institutions.
Their own policies can be very conservative, meaning if they wanna build a pipeline through America, they'll hire the government to just take all the land from people.
Now that's not very libertarian, but they're a big force behind that Keystone Pipeline.
And they have a foreign policy, it's just their foreign policy is all wrapped up in Venezuela, not in the Middle East, because they have different oil interests, right?
So I don't wanna sound like I'm full of any illusions about them or anything like that.
But then, what I'm really interested in actually here, John, is at the end of the article, where you, I think, maybe characterize them unfairly to what I would think would be flattering them, saying that they're really this anti-government, when I think they're really not that anti-government.
But you even got yourself, I think, in a trap where America really still must be the world hegemon and the world army in order to enforce the United Nations international law.
You just wish they wouldn't do it like this.
But to have a Ron Paul foreign policy where America really rolled back the empire, you say, well, that would be alarming.
Then the whole world, it would be a free for all, and without our nuclear umbrella, I forget, I maybe mis-paraphrasing you here a little bit.
You can clarify, I'm sorry.
I actually read two or three things like this recently.
Without the nuclear umbrella, all these other guys would start making nukes, and the world would go to chaos.
But what about that?
How can you have a UN without an American empire to back it up?
Well, okay, so let me unpack a couple of things here.
First, I think I've worked with the same folks over at Cato, and I have nothing but respect for what Stephen Walt and Barry Posen have written, kind of laying out their realist foreign policy, and more power to them.
As for the Kochs, I do think that they are ultimately anti-government, but we have to be very specific about what that means.
They have no problem taking government money.
They've taken government contracts from the military.
They, as you said, are perfectly happy to use government for their own purposes.
What they mean by anti-government is all government that doesn't benefit their own bottom line.
And so that means make sure that there's absolutely zero government regulations, health and safety, environmental, that there's no government kind of interference in how the market operates, such that they would have their hands tied one way or another in their corporate dealings.
And at least looking forward that the government is as small as possible in its dealings, again, except for those things which benefit the Kochs' bottom line, though I imagine that at some point they would argue that the government's small enough that the Koch enterprises no longer needs those contracts that they have given up.
And they don't do much for the Pentagon.
I mean, mostly they make carpet and tires and pump oil and actual capitalist stuff, not just, they're not like general dynamics or whatever, just welfare parasites.
That's correct.
I mean, they have energy contracts, and some of those energy contracts were, of course, connected to post-Iraq war, because, I mean, that's where the money was.
Oh, you're saying they have contracts in Iraq with the Baghdad government there?
I don't think they were directly with the Baghdad government, but they were kind of follow-on contracts.
Oh, man, no, I didn't know that.
Anyway, I'm sorry, go ahead.
But when it comes to foreign policy, I mean, to a certain extent, they're consistent, and I think that's a good thing, to have consistency.
And that is, as opposed to a lot of other kind of small government conservatives who had a national security exception, the Kochs are like, yeah, well, we should shrink the Pentagon and defense spending, and as well shrink American military footprint overseas.
Now, the reason why I wrote the article was that I feel that the Kochs are involved in a kind of airbrushing of their reputation, that they haven't changed their position on any kind of domestic issues, whether we're talking about energy policy or kind of the evils of government regulation or their own litigious efforts, but they do know that their reputation has suffered an enormous decline, and as a result, they've embarked on a couple of things to rescue that reputation, and one of those is these so-called trans-partisan efforts to show that they're not just on one side of the political spectrum, that they support, quote-unquote, noble actors on all sides.
And that's what makes me uncomfortable about receiving or supporting the accepting of Koch money.
Now, that's the argument in the article.
Now, at the end of the article, all I say is that simply scaling back U.S. military presence won't necessarily result in a safer world.
That doesn't necessarily mean I don't support the United States scaling back its military presence.
It just means that I support the reduction of empire, but it has to go hand-in-hand with other things, because I know there is an argument out there, as you put it, that if the United States withdraws from the world, then the world goes to hell in a handbasket, that chaos and anarchy will prevail, and I don't believe that, but I do believe that there has to be something that replaces the United States, and I don't mean another hegemon.
I don't mean China replacing the United States.
I believe, effectively, in the rule of law, the rule of law domestically, and the rule of law in an international sense as well.
What constitutes that rule of law?
Would it be the United Nations?
Nah, probably not, given the United Nations track record, but there should be, for instance, robust regional security mechanisms that take the place of the departing United States.
So, for instance, if, and I hope when, the United States withdraws its military bases from Asia, it's not just a matter of Japan saying, okay, well, our self-defense forces, which are now renamed our military forces, take over and expand those bases, which is, frankly, what Shinzo Abe would like to do, or that South Korea says, okay, fine, we're gonna up our military spending, start producing all of our own weapons, take over these bases, and become kind of the military force to be reckoned with in Northeast Asia, absent any other regional military or security mechanisms.
Northeast Asia doesn't have one.
It doesn't have an organization of security and cooperation.
It doesn't have an Africa Union, so-called.
So that's what my final argument had to do with.
It wasn't an argument against U.S. withdrawal.
It was an argument for U.S. withdrawal plus regional security mechanisms.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I would like to see, wouldn't it be fun if America was just a giant Switzerland and we hosted peace conferences all the time, but our side never made promises of their own just to keep the door open to the peace conference center?
There's a funny old speech by William Jennings Bryan, which is so anachronistic to hear recently.
Behold a republic where we sit and mock these ridiculous imperial European tyrants destroying their own societies with all their stupid wars while we go around hosting peace conferences.
He's bragging, you know.
I'm thinking, man, that was a long time ago.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'll tell you.
All right, hey, oh, so here's the thing, though.
I think that, like, let's say that the Kochs are even like three clicks more right-wing than they are, but they stay anti-war.
I think that's really the very best thing for any kind of peace movement is even if it's liberals and progressives like yourself leading it, to be able to say, look, these right-wingers say we're right, and that proves how right we are, basically.
In other words, instead of saying, oh, no, the Kochs want to come, but we should be suspicious of them because of what bastards they are and all that, you should just celebrate that, yeah, no, they're big right-wing Republican oligarchs, and you go, well, look, compared to other right-wing Republican oligarchs, these guys want a smaller Navy.
Like, hey, they got a real good point there, and then that just, and you guys siding each other in your consensus, I think, just makes the argument much more powerful, and especially when the kind of idea is that, well, of course, progressives and liberals and leftists are anti-war, but when right-wingers are anti-war, they better have a real good reason.
Otherwise, their default is always supposed to be USA defense, et cetera, et cetera, right?
So it seems like the more anti-war, the more right-wing deviationists the anti-war people are, the better for citing them for your purposes.
I agree with you completely.
I just won't take money from them.
Yeah, no, well, hey, if they're passing some out, I, on the record right now, will take Koch money.
I don't give a damn.
Although, I'll tell you a story.
Greg Palast said that what happened was that the Republicans in the Senate agreed that they would not remove Bill Clinton from office if the Clinton administration would agree that they would not prosecute the Kochs for all their illegal bankrolling around the campaign finance laws in the Republican Revolution of 1994, and so that was the compromise that kept the Juanita Broderick testimony sealed up until after he was acquitted and kept Bill Clinton in there, when, of course, and I hate to give Al Gore credit because I'm not a big Al Gore fan, but in the alternative history, Al Gore handily wins the election of 2000.
He doesn't destroy the agreed framework with North Korea.
Lieberman tries but fails to talk him into marching the 3rd Infantry Division into Iraq, and things are not quite this bad.
That would have been a nice alternative history.
That's what I'm saying.
All right, listen, I really like talking with you, and now I'm talking to you instead of interviewing you, so I'll let you go, but thank you very much for your time as always, John.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's John Pfeffer.
He runs Foreign Policy and Focus over there, and they got a bunch of great writers, of course, Con Hallinan and all the guys over there at fpif.org, and this one, this very important article, I really hope you'll read it.
It was great.
We ran it at antiwar.com.
North Korea, the costs of war calculated, and then, yeah, so my stuff is scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, antiwar.com, foolserend.us, foolserend.us for my book, Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
