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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of it's 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 quickly.
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 freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the Armed Forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun when the president doesn't.
That means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got our good friend Peter Van Buren.
He's a former State Department weenie, but he's all right now man.
He writes for the American conservative magazine pretty regularly and he wrote some books.
We meant well about his time in Iraq war two and the ghost of Tom jode about the economic crash here in the US.
And then the latest is Hooper's war.
It's a novel of World War Two, Japan, but you know, it's got some things in there for our time to welcome back to the show.
Scott, it's always a pleasure to be here with you.
I enjoy talking with you.
And the fact that others may be listening in is just kind of a bonus for me.
Oh, cool.
Well, that's nice.
My whole thing is I like talking with you.
But the part I like best is that other people are going to be able to hear this later.
So yeah, tell me man.
I'm not to take what you said and turn it around or anything because yeah, we just talked for 10 minutes before the show even started.
If only they could hear man if only they could hear that I already told him 100 times.
Hey, listen.
Um, so the Koreans Yeah.
I guess I'm really terrified that they're gonna kill me and I think I need the government to protect me from them.
Well, no, actually, I'd like to take a in the spirit of the Olympics, I'd like to take a short victory lap because for the last year or so actually much longer, but but in kind of the spotlight for the last year or so, I have been writing in a number of places saying that we are not moving closer to war with with North Korea, and that the media which has been telling us this is happening in the guise of Trump is going to kill us all simply are turning this into another political chew toy that they can use to blame Trump for things that really aren't happening.
Now I quick caveat as I take my victory lap and saying I was right, and they've been wrong, you know, is to say that simply commenting as objectively as it's possible, given my hangover on world events does not mean I'm defending Trump, the world is not painted as black and as white as all that we can we need to talk about international events, objectively, and we need to say what's happening, whether that ends up looking good, bad or indifferent towards whoever happens to be in the White House.
And in this case, we are not moving closer to war.
I've made that point a number of times.
And I think the events of the last week or two in Korea have underlined the fact that North Korea is a country that can be worked with they have they are open to a form of negotiations and diplomacy.
They're obviously better at it than we are, given the way that they have successfully manipulated the Olympics to present themselves in a more positive light and to build that connective tissue with South Korea that's so important in diplomacy.
The United States for its part seems to have woken up a little late, but maybe not too late.
As we know, during the Olympic ceremonies, Mike Pence sat on his hands and did not acknowledge the North Korean athletes and did not speak with two of the most significant people in North Korea, Kim Jong Un's sister, and Kim Yong Nam.
And we'll return to Kim Yong Nam in a moment because any of the listeners who do not know who that is, should not be commenting about events in North Korea until they do.
Mike Pence returned to the United States yesterday and said that he and the South Koreans did work out some ideas about how to continue to engage North Korea.
And he cracked that window just a little bit to say that maybe we're going to look for a way to take a step forward.
Point is, Wait, he said that?
Pence said that?
Pence said that he worked out some details with the South Koreans on how to engage North Korea going forward.
And that counts as opening on the window a little bit.
He's a day late, but that's okay.
We'll take it.
Hey, listen, I want to bring up something stupid just to dismiss it, but it's really big in the news right now and, you know, in the context of the Olympics and everything.
And that is that Kim Jong Un's sister, as you mentioned, was sent down to the South to, you know, be a presence here.
And she's kind of pretty and whatever.
So then the mainstream media hairdos, you know, the TV anchors, they know nothing about anything, right?
So they go from full 100% demonized Korea because that's their marching orders mode to, wow, I'm looking at a North Korean, and they look just like regular humans.
Oh my god, and this one's actually really pretty.
So then they go completely overboard with, wow, North Korea must not be that bad of a place after all.
And what a great lady she is because if she's pretty, she must be great and this and that.
But then of course, the right wing reaction to that is, uh, North Korea is really bad and she's really bad.
And then, and there you have a totalitarian system and we hate them and blah, blah, blah.
They don't seem to have a point other than, I mean, I must have saw on Twitter, 20 references to Walter Durante yesterday.
That's for the audience, the New York Times reporter who denied Stalin's, uh, famine, deliberate famine, uh, inflicted on the Ukrainians in the 1930s.
And they go, oh yeah, no, yes.
The American media, they just love communism and they love totalitarianism and blah, blah, blah.
And they're all missing the point that, yeah, Korea's bad, whatever North Korea, that's why we want to talk with them.
That's why we need to talk with them.
That's why we need to encourage the sunshine policy and for North and South to get it together.
That's why we need to drop sanctions on them and encourage them the same way Nixon and Kissinger did with Mao Zedong and to get rid of communism and move into the 21st century, man, you guys need to save up some capital, you know, I don't know.
And then, but it's, you have the right versus the left or you have the right versus, you know, brainless CNN hairdos and the narrative gets all skewed away from the real point, which is what you said, hey, look, a window cracked open for real negotiations.
That's the only thing that matters here.
Yep.
So, I mean, as if we needed another reminder of the utter shallowness of the American mass media, yes, they were happy enough to provide us with one.
You didn't mention, and then we'll get to serious stuff, you didn't also, you didn't mention the North Korean cheering squad.
You know, the North Koreans sent down 230 women who apparently were personally selected by Kim Jong Un for their beauty, to form the North Korean cheering squad.
And the media has made some of that.
And the New York Times didn't miss a breath.
They ran a op-ed from a woman named Sook-hee Lee, claiming that, you know, the North Koreans are like, I don't know, sexually harassing women by turning them into sex objects, who she apparently was unaware that the NFL cheerleaders that are popular in the United States as well.
Nonetheless, what is missing in all that shallowness are the things that matters.
And let's talk about Kim Jong Un's sister.
And she is important in several ways.
First of all, she represents the highest ranking North Korean person who has ever visited South Korea in history.
And that matters.
This is a game where symbolism plays a role.
This is a game where image plays a role.
And for her to visit South Korea is not small potatoes at all.
It does matter.
Number two, she is a young person.
And a lot of people in, younger people in South Korea are not as engaged in these, these Korean Peninsula issues.
They see this as like mom and dad's problem.
And by sending her down there and letting her look like a normal person, she is communicating with the younger people in South Korea.
More significantly, and I spent four years in Korea, working with the State Department, and I've kept in touch with both my Korean friends and people, State Department people.
More importantly, there is a sense, particularly among older Koreans, parentheses, the people who are actually running the government and in power, that they are one people.
And that the roots of being Korean, woori woori is how they describe it, run so much deeper than politics.
When the sister, Kim Jong Un's sister comes to South Korea and extends a personal invitation to the head of South Korea to visit, that sends very clear signals to people who have great respect for family ties that understand the symbolism of these things.
The fact that she made the invitation is not an insignificant thing.
It's a gesture, it's symbolic, of course, but it's not insignificant.
More importantly, sitting next to her is this guy Kim Yong Nam, and he's the old guy.
In fact, he's 90 years old.
We should all be so energetic when we're 90, Scott, doing these interviews from the rest home.
Kim Yong Nam has the most impeccable credentials for dealing with the West.
He is bulletproof.
In other words, no one in North Korea can claim that he is giving in to the South Koreans or the United States, because North Korea has its factions too, believe it or not.
Kim Jong Un does not rule independently.
He has to have at least the tacit approval of his military and his intelligence services and the other things that are going on in his country.
Sorry to break that news to people, but that's how it works.
It worked that way for Stalin and everybody else.
Kim Yong Nam is impeccable.
He joined the Communist Party before there was a North Korea.
He fought against the Japanese colonizers.
He was there from the beginning.
He served all three Kims.
He was in the military.
He fought in the Great War.
He fought against the Japanese.
He was their foreign minister.
He now is the head of the People's Congress.
Essentially, he is the senior politician next to Kim Jong Un, and he is representative of the side of government that cannot be touched for making inroads to the West.
Who gets sent down to the Olympics with the sister?
Kim Yong Nam.
Better yet, Kim Yong Nam, despite that resume I just read off to you, has never been placed on the sanctions list by the United States.
The United States has studiously through administrations, Republican and Democrat, left him off of the sanction list, claiming, quote, he is not directly involved in the nuclear program, unquote.
What that means is this is the guy who can be the bridge if both sides, all three sides want to play.
This is the guy who's got the cover on the US side.
He's clean.
He's not on the sanctions list.
He's got the cover.
In other words, though, as soon as the CIA and the State Department analysts at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and so forth saw that, wow, they're sending Nam down there.
That must have been their reaction that, hey, look, we need to write a report about what this really means and send it up to the bosses.
I can absolutely guarantee that that was the reaction inside the US government.
They know who this guy is, of course.
Despite what you hear about the State Department being dismantled.
In fact, the people who have been working on Korean issues since before you and I paid attention to Korean issues, you know, are still there in the rank and file.
Not just that they know, but that they would be bowled over by this or they would be.
They would recognize what it was.
They would understand the importance of his presence there.
And that what that means there, if Pence cracked a window, they're opening the door pretty wide open by even sending him right or not.
So what you, yeah, and so what you want to do is watch because whenever you're dealing with North Korean issues on both sides, on all sides, the South, this is a tripartite thing, the South Koreans and North Koreans and the Americans, you know, you've got to worry about, you've got to keep your domestic audience in mind.
And so in my, I'm going to take the most optimistic view here on characteristically, you know, what Mike Pence has to do is Mike Pence has to cover his right flank here.
Mike Pence has to make sure that the Trump base sees, views this as the United States negotiating from a position of strength, that it was the Trump threats that brought the North Koreans around.
And so Pence has to put up an exterior that keeps that base on board with this.
Not unlike Nixon going to China, though, we're not going to go too far into the parallels.
But I mean, the idea is, is that we'll see what happens next.
Also, keep in mind that South Korea and the United States have their own relationship here.
And there's an enormous pressure among the older generations in South Korea to find a way forward with the North.
In 2000, when I was in Korea, when they first allowed family visits, they allowed families that had been separated by the Korean War, had seen each other in 50 years to make visits under very highly controlled conditions.
That was the media event of the decade in South Korea.
It was given wall to wall TV coverage, reporters interviewing North Koreans and saying things like, do the noodles taste the same in South Korea?
You know, we're breaking news.
They would cut into the sports programming to have some old guy from North Korea say, your noodles taste different.
They taste a little spicier, I think.
And, you know, this is like headline stuff.
There is an emotional underpinning to the politics here that is ignored at our peril.
We'll see what the Trump people do.
I mean, giving them credit for diplomatic subtleties is something I'm not quite ready to extend myself to.
There's a lot of hardliners inside the American government and media who don't want a form of detente with North Korea.
It will require some version of accepting North Korea as a nuclear state.
I mean, of course, we de facto do that.
North Korea has been a nuclear state for for quite some time.
And even though we claim, oh, my God, this is a terrible thing, we sort of just sit back and let it happen.
So we're going to have to find our way through this.
But I will step onto the edge of the diving board and say that I feel there's room for optimism here.
I feel there's a path forward if two of at least two of the three sides want to take that path forward.
And I haven't seen that path forward existing for many years.
Yeah.
Well, man, I'm really happy to hear your spin on this.
You know, obviously, there have been a lot of wasted opportunities.
So I don't really know.
I guess, like you said, the fact that Pence commented that actually we are working on maybe the next step here is should be a huge sigh of relief.
Let me let me ask you.
I forget if you said in the article and I didn't mention the article, man, I'm sorry.
It's at the American Conservative.
You guys don't be cynical about an Olympic state taunt with North Korea.
You say there which years you were there?
I was in I was in South Korea from 1997 to 2001.
Oh, man.
And then I before the history I want to ask you about.
Go ahead and ask me about it.
And let's talk about the agreed framework for a second.
I mean, you were there during the agreed framework.
Yeah.
At the end of it all.
And this gets into some some complicated territory.
But essentially what you had is under the Clinton administration.
Help me out if this summary is not is too, too, too, too, too thin.
But I mean, essentially, you had a move by the Clinton administration to share some nuclear technology with North Korea in return for them scaling back their weapons programs and making some steps forward in terms of diplomatic relations.
The idea was to give them a little in hopes of getting back more in many people's mind, in some people's minds, I should say, that was seen as selling out in other people's minds.
It was seen as the kind of smart, practical diplomacy that needed to be done.
We that the reality is North Korea is a nuclear state and we can't get forward by pretending it's not.
That agreed on framework did result in some some amazing things.
We had American diplomats stationed, assigned, working, living in North Korea.
And I got I had a chance to talk with them and meet with them and get to know them because they would periodically come back down south and learn about things.
What's important in from a very core diplomatic level on things like the agreed upon framework, we can we'll scale up to the nuclear questions if you wish, is that you need to build what I call connective tissue.
If every single issue has to be decided by Mike Pence signing off on something that eventually gets passed, Kim Jong-un to agree or disagree with, you don't make progress very quickly when you're arguing over over small things that take a long time to resolve.
What you need are these lower level, mid-level bureaucratic kind of connections where people begin to know each other.
We know who to talk to.
We know how to talk to them, how to get in touch with them.
We create those communication lines so that if there is a minor issue, it can be resolved as a minor issue.
It doesn't have to be inflated.
And that builds trust, that builds these connections that allow progress to be made again if everyone wants progress to be made.
There are many instances.
And the agreed upon framework, by the way, was shot down because people in the newly elected Bush administration did not want progress to be made and basically shut down all of the programs that were started under the Clinton era.
Yeah, I mean, and that's the part that really can't be overstated.
And it may have been the most recent Gareth Porter interview or something.
I can't remember exactly, but it was how Cheney and his allies broke the nuclear deals, the article that he wrote for Truthout.
And it's at Antiwar.com, too.
It's the best retelling of that that I know of, of how in 2001 and 2002 the Bush administration did everything they could step by step by step and ultimately including abrogating the deal and announcing the deal was off from the American side before the North Koreans ever gave it up.
And then it was only after that that they left the nonproliferation treaty, kicked the IAEA inspectors out of the country and started making the first one to 2006.
And I'll confirm the accuracy of and the utility of Gareth's reporting on this.
It's good stuff.
Yeah, it's really, really significant.
I mean, I had my whole list in my head, but he added like four or five more steps.
I got it.
Yeah, I can't even memorize it now.
I got to go back anyway.
So, yeah, in other words, just another way of saying, though, that, yeah, it didn't necessarily have to be like this at all.
We had the sunshine policy way back then and the Bush guys ruined it.
And of course, Obama basically just, you know, for the most part, ignored North Korea or certainly never worked hard on moving forward on any of this.
And as you said, sat back, not that I mind this part, sat back and just watched him make more and more nukes because we're going to do.
And I think so.
Here's the deal.
You started out by saying, look, everybody's saying, oh, boo hoo, there's going to be a war with Korea.
But no, there's not.
Now, you're totally speaking for me.
Ninety nine percent of the time there because we do this every year.
North Korea makes some threats.
The Americans make some threats.
We go back and forth.
Everybody panics because they can't remember that we did this last year in the year before that in the year before that.
And it never really comes to anything because what are they going to do?
Really start a war.
Come on.
And why would our side start a war when the red lines have all already been crossed pretty much?
And the consequences of a war, as everybody knows, would be absolutely catastrophic for all sides in this, including our friends in Japan, our forces in Japan and all over the Pacific and this and that.
So it's just, you know, kind of off the table to do it.
So that makes sense.
And yet something has changed, right?
I sort of was wrong about the red line thing.
What's changed now is now they have legit ICBMs where they could take out my hometown and yours.
And the Trump government has said that, look, them combined with nukes, combined with effective delivery systems, not on my watch.
No way.
We're rolling this back one way or the other.
Now, maybe he doesn't really mean that.
He doesn't really mean a lot of things, he says.
But they've had nukes, as we were talking about, since 2006 already.
Their missiles are getting better and better all the time.
And so I guess I wonder if if you think it's really just a matter, that's maybe why they're willing to negotiate now, because they really mean that something must be done about this.
And if that does that imply, then that if these negotiations don't work, that they really might start a so-called preemptive war against Korea?
Well, first of all, let's keep in mind what nuclear weapons represent to North Korea.
They represent a defensive weapon.
And I'll say that in the sense of it prevents them from being attacked by anyone else who's not willing to to deal with the nuclear exchange at some level.
And for North Korea to succeed as a nuclear exchange, they don't have to wipe out Austin, Los Angeles and New York.
They just have to wipe out.
They just have to blow up something.
And if a struggle with the United States results in a nuclear weapon being detonated in or on Seoul, Tokyo, Guam, Honolulu or a suburb of Spokane, it doesn't really matter.
The story is the North Koreans just killed Americans with nuclear weapons.
That's the political value of those nuclear weapons.
So the idea that instead of smuggling a nuke on a freighter or having special forces infiltrate a nuclear weapon into Tokyo or whatever scenario or a submarine launch nuke or something like that.
I mean, the idea is, is that the threshold of attacking the United States and or its allies with a nuclear weapon has been crossed ever so long ago.
The fact that they might be better at it or have bigger ones or something like that, you're just changing the scale of the political victory, if you will, for North Korea.
At the end of the day, North Korea is a nuclear power.
Wait, but you're saying that that's what the National Security Council thinks, too.
What you just said.
I hope they do.
I hope they recognize that a nuke going off and taking out any part of America or its chain of allies is sort of the thing that matters.
Well, you know, Lindsey Graham says, well, hell, I mean, it would be over there, not here.
So, yeah, I mean, that's nice for Lindsey to say.
But if the United States wants to retain any credibility as as an ally and protector, it would kind of have a hard time working around the fact that it just watched, you know, a quarter of Tokyo disappear because that's the idea is, is that we lose more politically than they do, I guess.
I mean, the idea being that those weapons prevent them from being used.
This is classic deterrence is my is the bottom point here.
So the idea that North Korea is negotiating from what they consider a position of strength is not a bad thing that gives them some flexibility.
If they feel they have more than they really need, that gives them something to bargain down from.
If you're trying to negotiate with them when they've got theoretically at some point in history, one working nuke that they'd have to FedEx, you know, to antiwar dot com to set off, then they don't have a whole lot to bargain with.
If they have stuff that they can afford to give away.
I mean, the United States and Russia did this all through the Cold War.
We develop new weapons and then we give away something else, usually the older stuff to make it look like we're heading towards peace.
The point is, North Korea is a nuclear power.
It has been a nuclear power.
And the United States has tacitly acknowledged that the same way we acknowledge India, Pakistan, Israel, China, Britain, France and everybody else who has nuclear weapons.
And it's simply time to say that's the starting point.
Now, North Korea is a nuclear power.
Where are we going forward from there?
Hey, people keep telling me, man, you've got great show notes on your show nowadays.
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So what do you make of this?
There's the famous quote.
John Schwartz has done a good job of bringing this up over at The Intercept because The Washington Post and others keep using half of a quote from North Korean officials saying we will never negotiate with the Americans.
But the rest of the quote is we will never negotiate with you as long as you continue practicing invading our country and threatening us all the time.
But if you would back off, then we would negotiate.
And in fact, I forgot exactly how he said it, obviously, but something along the lines of they would even be willing to negotiate the issue of nuclear weapons to some degree.
I don't know about their entire abolition, but I wonder how seriously you take that.
It's interesting because this this has always been something the North really bugs the hell out of them.
The United States and South Korea usually once a year hold very large scale military exercises, usually way beyond what we normally do in terms of practice and things like that around the world.
This is this is pretty serious stuff.
And there's all sorts of things that go on throughout the year that are very provocative to the North Koreans.
One thing to watch now is what happens with the next with with these exercises.
The United States agreed to, quote, postpone the latest round of exercises in honor of the Olympics.
That, again, is a very interesting signal.
Whether what happens next will be very interesting, the United States, for example, has the option to say, well, we postponed the last set, so there's no need to do that again.
We'll we'll catch up when the next set comes around in a few months and leave that gap in there.
That's one thing that could happen.
That would be a very positive signal.
The United States could decide to hold the exercises and say, well, we put them off for the Olympics.
Olympics are over.
We're going out at full guns now.
That would be a very bad sign.
And the third thing would be what we've done in the past, which is scale these things back and scale them back in ways that signal to the North Koreans.
We're obviously doing something different this time.
And they watch these things very closely.
So the US has a chance with these military exercises with the North, which the North Koreans really, really hate, to use them to signal our intentions.
So keep an eye out for that.
Don't just let the media tell you they're happening or they're not happening.
Go one more paragraph deeper and see if you can pick out whether the United States is scaling up, scaling down, calling them the continuation of the postponed ones, new exercises.
All those words, they matter.
And they're all part of the signaling that goes on behind the scenes.
So keep an eye out for that.
Right.
All right.
Now, here's something I can't get over because, yeah, OK, they got A-bombs and they claim they have H-bombs, which may be some kind of boost to A-bombs or half an H-bomb type of a thing.
But other than that, we are talking about one of, if not the poorest country in the world.
I mean, right up there with Somalia and Yemen under American bombs right now.
And America is the most powerful government, country, nation, state that's ever existed.
And so can we not afford to deal from not just a position of strength?
There's no question about strength.
Can't the Americans afford to be completely magnanimous with this?
I mean, if it was me, I would just send Dennis Rodman and the whole crew and just let's be friends.
Drop all sanctions.
Stop practicing invading.
Stop threatening them.
Give them, like Kennedy did with Cuba, a guaranteed and not invade.
And look, we're just going to do like Nixon with Mao.
We want to trade.
Put Donald Trump on Air Force One and just start flying it straight for Pyongyang.
What are they going to do?
Shoot him down?
Land at the airport?
Demand take me to your leader.
I want to shake his hand and have some dinner.
Scott, I mean, we're hippie, sissy boys and, you know, peace and love and unicorn farts.
I'm not.
I skate vert.
And, you know, I agree with you.
I don't quite like Cuba.
I don't quite understand how this hair got buried so far up America's ass that we can't figure out.
I mean, what are we what are we still mad about?
In other words, North Korea exists.
It's going to continue to exist.
It is a nuclear state.
Where do you go from that?
What you want to do is de-escalate the chance of conflict.
You want to if you want to weaken the Kim regime, why not open relations in a way that we've seen in the past with the Soviet Union, with other dictatorial countries where you start to pry open that society?
I just don't know what the value of sanctions that keep a country on the edge of starvation actually is in terms of geopolitical progress.
If our goal is to reduce the risk of conflict in Northeast Asia.
Well, maybe that's your false premise.
You're assuming too much, right?
We do this all the time, don't we?
We assume that our government is acting in what we would try to conceive as the national interest.
But they have a different interest in that.
No, you're right.
You're right.
I'm sorry.
I'm one one one monster energy drink short this morning.
That was foolish of me to think that the United States had peace in Northeast Asia on its minds.
Well, so what is the deal anyway?
And especially, man, you're a former State Department guy who was actually in Korea, not just somewhere else there.
So what's it all about?
In fact, let me set that up better.
There's this thing I may already asked you this.
Sorry.
There's a thing in the L.A. Times a few months back that China hand Peter Lee showed me where the guy says, look, we could make a deal.
And his deal, he's talking about we could get China to invade and seize their nukes for us or something like that.
But anyway, he's saying one way or the other, we could resolve this.
But that would cost us our leverage over South Korea and Japan.
Why do they need us?
They need us to protect them from the north.
If they don't need us to protect us, to protect them from the north anymore, then they don't need us at all.
And they might spin off from the American empire and God forbid, fall under the sway of the Chinese.
And I wonder, is that really the doctrine is we have to keep North Korea like this in order to extort our friends, the Japanese?
I think, you know, I can't I wouldn't say there are not elements of that going on, but I think that's a tad simplistic.
If it's a slice of the pie, it's a very thin slice of the pie because the relationship, I mean, maybe in 1950, but in 2018, the relationship between the United States and Japan and South Korea is deep and complex and multilevel.
It's as much economic as anything else.
I don't think that that's what this is really all about anymore.
I'll give more credence to that theory a couple of decades ago.
I think it comes down to the fact that in a broader sense, since the end of World War Two, the American government has felt that it must have enemies out there to justify the defense budget, the bases overseas, the worldwide empire.
It doesn't work for us somehow to be sort of the good guys.
It has to be that we are always on the edge of survival.
And the North Koreans have been like the Cubans before them are just such a handy enemy.
They're like Bond villains.
They never like they always look bad.
They Kim Jong-un with his goofy haircut and and his bellicose language and his military parades.
I mean, he's just a great villain.
And the American government wants villains and likes villains and needs villains and justifies so many other things.
I suspect there's an element of that in the in the Japanese side.
The Japanese government has never met a conservative thought or a right wing element.
They don't they don't love dearly.
And having a bad guy out there is very convenient.
And the North Koreans are such a convenient form of bad guy.
They know how to fire off rockets.
Yeah, they do like that.
Wimp Saddam Hussein who could catapult a station wagon at you or something.
Yeah.
And so I think there's elements in those things.
But at the end of the day, North Korea is just the bus that that came along.
You know, when the Cold War ended, the U.S. farted around for a long time.
We gave terror with our global enemy that we had to be super afraid of to justify all the acts of empire.
We gave terrorism a good run.
They got a good almost 10, 15 years out of terrorism as the motivator for all the American empire and wars around the world.
But I think we've kind of gotten bored with it.
We've declared victory in Iraq over ISIS.
I don't know what's going to happen in Syria, but I mean, nobody pays much attention there in Afghanistan.
And so we need a new villain.
And North Korea is just perfect.
You know, this Putin is running there.
He's doing well in the villain category.
But I just can't get around how good a bad guy North Korea is in the minds of the people who want the American empire to have someone to threaten us.
Yep.
And it's really an amazing thing, the way America works, just where, you know, Smedley Butler said war is a racket.
I think America itself is a racket.
The whole thing is just completely there's I used to believe like when I was a kid in the 1990s, I thought the whole thing was secretly run by the skull and bones behind the scenes or whatever.
And now I wish, God, at least then that would imply there's some board of directors somewhere with veto power over the worst passions of these kooks.
But yeah, no, it doesn't look like it looks a lot more like a free for all.
When you go back in and look at this, and I did an article on American conservative talking about fear and the role it plays in America's political world.
You know, you go back and you look at the genesis of all this, the end of World War Two.
You know, we were sitting there.
We were the only nation on Earth that had an intact society and industrial capacity.
We were the only nation on Earth that had nuclear weapons.
We had a global military presence that had just won the war.
And the very first thing we did was create new enemies as quickly as possible and reconfigure that the Soviet Union, which had just lost, what, 12 million people or something in the war against the Nazis and was decimated.
We instantly reconfigured them as an immediate direct threat against the survival of the United States.
That was kind of our first gesture in the post-war period was not to say, wow, we're pretty much top of the mountain here.
Doesn't look like anybody can really challenge us in any significant way.
Oh, my gosh, that's not going to work out.
Let's get the Russians on board here.
And we quickly changed that into a global conspiracy.
We threw the Chinese in there and then that quickly led us into Vietnam and all the all the the terrible things that happened along the way.
I think that pattern of needing that bad guy has really ingrained itself in how the American government, if you will, works.
And as we fit North Korea into that, they're just kind of the bus that we got on.
And we could have been somebody else.
But North Korea is just can't stop winning for us.
Yeah.
And back to that Gareth Porter article when he goes through step by step by step, how the Cheney cabal in the Bush Jr.government forced them out of the deal.
Back then, it was all about selling anti-missile missiles.
You know, I mentioned Saddam Hussein's Scuds there.
Yeah, you can sell some Patriot missile batteries over that.
But that's nothing compared to the real anti-nuclear ballistic missile business.
Yeah.
We'll have a new improved version coming up soon.
So stay tuned.
We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars when it comes to Star Wars and all this stuff.
Keep in mind, the other role that North Korea played for the Bush people was to enlarge their war view.
You know, they were they were really when when the Bush people were dismantling the agreed upon framework and the other initiatives, the United States extended to North Korea.
They were really their their real goal was preparing America for war with with Iraq.
And they kind of wanted to distract a little bit, I guess, or broaden the picture.
I'm not sure the right way to phrase it.
But remember, North Korea was tossed into the so-called axis of evil by George W.
Bush.
They were grouped alongside Iraq and Iran.
The Bush people had no intention of invading North Korea, but I think they wanted to make it look like they were on a global quest, not just hoping to beat up on Iraq and maybe score against Iran.
So North Korea served that that bad guy, Bond villain role for the Bush people.
Hey, fun coincidence.
One of the it's one of the Davids, David Froome or David Corn, who is now a ardent anti-Trumpist, was the guy who wrote that axis of evil speech.
So small world.
Yeah, Corn is the kook from Mother Jones.
Oh, yeah, right.
Sorry, I get it.
Yeah.
And he's also the author of The Right Man, the hagiography of George W.
Bush and An End to Evil, which he co-wrote with Richard Perle.
Yeah.
Taking over everything.
And in fact, one more thing about that.
And I admit I can't find this.
I've looked and maybe I should ask John Schwartz because he's just the absolute encyclopedia of this stuff.
But I could swear to you that I read a story that Froome got the phrase from Perle to put it in Bush's speech.
And that originally it was Iran, Iraq and Syria.
But then it was too obvious that they were simply agents of a foreign power, Israel.
And so they said, you know what?
Throw in North Korea to confuse the issue a little bit, make it sound like it's something other than just what Ariel Sharon wants.
Yeah, that makes sense.
That makes sense.
And again, you can't go wrong with North Korea making them the bad guys.
They will rise to the bait.
And the fact that they are such a closed society means that you get to say whatever you want about them.
And there's really not much of a chance of rebuttal.
This is, I think, one of the things that was so deeply amusing.
And we going circling back to our chat about Kim Jong Un's babalicious sister there is that, you know, finally, the media found something nice to say about North Korea that they were they couldn't really.
I mean, because the stories are all the same.
One of these days, I want to I'm going to write my my my North Korea story and be famous without ever going there.
But because all the stories are the same, you know, these journalists who get these visas, they go to North Korea and they write the same story every time.
It looks nice, but, you know, just behind the facade, they're starving to death.
And we went to an amusement park, but it's only available to the elites.
And don't believe what you read.
It's still a terrible place.
And here's a picture of a dirt road I secretly took from the bus.
You know, they all write the same story and they all get published and they get make books out of it.
So I'm not even going to bother to travel there.
It's too far.
I'm just going to write that story.
I'm famous.
Yeah, right.
The same 100 times over.
Like you said, exactly.
Exactly.
And so there's one exception to that, of course, which is Doug Bandow, who always comes back and says, I'm not afraid of them.
I don't think the South Koreans should be.
I think they could defend themselves without us, since their economy is, what, 25 times the size of the North Korean economy and their army is twice the size.
And what are we even doing on the peninsula at all anyway?
Fair enough.
Yeah, yeah.
And he didn't get a book deal.
So let's let's just stick with the the amusement parks are only available for the elites and don't believe anything you see that looks good.
So the fact that there's never a counter narrative about North Korea makes them just so easily available.
They don't spend money.
They don't have a lobbying force in the United States.
They don't have expatriates that say nice things about them around the world.
They're just a great bad guy.
And I would hope and keep my fingers crossed that maybe, maybe, maybe we're going to see a teeny little step to the side on that in the near future.
I hate to say something good about Trump, but he's the kind of guy you can just imagine him going for the big.
Play, you know, the the guy who's who's looking at his place in history and he looks back and there's Nixon, right?
Nixon's remembered for being a scumbag, warmongering freak and for opening China.
And the idea that there's a cherry that you can put on top of that tarnished historical role, I wouldn't be beyond someone to pitch the idea to Trump and say, let's get on that plane.
Let's go to Pyongyang.
Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know if Trump knows anything about Nixon going to China, but no, no, no, no, no.
I mean, it would be someone would have to tell him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Write him a note or something.
Let us keep tabs on on what happens in North Korea, because the steps forward, if they take place, are going to be subtle and we'll want to keep a close eye on that.
The mainstream media we have seen is incapable of covering this story in any intelligent way.
They simply see it as a political chew toy that they can use to blame Trump for different things.
They don't understand the subtleties of how this works.
So let's keep tabs on this and see.
It's so the problem with this process is that it is just so easy to derail.
All you need is one person on one of the three sides to throw a wrench in.
And the whole thing's going to fall apart because it is a very you don't have that base of trust.
You don't have that base of relationships.
You know, on the US side, it's a small handful of diplomats that are doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
People who meet with the North Koreans in third party locations or meet with the North Koreans at the UN here in New York City.
It's a very small handful of people on both sides that know each other.
You've got to build out that base if you want progress to occur.
And all it takes is one dumb thing to happen.
And everybody's scattered.
It's like turning on the light.
Everybody runs under the under the stove.
And you've got to wait a while before they're ready to come out again.
So we'll keep an eye on there, actually, man.
I'm sorry to ask you this.
Oh, no, go ahead.
Yeah, we'll just just add into what you're saying here about the future of South Korean talks with the North.
It seemed from here that they're sort of worried about the tone that Trump was taken and that kind of thing.
And they sort of started their own bilateral thing separately or not.
It's very possible.
I mean, again, we cannot underplay the domestic political value of making progress with the North Koreans to to the South Korean politicians.
This is a domestic issue for them.
And it gets votes for them, particularly.
Do you think that they're out ahead of the Trump team on this?
And they're really good cop, bad cop.
Yeah, you get two choices.
It's either good cop, bad cop or they're out ahead.
It's it's it's a roll of the dice.
I mean, it really depends on whether you you're willing to give Trump's State Department any credit for being clever enough to set up the good cop, bad cop.
If you are, then I'd go good cop, bad cop.
If you're if you're a little more cynical about it, then the South Koreans are out ahead.
I think the U.S. people will I think the U.S.
State Department people, if they're allowed to kind of get a word in, are going to make it going to help understand what's going on.
One more quick thing.
The media always reports on that.
The president has been briefed on plans to do this and bomb North Korea.
And Mattis has come forward with it.
But keep in mind that the United States has active planning to attack nearly every nation on Earth.
There's a file on the on the shelf about what we're going to do if Botswana suddenly goes nuclear and attacks the United States.
So planning to attack North Korea is nothing new.
It's been going on every single day.
And so, again, the media will overreact to those things.
But of course, people are thinking about that.
It's kind of what they do.
So let's watch the signals.
Let's keep in mind they're going to be subtle.
But I think between us, we can try to read them.
Yeah.
Oh, wait, one more question along those lines.
Then what do you think about the signals about the role of Mattis and McMaster in this and their takes on Korea and what must be done there?
I don't know.
I mean, they're playing they're playing roles.
Mattis is the secretary of defense.
I mean, his role is to plan for war against North Korea.
So that's the role he's going to play.
McMaster, I have less insight into his his thinking, but I mean, his background clearly is from the kinetic side of things.
I think they can play a part.
I mean, the North Koreans have a lot of generals on their side of the table.
If this ever comes to it.
And I think they will find men like McMaster and Mattis comfortable to deal with.
So there's a positive side on that.
But again, the fact that Mattis is talking about war options is exactly what his job is.
Don't be surprised that that's what he's doing.
They all have roles to play and we'll see where it comes out.
I mean, the thing is, is we're kind of criminologists about this.
Right.
So you read a story like this and so then now you're picturing, OK, there's President Trump.
And he's got his generals there and some kind of conversation along the lines of, I want new options presented.
Go do work and bring me different choices I can make.
You know, that can prejudice the reaction to a great degree.
Right.
Like the Simpsons version of this when it's President Schwarzenegger and they're like, pick number three or what?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, of course.
You got God knows what goes on, as you said, behind the scenes here, it's the Simpsons things.
But at the end of the day.
Mattis does not want to be the secretary of defense who has to call five thousand families and explain why their sons and daughters were just nuked on Guam.
Well, I mean, he said he's actually got the best soundbite out of everybody on the planet on this.
I think when he said, if we have war with North Korea, it will be the most bitter fighting of our lifetimes.
And I'm going, wait, this guy was born during World War Two or something.
Probably right.
Maybe before it.
This is so.
Yeah, I myself am not worried if somebody wanted to sell me beachfront property on the DMZ.
I'm interested.
That's cool.
Actually, man, you could probably make a killing doing some betting against the conventional wisdom there.
I have a lot of real estate terms, but yeah, I have a lot of bets out there.
I, you know, all these these warmongers who for the last year have been announcing, you know, the clock is ticking.
I said, how much do you want to how much you want to put down on this?
I'm willing to throw down some serious Bitcoin if anybody wants to bet me that we're not that we're going to have a war.
I'm I'm investing heavily in DMZ front golf course condos.
And you guys can find Peter on Twitter if you want to take him up on this as as we meant.
Well, that's that's the handle.
All right, Scott, my friend, take care.
Thank you very much, Peter.
Appreciate it, man.
Talk to you again soon.
Bye bye.
All right, you guys.
That's Peter Van Buren.
Hooper's War is his latest book.
And before that, we meant well.
And of course, yeah, that is his handle on Twitter.
Watch him fight with the leftists all day.
It's funny.
And guys, a liberal, too, is, you know, he's not a right winger, but anyway, it is funny.
We meant well.
All right.
And check out this great article at the American Conservative magazine.
Don't be cynical about an Olympics detente with North Korea.
And you guys know me.
I'm Scott Horton and sign up for my RSS feeds at Scott Horton dot org.
You can also find the archives at YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton show.
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Thanks.
