06/12/18 Peter van Buren on the Singapore Summit

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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
On the line, I've got Peter Van Buren.
He was a State Department guy for a long, long time, a diplomat.
He was stationed in Seoul, South Korea.
He, of course, famously was a whistleblower about Iraq War II and wrote the book, We Meant Well, about his time in Iraq War II.
And he's been a great anti-war guy ever since then.
He writes often for the American Conservative Magazine and a lot of other great places.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a good day to talk with you today.
I'm a pretty happy guy on this morning.
I'll tell you what.
Well, so for people hearing this later on, that's because it's Tuesday, June the 12th of 2018.
The day, well, I don't know.
Go ahead and say everything that you have to say about whatever you want.
Well, it's obviously the day that Putin activated the mind control device and forced Trump to sell the United States out on the Korean Peninsula.
Thank God.
And force everyone in the United States to eat Chinese food.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why a bunch of Russia firsters like you and me are so happy about this deal, right?
What could be wrong about that?
I'm actually very, very happy because less than 12 hours ago, the United States took a major step forward in holding the Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un.
And we'll talk in detail about how nothing's perfect and there's good and bad to every side of things.
But the idea is that six months ago, we were on this show with me trying to explain how I didn't think there was going to be war in Korea.
But it was headline news in The New York Times and The Washington Post and throughout parts of the U.S. government that we were on the verge of a nuclear apocalypse.
And here we are six months later beginning the process.
And it is the beginning and it is a process of finding a way forward to denuclearize North Korea in the long run and in the short run continue to reduce the risk of conflict and war.
Anytime I see diplomacy being practiced well, I smile.
And I realize for many listeners and many people, it is so difficult for them to accept that this summit was a positive thing and they hate Trump to the core of their being.
But at times, you've just got to look at the reality of what has been done and whether it's an Obama that you don't like making peace moves with Korea or Iran or a Trump you don't like who's doing the same thing with North Korea.
Anytime we're talking about peace negotiations and diplomacy and not talking about war, that's a good day.
Alright, now I don't want to get off on a tangent about partisanship and how frustrated I am and how hilarious it is to watch these liberals flailing around.
But let me try to paraphrase their best criticism.
Donald Trump is a big dummy and the North Koreans know what they're doing.
And they know that he has to look good on TV.
It's his biggest priority right now.
And so Kim has got Trump over a barrel and Trump is giving away the entire story.
He's bestowing all of America's legitimacy onto North Korea, which they never had before.
And he hasn't gotten any really firm commitments at all.
But in exchange, he's already calling off war games and all of these things.
So this is what happens when you send a child to do a real man's job.
I will take a moment to look at the concessions that were made because it's very important to tally those concessions up.
Well, there's a moratorium on nuclear and ballistic missile testing out of North Korea.
There's the return of three American prisoners.
There's the return of American soldiers' remains that have been pending since 1953.
There's the closing of a North Korean ballistic missile test site.
There's the shutting down of a major nuclear test facility without repairing it or reopening a new one.
Those are some pretty serious concessions, but they all came on the Korean side.
The idea of Trump giving away the store is amusing in the sense that no one ever really explains what that store is that could have been given away.
He did agree to suspend some military exercises, which have, by the way, been suspended or postponed or delayed or canceled in the past.
You can go back as far as the 90s and look at the cancellation of Team Spirit exercises that was done under Bill Clinton.
You could look at suspension of exercises by the South Koreans that was done during the Bush administration, and you could look as recently as January for the suspension of military or postponement of military exercises that was done running up to the Olympics.
Every one of those suspensions did not result in the weakening of any defensive posture.
Exercises that are suspended can be restarted at any time.
Having participated in those military exercises from the State Department's position in Korea, I can also tell you that an awful lot of the critical components are done on computer, and you can actually get a bunch of people and fly them to someplace in the world where there are computers, if such a place exists, and they can, in fact, conduct a lot of the exercises off the peninsula and gain much of the value.
And last but not least, it's 2018.
The actual deterrent to North Korean aggression against South Korea doesn't live, work, play, or exercise in South Korea.
It's B-2 bombers that fly out of Missouri.
It's B-52s that are based in Guam.
It's missile-armed submarines and ships that are strewn throughout the Pacific Ocean.
And none of those components, the real security umbrella for South Korea, are going anywhere.
They're going to stay in Missouri and deep under the Pacific Ocean, long past the end of the Trump administration or anything along those lines.
When I add it up, it seems like the concessions to date have occurred almost exclusively on the North Korean side and little to nothing on the American side.
Now go ahead, ask me about empowering or legitimizing Kim.
I think that's the next thing in the string that usually comes up at this point.
You know what, let's not waste time on these silly narratives, at least not until later on.
You know, the liberals are the liberals and they got their own problems.
But, so, what about the idea, though, that, you know, their argument, that Kim doesn't mean to follow through on this.
That, for example, I've seen that, come on, the test site, they were already done testing.
They already know how to make even an H-bomb now, supposedly.
The missile, they've already made their progress on their missiles.
Which is why the United States has no nuclear test facilities, because we got it right in 1952 and we've never had to test anything since then.
Okay, yeah, that's a good point.
Go on, please.
And then also just that, well, we can talk about the legitimacy, because maybe that's not a completely hollow argument.
It just seems so silly to me.
I know you're going to dismiss it with such contempt, but I guess that is part of it, if you want to add it all up and pretend like it's a little bit substantive with the rest of this.
But the basic point, I think, really being Peter, right, that Kim is the most brutal, evil, you know, domestic dictator, and therefore you know what his foreign policy is.
Lie and deceive and trick and backstab.
And that you're a damn fool, Peter Van Buren and Donald Trump, for thinking that this guy ever really means to follow through with denuclearization.
He's just taking you for a ride.
Wait a sec, I got distracted.
When you were talking about dictators that can't be trusted and that are despots and bad to their people, did we switch over to the Saudis or we're still on North Korea?
Oh, well, yeah, no, that's a different discussion.
Oh, shoot, okay.
Yeah, it is a different discussion.
But, you know, this is, in fact, what they've said word for word about Joseph Stalin, about Saddam Hussein, about whoever they want to target.
They go, look, the fact that he's a psychopathic murderer is proof that there's no point in dealing with him.
So, well, sure.
I mean, and I'm certainly not on Kim's fan club team.
I don't doubt that he is a lousy human being.
And I also don't doubt that that's totally irrelevant to the way that international relations work.
You make peace with the people you're at war with.
You have to negotiate these type of things with your adversaries, not with your friends.
And so you get down in the mud with some of the worst scumbags on planet Earth in order to achieve America's policy goals, which may, in fact, include lessening of tensions or peace.
If the only standard was you got to be a nice guy before we negotiate with you, then that would eliminate the need for an awful lot of our embassies around the world in a lot of countries throughout the old Soviet Union, Africa, places like that, where there are some pretty scummy guys still in charge who are our quote-unquote friends.
Well, you know, polite people aren't supposed to point out that America is the greatest purveyor of violence on the face of the Earth.
Yeah, think about Kim Jong-un having to answer his critics.
Why are you sitting down with the Americans?
Who the hell can trust them?
You know, it's kind of funny that the irony there is that the thing that we're terrified about North Korea is the thing we demand they accept from us.
In other words, we're terrified that they have nuclear weapons, but we demand that they accept the fact that we do.
So there's some ironies here that deserve a beer and a discussion.
But I want to go back to the idea of, well, Kim is simply going to cheat, and that's where this is going to end.
And of course, it's impossible to argue with someone who's predicting the future.
My prediction of the future is no more valid than anyone else's.
If you want to look back at the events of the past, the first thing you're doing is you're not talking about Kim Jong-un.
You're talking about his father and really just his father.
His grandfather didn't really make too many treaties that he had the renege on, but you're really talking about his father, a different person in a different time, in a different place, in a different global setting, dealing with a different set of American presidents.
But fine, we'll say that Kim, the son, has inherited some of the traits from his dad.
But there's other things that are actually different now that suggests that we're in a different environment.
First of all, Kim is not his father.
He's young.
He's Western educated.
His education was in Switzerland.
He's multilingual.
He speaks French.
He speaks English, obviously Korean.
And he may be envisioning himself as his nation's Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who actually brought the future to China while preserving its sovereignty.
I mean, yesterday, for example, Kim said as he was signing the documents with Trump, we've decided to leave the past behind.
It's hard to parse out of the American media, but if you're willing to read, in translation, the French, the British media, or some of the Asian medias, you find that there's a lot going on in Pyongyang.
There is a consumerist middle class that is emerging there.
I read that in Forbes magazine, never mind some left-wing rag, that are actually living in a parallel semi-market economy that is fueled by black market dollars, Chinese currency, access to foreign media.
Kim himself has made major reforms in allowing small-scale capitalist markets, particularly among farmers.
He has recently announced reforms in the educational system that are going to de-emphasize rote learning.
There's a lot going on out there that's very different than in the past.
It's simply not enough to say at that point, well, it's the same.
There are things that are different this time.
There's differences on the American side as well.
Donald Trump, and we will focus on Donald Trump in this very specific situation.
We can have a much longer discussion about his goods and bads in other places, but Trump has for the first time established to the North Koreans that he is willing to break the rules, the playbook on how to deal with them.
And that alone is worth something in terms of saying, well, we're willing to step out of line to help you, and maybe you'll be willing to do the same.
But one of the critical, critical differences this time, as opposed to in the past, is the presence of the South Korean president Moon Jae-in.
The American media has basically written him out of the story.
But if you look at what's gone on in the last couple of months, he's been at the center of everything.
He's been the prime mover behind the notion of this summit at all.
He's the one who has convinced Washington that North Korea is a top-down system, and you've got to deal with it that way.
His April meeting with Kim Jong-un established the basics of what they talked about yesterday in Singapore.
On May 24th, when Trump decided to cancel this meeting for whatever, Moon did shuttle diplomacy between Washington and Panmunjom and got the whole thing going again.
He is the dealmaker here.
He is the vehicle to solve problems in this relationship going forward that never, ever existed before.
He's an advisor to Kim.
He's an advisor to Trump.
He's an honest broker in this.
He's the guy that's going to help keep this on track, and that guy has never been present in this relationship or in previous negotiations ever before.
So anybody that says, well, it's all the same and nothing's changed and what the North Koreans did before is what the North Koreans are going to do again, in order for that to be true, everything I've just said has to be not true.
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So a friend was asking me last night, I mean, come on, this guy, Kim, he's probably looking at the future and thinking, you know, he probably is afraid that his system, it's such a backwards, insane totalitarian system in North Korea, that he must be afraid that it's going to fall apart on him.
And I says, you know, he might be.
And of course, that's the basis of all political power is fear.
So obviously, that's part of it, you know, to some degree, although I don't think anybody should assume that the North Korean state really is weak in comparison to its people, or that Kim himself really thinks that in any specific sense.
But it seems just as likely that he's just, you know, I mean, obviously, he's a politician and the son of one and everything.
Don't get me wrong, but he's, you know, possibly less of a psychopath than his father.
A lot of people disagree with their fathers about a lot of things.
And like you say, he was living in Switzerland.
He was raised with full exposure to everything the West has to offer.
And now he's the hereditary dictator of the most backwards ass country in the world.
So it just seems like, you know, there's a pretty good chance that he would like to make things better, just because how could anybody want them to stay the way they are?
So, you know, rather than even necessarily reflecting any personal fear on his account about the stability of the North Korean dictatorship, like what kind of kook would you have to be to want to keep it like this anyway?
You know, I really will encourage listeners who are not familiar with the work Deng Xiaoping did to go do some googling around and reading up on that.
Because let me just recommend one little footnote about that.
It's a great article that Lou Rockwell wrote back, I don't know, 15 years ago or something.
And it's called From Death Camp to Civilization.
And he goes, look, here's the most ancient advanced civilization on the planet.
The communists turn them into cannibals and cavemen and starve them by the tens of millions to death, raise their entire civilization back down to the dirt.
And then Deng Xiaoping comes and says, hey, let's try markets instead.
And now in just the 30 years since then, 35 years since then as he was writing this, that this is the greatest advance in a relative sense, in a comparative sense of humanity that's ever been recorded anywhere.
It's the best thing that's ever happened.
And now you want to cry about a little bit of lead on your toy fire engine?
Shut the F up, man.
This is called progress here.
And our trade and our open relationship with them, that dastardly Nixon bestowing his benevolent, Jesus-like legitimacy onto the Maoist regime, going over there and dealing with them, has helped prevent a thermonuclear war in the intervening 40 years as well.
And that's as simple as that.
I mean, that summarizes the whole idea that anyone who is criticizing what happened in Singapore is implicitly endorsing the opposite, which is we shouldn't be talking to the North Koreans and we should be gearing up for war because that, in the end of the day, when we push things all the way out to the end of the night, that's the alternative to diplomacy, is either doing nothing and hoping, and hope is not a good strategy in international relations, particularly with nuclear weapons, or going to war.
I want to return to the Deng Xiaoping thing because I think if more people were familiar with that bit of history from, gosh, we've got to go all the way back into the 70s, the Jimmy Carter era, I think they would have a clear roadmap of where Kim Jong-un may be going.
Because if I had the opportunity to poke around Kim's bedroom, one of the things I think I would find would be a biography or history of Deng Xiaoping on his nightstand.
Deng Xiaoping did a lot of good things and bad things, like everybody, but the critical thing that he did was he found a way to open China to the world to allow, at that time, what was a limited amount of capitalism, a more creative society, a more open society, while preserving China's sovereignty and while preserving China's unique place in a superpower world.
They were not going to be Russia's boy and they weren't going to be America's boy, but were going to be strong enough to deal with both of them as equals.
They were going to amend their communist system in ways that empowered the country without destroying what the country represented to them.
Well, and think about the opposite policy at the time, too, still on the question of China.
So all the perches and all the right-wing hawks and all the neoconservatives piling around with Scoob Jackson, they all tried to stop this, well, especially with Russia, but they were against detente with China, too.
And their policy, their preferred policy would have been, no, starve them out.
Don't trade with them.
Don't encourage the rise of Deng because Deng will create a growing tax base for the Communist Party to thrive off of.
It might last another 40 years or so.
What would be better is to keep them under total blockade and hope, and just cross your fingers, that at some point, like with Iraq War 1.5 in the 1990s, at some point we'll starve them to the point where they're so desperate that they'll all die trying to overthrow Mao, Saddam, whoever, for us.
And that would be the policy here, too, that rather than a cooling off and getting along and figuring out a way to get along with this guy, no matter what a psychopath he is, no matter how many cousins and brothers he killed with sarin gas and whatever the crap, that this is the only way forward because the opposite of that would be to just, what, to continue to starve them out?
To pray for another drought and famine there?
Because hopefully that will finally – and isn't it right, Mr. State Department, that the guys who know everything about this have been telling us for 25 years that as soon from the time that Gorbachev resigned that the DPRK was next and that there was no point in trying to deal with them because the regime's about to fall?
There you go.
And I can – without dragging the idea too broadly, but you look for touch points and you don't say, well, gosh, this historical lesson doesn't matter because I've been able to find one thing that doesn't match up.
You know, that's been the United States' policy to, quote, overthrow, destroy Cuba.
It was the United States' policy to try to overthrow China, as you've just pointed out.
It was the United States' policy – it still is the United – and is back again the United States' policy with Iran.
This whole idea that we can literally starve nations of millions of people to death to invoke regime change has never worked.
It has failed consistently and it is failing in real time in front of us.
The one example that we can point to in modern times where the opposite has worked is again with China and why we insist on doing the wrong thing over and over again.
I don't know.
Every one of these people that you're seeing on the mainstream media, these pundits, these former U.S. government officials, every one of them is on CNN now because they failed when they were in government to resolve the problems in North Korea.
If they had been successful when they were in power and in government, we wouldn't have a Singapore summit.
They'd still be working for the U.S. government instead of embarrassing themselves on CNN and Madao, telling everyone that Trump making peace is the worst possible thing that could have happened.
I've been very disappointed.
I mean, never mind the Jake Tappers of the world and all these bad guys, but there have been people like Robert Kelly who heroically debunked lies about the Parchin test chamber in Iran, who has debunked lies about the Syrian attack on the fake, not even Syrian reactor in 2006.
Did I say the Israeli?
I meant to say the Israeli attack on the Syrian supposed reactor.
They're admitting it now.
Wait, who's admitting which part?
The Israelis admitted they blew up the reactor.
Oh, yeah, but it wasn't a reactor.
That was the point.
It never was a reactor in the first place.
So here's a guy who's been not just good, but heroic and has been a very important source for us in the past in doing the right thing with just such a negative attitude about how this is supposed to play out.
And you know, Christopher Hill, who, if there was one guy who ever accomplished a thing, I don't know anything about the guy personally, if there was one guy who ever accomplished a thing in the State Department of the Bush administration, it was when Christopher Hill and Connelies Rice cornered George Bush on a Friday afternoon, as Ray McGovern points out, they got him at like 5.30 on a Friday when Cheney was out of town threatening Iran, and they said, please let us go to Korea.
And they let Chris Hill go to Korea, and he started making real progress.
They turned off the Yongbyon reactor, the heavy water reactor, and they started making real progress, and then Bush himself came and ruined it a couple of months later by putting them back on the terrorist list, because that was what Israel wanted probably, whatever crap.
So here's Christopher Hill as a guy who had, if these other idiots had stayed out of his way and let him do his job, he could have had a pretty damn good deal back then.
And then I see him raining all over this parade instead of saying, hey man, there's a real basis for a possibility for a deal that will satisfy everyone here.
Come on.
What the hell is with that anyway?
Because that's not just simple partisanship.
I mean, I know never Trump and blah, blah, blah, but still, it seems like people who really ought to know better have just such the worst attitude about this.
I would hope it's really only partisanship, that they're really not this stupid, because if it's only partisanship, then at least I understand why people who, in some cases I personally have worked with and know to be intelligent, are saying ridiculously stupid things.
I hope they're just doing that because CNN or Maddow or somebody is paying them a consulting fee and a producer has told them, hey, I want you to take this position so Rachel can talk with you about it.
I hope it's just that.
I hope that they really aren't as dumb as they sound when they say, well, we're betraying our South Korean allies because we're going to delay or postpone or even cancel a military exercise.
I hope they're not as dumb as saying that, wow, the United States has magic fairy dust.
It can sprinkle on world leaders to turn them illegitimate to legitimate overnight.
A magic handshake from Donald Trump apparently has that power.
Who knew?
I hope they're not that dumb.
I saw some funny tweets along those lines where they do the bait and switch with the different people.
So Donald Trump, who is the lowest scum in the history of the world, according to these people, he doesn't bestow Donald Trump's benevolent legitimacy on Kim by meeting with him.
He gives Kim all the legitimacy of the red, white and blue and the bald eagle and the American flag and every man who ever died for freedom.
And so, wow, how undeserving is Kim of that?
But of course, they don't say of Korea, right?
Because they got to do the bait and switch back and forth between personalities and nation states because they're too PC to just say, yeah, North Korea is a terrible country and screw all the people there.
They don't want to frame it quite like that.
But it's not Trump.
It's America's legitimacy.
But it's not being bestowed on Korea, which, as Ben Norton was pointing out on tour this morning, has existed as a nation state and a member of the United Nations since 1950-whatever and all of this, this whole time anyway.
The other interesting thing about all that, and while, yes, there is some difference between what CNN called last night, the acting U.S. president himself, we can't ignore the reality that Madeleine Albright, as Secretary of State, went to North Korea and took a whole group, Wendy Sherman and the whole gang with her.
We can't ignore the fact that as ex-president, both Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter went to North Korea.
We can't ignore the fact that during the Obama years, Clapper went there to pick up a prisoner or two.
The idea that nothing happened prior to Singapore or that none of these previous events mattered in any significant way is also, I think, at this point, shameful for the media not to talk about and acknowledge and explain their point.
They could spin it as a pro-Democrat thing, which they like.
Bill Clinton had a pretty damn good deal.
Credit to Jimmy Carter and to Madeleine Albright.
It was Dick Cheney and John Bolton who ruined the agreed framework and got us into this mess in the first place.
That also is a fun little rejoinder to the people who talk about how the North is certainly going to cheat.
We want to take a look back at what the U.S. did to the relationship between America and North Korea back when they declared the axis of evil.
George Bush shitcanned all the Clinton-era progress the day he took office and basically said, Then he finally sealed the non-deal by throwing North Korea into the axis of evil pointlessly alongside Iran and Iraq.
I don't think anybody really understood that.
The North Koreans certainly don't quite figure where they fall into that group.
The idea would be that in that case, the deal was broken not by North Korean nefariousness but by American nefariousness.
It's really time to get some reality into this process.
I'm disappointed not to see it out of our media.
I would hope that there will be other sources that will emerge that we can look to.
I've got a column in editing at Reuters right now that I hope will make some of these similar points.
I'll share that on my blog and other places as well.
Follow me on Twitter at the at sign WeMeantWell.
WeMeantWell.com for the great blog as well.
I'm sorry I didn't mention that at the beginning.
The book is Hooper's War.
Peter Van Buren.
Thank you, Peter.
Scott, always a pleasure.
There's going to be a lot more to talk about.
Let's keep in touch on this one.
Absolutely, Will.
Thanks again.
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