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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, 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, introducing the great Gareth Porter, my very favorite reporter.
He's also a historian, an investigative historian and journalist.
He wrote Perils of Dominance, Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
And he also wrote Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
He writes regularly for Truthout and for the American Conservative Magazine and for consortiumnews.com.
And we reprint all of it at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
This one is called An Elite Coalition Emerges Against a Trump-Kim Agreement.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
And wow, what an interesting time.
Donald Trump, he went through with it, went to Singapore, struck up a personal relationship of a sort with the dictator of North Korea.
And they signed a thing promising to move forward on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
And the center-right and the center-left and the TV news in America, especially, went absolutely crazy over this.
What's going on?
What explains it?
Well, you know, it seems to me, this response, the reaction to the Singapore summit meeting really reveals something that was not quite as clear as it is now, which is that there is not just an anti-Trump feeling on the part of the news media and the Democratic Party, but there's something else at play here.
There's a way in which the anti-Trump position of the mainstream media, particularly, of course, the partisan media, but not limited to that, has been now linked to and allied with a distinctly separate issue, which is what happens if, in fact, Trump is able to actually reach an agreement with North Korea that sticks?
And how is that going to affect the future position of the United States as a power in East Asia?
And it's now occurring to a lot of people who are not allies of Trump that this could mean a very big change in the regional politics and even global politics, because it would make it much more difficult for the United States to maintain or even beef up its power position, quote unquote, in relation to China in particular.
And this has begun to be expressed by some of the people who have been critical of Trump's policy toward North Korea.
Initially, of course, as you know, the problem that was raised by critics both in the partisan media and in the more established print and electronic media was that Trump was proceeding on the basis of a false assumption, which was that North Korea would ever be willing to give up its nuclear weapons.
Now, that was a way of basically trying to ward off the possibility of a summit between Trump and Kim, trying to get the White House to reassess whether it was going to go ahead with it.
And of course, they were working closely with John Bolton in that regard, one of the interesting things about the situation is how the press is clearly aligning itself with Bolton's point of view.
But now, what we're getting is something that is beginning to worry about the possibility that he could succeed in this.
And so they're now primarily wringing their hands over the idea that Trump, or not the idea, but the fact that Trump expressed the readiness and has actually acted on it to stop, temporarily at least, the joint military operations or military exercises with South Korea.
Now, this has become one of the flashpoints politically surrounding the issue of Trump's policy toward North Korea.
And it's being presented by this coalition of mainstream media, Democratic critics, and I would add the foreign policy elite, the foreign policy establishment generally, part of it.
What they're saying now is that Trump is actually endangering a 70-year-old alliance with South Korea, and that therefore, he is really endangering the security of the United States.
That's the implication of what the critics of Trump are saying now about his policy.
And to my way of thinking, this is the beginning of a new stage where I think there's a coalition that is forming.
It's a very loose coalition.
It's not formalized, obviously.
It's maybe not even conscious.
But I think a lot of people are beginning to believe that they have to oppose Trump to make sure, to oppose his policy toward North Korea, to make sure that he doesn't make it impossible for the United States to carry out the strategy of really competing with China much more vigorously than has been the case in the past, because he is making peace on the Korean Peninsula.
All right.
So, there's so much here.
But first of all, I had a clue that some of the arguments here were disingenuous, when they all kept repeating themselves that we are abandoning South Korea here, when this entire effort has been led by the South Korean president Moon.
And Trump has basically told him, yes, go ahead.
I won't stand in the way of you moving this thing forward.
And then Moon came to him and said, listen, we've made substantial progress.
We're ready for you now.
And so, talk a little bit about, because there are important talking points beyond just, you know, we must hate Trump even more than peace deals, which is a major part of just the frame of reference for all of this stuff.
But some of the important talking points, Gareth, are that we got nothing for this.
Trump says, not only is he calling off the exercises, which I guess are a given good, but he even went so far as to adopt the language of the enemy and say that they're provocative.
And so, and he did that and he got nothing for it.
And he just bestowed the benevolent legitimacy of the United States and its red, white, and blue flag onto this merciless dictator.
And Kim just completely played Trump like a fool, because all Trump is, is a TV actor at the end of the day.
That's what they say, Gareth.
That, of course, is a repeat of the theme that began many weeks ago, that Kim and the North Koreans would simply play Trump.
They're clever.
They will make promises, but they won't keep them and they'll pocket all kinds of concessions and he'll never get anything in return.
And you're right.
I mean, the prize argument that the critics have come out with over and over again in various media is that Trump actually internalized the rhetoric of, or the argument of the North Koreans, of the adversary.
And this was such a damning, such a shocking idea that a lot of people thought they really would be able to show that Trump is on the wrong road here and be able to push back in an effective way.
Now, what you've said is absolutely right, that the South Korean government, Moon Jae-in, has all along championed the idea of, at the very least, toning down these military drills between the United States and South Korea, because in the past they have involved—and by the past, I mean even as of last year and early this year—they involved B-52s capable of carrying weapons that were flying over South Korea.
They involved the idea of practicing decapitation strikes against North Korea.
Somehow this was all reported in the Japanese press and the South Korean press.
So the idea that Trump was merely repeating or internalizing North Korean propaganda about U.S. and South Korean drills, military games, rather than actually reflecting the reality that even President Moon, or especially President Moon himself, has recognized and has sought to try to tone down, if not eliminate, is clearly disingenuous.
What I found by going back into the historical record, moreover, is that Trump was actually reflecting the point of view that was held by U.S. officials in South Korea, both diplomatic and intelligence people, back in the late 80s and 90s.
Because in a book by Leon Siegel called Disarming Strangers, which is the most authoritative book on the history of U.S. nuclear diplomacy with North Korea that has ever been written, it is documented that the then ambassador to South Korea, Donald Gregg, was in favor of actually suspending those military drills because they were so provocative to North Korea.
Because the North Koreans were so freaked out about them, that they were afraid that they would not be able to get the North Koreans to cooperate in a North-South peace process, nor to be able to get the North Koreans to go along with the effort by the United States to promote a non-nuclear Korea.
There's a history here.
By the way, James Clapper, who was later the Director of National Intelligence, was earlier in his career a general who was in charge of U.S. intelligence in South Korea, basically in charge of intelligence for all of Korea.
He also told Leon Siegel, for his book, that he knew the North Koreans would go nuts every time the U.S. had a joint military drill with South Korea, because they were regarded as a threat to North Korea.
They were really convinced that the United States might use this as an opportunity to attack the North.
So there is a long history here of U.S. officials and intelligence specialists on Korea knowing that these drills were in fact quite provocative to the North Koreans.
Essentially, what Trump was doing was simply recognizing a well-established fact.
Now, how he arrived at that, I don't know for sure.
But what we can say for sure is that he was not merely internalizing North Korean propaganda.
He had good reason for believing that.
There is an awareness on the part of a lot of people, privately at the very least, people who are no longer have to maintain the official line, shall we say, that these drills were not really helping in any situation where the United States wanted to have diplomatic progress, political progress that involved the North Koreans willingly coming along.
It's simply they were incompatible with that.
So now here's the thing of it, and you mentioned in here too, to get back to the concessions real quick, that the biggest concessions from the North Koreans, and this is convenient for the media and the national security elite who are upset about all this, they came before the big meeting.
So Pompeo didn't get a big parade and didn't seek as much TV time and credit as Donald Trump, of course, made a big deal about it when he showed up to accept what had already been worked out so far, basically.
But Trump could have emphasized that a little bit more, I guess, for PR's sake, that they did get real concessions here.
And in this case, before he even arrived, because they wanted to be real sure that it would not end up being an embarrassing meeting or whatever.
So they had Pompeo and the North Koreans already worked this out beforehand.
So can you go into a little bit more detail about what those concessions were?
Because it's a real powerful narrative that Trump got nothing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And by the way, this is not, and I think people can tell and ought to know that neither of us are Trump partisans anyway.
We are simply peace talk partisans, both of us opponents of Obama and also big boosters of his deal with Iran, for example.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I can say without any fear of being inconsistent with my entire record of publishing that I have no regard for Trump as a human being or as a political leader.
And I regard him as a disaster in many ways, a disaster for the United States.
But, you know, I think that the idea that everything that Trump does must be automatically opposed begins to look a little bit sketchy when we regard the U.S.-North Korean relationship as a test of it.
I think this is actually, you know, after Obama softened up with Cuba, this is the last front of the old Cold War.
Now we have a new Cold War with Russia and with China, but that's different.
This is the last Cold War.
We ought to be able to go ahead and wrap this up now, I think.
Absolutely.
So let me come back to your point or your question about the case that was made that Trump got nothing and Kim took away all of the winnings from the Singapore summit.
You know, this is an absolutely outrageous misfeasance or malfeasance by the news media in pushing this line, because all they had to do was put together the knowledge of what Pompeo has said publicly.
The fact that he, you know, had this mission to Pyongyang and met personally with Kim Jong-un and then met with his personal envoy to Washington, had, I believe, three meetings with Kim and two meetings with, I guess, two meetings with Kim and three meetings with the envoy.
So a number of hours spent with the two of them.
And then within a couple of weeks, I guess it was more like 10 days after his originally secret trip to Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un comes out with a major concession, which was to agree that North Korea would end its testing of both nuclear weapons and the ICBM before any negotiations even begin, without even having an actual pledge from Trump that there would be a summit, but on the hope that there would be.
So obviously, there was a connection there between the concession made by Kim Jong-un and the move toward the summit with Trump.
And the idea that no one in the news media called attention to the connection between these two and suggested or pretended there was no connection is simply outrageous, in my view.
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What are the chances, do you think, that they can work out a deal where North Korea really gives up all their nukes, and or all their long-range rockets?
Well, look, you can't say anything for sure.
And these negotiations are extremely tricky.
They involve a lot of issues which have to be somehow reconciled, desires or demands on both sides that have to be reconciled.
And it involves a series of phases.
And no one can say for sure that they're going to be able to come out of this with an agreement.
But I have to say that I feel that there's strong momentum here, and it reflects the desire of both sides to come up with an agreement, the conviction of both sides that it's in their interest, because the value of that agreement for both sides would be much greater than what they give up.
And your question about the North Koreans, I think, is one that is clearly relevant to understand that this is something that the North Koreans have wanted to do.
This reaching an agreement with the United States is something that the North Koreans have wanted to do ever since Kim Il-sung was still alive.
And why is this?
Because the North Koreans have understood at some level that they cannot be secure, and they're not going to be able to feed their own people adequately and have a decent economy until they reach agreement with the United States, because the United States is going to be able to prevent them from achieving those goals.
And that's the very least.
Of course, they're also afraid the United States might invade them and try to change the regime.
So this has been a very strong motive for the North Korean regime for decades now, certainly going back to the 1970s.
And by the way, Scott, I was the first journalist, and I'm rather proud of this, I have to say, I was the first journalist to publish an article making a very detailed argument that the United States should negotiate an agreement with North Korea to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula and to try to move toward a more peaceful situation for Northeast Asia.
That was in 1979 in Foreign Policy magazine.
And ever since then, it's been decades that nobody else really in the media has made that sort of argument.
And the point I'm trying to make is that the North Koreans have been highly motivated for a long time to do this.
And Kim Jong Un, specifically, we know there's a lot of documentation based on their own published documents and meetings that the North Koreans had with Americans who had been in the government and then were in private life in 2013, that indicate that Kim Jong Un had a strategy to build up his nuclear weapons capability and to reach toward having an ICBM capability in order to try to push the United States, at that point, it was the Obama administration, to actually sit down and negotiate seriously with North Korea.
Apparently, Kim Jong Un did hope that Obama would change his mind before the end of his administration.
And particularly, if he was going to be reelected, he was reelected in 2013, in his second administration, that he would, in fact, agree to negotiate.
And they were disappointed about that.
So when Trump was elected, the initial period, of course, was one of fire and fury.
But when the South Korean President Moon Jae-in was able to get away with reaching a kind of detente with North Korea, then Kim Jong Un took advantage of that.
And that brings us to this period of intense negotiation.
So the answer to your question, Scott, as far as I'm concerned, is that yes, it can happen.
He is willing to give up his nuclear weapons in a situation where the United States takes a series of steps politically that signal clearly to the North Koreans that the United States is ready to give up its 70-year policy of overt and very aggressive hostility toward the North Korean regime.
Now, that's a big if.
That's a big if.
And there's no guarantee that the United States will, in fact, do that.
There's no guarantee that Trump can get away with it.
And that's one of the points that I make in my article, that there's a real danger that this elite coalition of Democratic Party elected officials, the foreign policy establishment and the establishment media will together be able to sabotage such an agreement by making it impossible to have a treaty between the United States and North Korea.
And if that's the case, then I think that's going to be problematic for the North.
All right.
Now, so a big problem here is, well, first of all, as you said before, John Bolton, who has not moved to the left at all, John Bolton is now representing the centrist establishment consensus here.
And he tried to foil the thing.
You wrote a different article about this previously that we talked about, where he invoked the Libya model and the Libya model being the one where you give up your centrifuges.
They didn't have nuclear weapons.
They had really traveled nowhere along the path to nuclear weapons in reality.
But anyway, they gave up their old junk they bought at AQ Khan's garage sale, and George Bush promised not to kill him.
And then Barack Obama went ahead and killed him anyway, and stabbed him in the back.
And John Bolton brought that up.
And even White House officials complained to the media that Bolton was trying to sabotage them by invoking Libya and Qaddafi.
But there is another example, and I don't know whether anybody's actually talked about this, but there's Kennedy's security guarantees to Cuba.
And it seems like that might be the way to put it.
And it seems like, best I can tell, it'll have to be a deal that big from the U.S. side, that we will give you an ironclad 200-year, no matter what, Cuba-level security guarantee that we will not attack you and regime change you and have you bayoneted and shot in the head on the side of the road like what happened to Qaddafi.
None of that is going to happen if you'll give up your nukes.
And then that would have to be the deal, would be that big of a, really, a peace deal to end the old war from the 1950s and opening of trade relations, dropping of sanctions, and a whole new kind of day here, right?
Which, actually, in a way, the vagueness of their document that they put out, in a way, sort of left it open-ended too, I think.
And where the handshake and the photo op itself, like when Nixon went to China and met with Mao, that that's really the most important thing.
And everything else after that is details, details, and we can work it out as long as we're really dropping the old Cold War hostile posture, as they call it.
Well, you're right.
I mean, the essence of the Trump-Kim summit was indeed to just reflect the warmth, relatively speaking, between the two leaders and the prospect for serious negotiation that that suggested.
They weren't intending to foreshadow the kind of deal that would be negotiated at all, even though, and I want to make this point clear, again, there were understandings between Pompeo and Kim, as well as his envoy to Washington, that went well beyond what was in that, what was a 348-word statement.
That statement was simply a boilerplate, basically agreed to before they arrived in Singapore.
And they even, in their negotiation, or I should say, in their conversation, because there was a negotiation, in their conversation in Singapore, they came to further understandings, obviously informal, not formalized, that went beyond what was in that statement, as Trump himself said.
So the idea that was reflected in the establishment media coverage of the event, that this was a nothing burger, that it was therefore kind of a flop and foreshadows, basically, the United States not getting much in the negotiations, is one of the worst kinds of failures of the media that I can recall in my 50 years of following international politics and negotiations in the media.
And by the way, I'd like to say that, for myself anyway, I don't accept the premise that North Korea needs to give up all their nukes anymore than I think everybody, all nations should give up all their nukes.
And I do think that America is bound to do so in the NPT.
But I'm framing this in terms of the goals and the lines drawn by the people involved, which is, of course, as they may be over-promised at the beginning, complete denuclearization.
But I'm cool with just a handshake.
I mean, I don't care if they give up.
I mean, hey, what if they gave up half their nukes?
Wouldn't that be fine?
We don't have to go back to full Cold War posture there.
We're still making progress and we're still talking.
Well, I think it's very difficult to cut the pie that way.
I mean, I think it really has to be pretty much an all or nothing agreement for obviously domestic politics in the United States being the primary reason, let's face it.
I mean, that's the major factor in determining whether there could be something less than total denuclearization.
At this point, I can't see that it's a viable possibility that there could be anything but that.
And again, I mean, the media portrayed this as a question of North Korea really having to give up everything and that the North Koreans would never do that and that he didn't.
I mean, the media tried to discredit every aspect of it for weeks and weeks, and the American people still supported it anyway.
That's right.
That's a very important point, Scott.
I'm glad you brought that up because some of the polling that has been published shows that the public is way ahead of the media in terms of its understanding of this situation.
Well, it's a very interesting example of the potential power of a guy like Donald Trump to do the right thing, where he's a right winger, he's got a right wing cabinet, a military cabinet basically in charge of everything.
He could make peace wherever he wanted.
He could go shake hands with the Ayatollah next.
And they wouldn't be able, they can try, but they can't really hurt him the way they would hurt Barack Obama for daring to go to Tehran.
But a Republican could do it, just like Nixon can go to China.
Well, I don't think it's quite the same, Scott.
I mean, look, the Democratic Party has a big constituency and they're pretty much united on this.
And they have the power to make it much more difficult than it was for Nixon to go to China.
I think there's a big difference there.
But I think they could be defeated politically if they really tried to take them on that way.
You know, General Loria had a piece about how the Democrats and the New York Times all congratulated Richard Nixon for shaking hands with Mao and said, you know, he had to be a pretty big man to do that.
And congratulations, good going, and let's move forward and this and that.
And if Trump wanted to really push a deal here, even if he did only get half a loaf, and then but shame them for opposing it, I think it'd be all right.
Well, let me go back to what I think a deal would have to be.
I think in terms of the North Koreans, what it has to involve is an extended period in which the United States willingness to get rid of this degree of hostility and outright, how should I put it?
I mean, just, you know, willful readiness to threaten North Korea constantly, to treat them as a non-state, to treat North Korea as something that is so hateful, that we don't need to pretend that it should be respected as anything but something that we're ready to remove.
That has to change dramatically.
And it has to change for a period of time.
It has to change for a period of years.
And I think that's the minimum that is required here.
It means watching the United States undergo a very far reaching political transformation in terms of its attitude.
And again, I would just emphasize that there's no guarantee that that is achievable.
I think no matter what Trump wants to do, there's going to be pushback.
And it's going to be a very tough row to hoe to get the coalition, which now I'm seeing forming informally here, to recognize that they would endanger the possibility of peace on the Korean Peninsula, and that they would be the bad guys in the history of this episode.
I hope that it will move that way, that it will turn out in that direction.
But I am afraid that this set of attitudes that we're seeing reflected in the media coverage is so long in formation and so fundamental in terms of the political culture of this country, that we're in real trouble over this.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, I'm sure you noticed the headline in USA Today, and I'm not sure if they were being cheeky about this or if they were just saying, hey, look, defense stocks plummet as Donald Trump successfully meets with Kim Jong-un and moves forward on a peace deal here.
And then you have these quotes in your article.
Again, the article is called An Elite Coalition Emerges Against a Trump-Kim Agreement.
And you have Fareed Zakaria and Ian Bremmer and others explaining that this hurts America's position of dominance in East Asia.
And my favorite quote here is Fareed Zakaria.
I'll have to click the link and watch the video.
And this is the man who in 1996, by the way, said, if Saddam Hussein did not exist, we would have to invent him.
He is the linchpin of our foreign policy in the Middle East.
Yeah, by the way.
But anyway, here he is.
He says, in the Clinton administration, and presumably up till this day, the policy is we have to keep at least 100,000 troops in Northeast Asia.
And he worried that if the U.S. military alliance with South Korea is de-emphasized, the U.S. would, quote, fall below that threshold.
So, and then the other ones are more explicit references to China.
So, it's better, without question, apparently, it's better to have brinksmanship and possible nuclear war between North and South Korea and including the United States there in order to have an excuse, basically, a so-called reason, just to keep our troops there and just to have an excuse for our ships around and just as a threat to hold over the head of our allies in the South and in Japan and really all as an excuse so that we can stare down China.
Yeah, you know, it sounds very cynical, doesn't it?
But it's absolutely true.
There's no question in my mind that that is precisely what has been going on and why the foreign policy establishment is so upset about this agreement.
They cannot abide the idea that the United States would pull out militarily from South Korea, even if, in fact, it is in the context of a real peace between North and South Korea, with the North and South themselves disarming, at least partially, and basically carrying out a series of reassuring steps on both sides of the 38th parallel.
They do not want that to happen.
And the reason, as you've suggested, as you indicated from the quotes that you read, is that this would mean that the United States will be symbolically withdrawing from its position of being ready to go to war in Northeast Asia and that this would be a sign that the United States is willing to accept a retreat from the entire Northeast Asian region.
So what they want is to keep those troops in South Korea, even if it means continuing a situation, as you've just said, even if it means to keep a situation where war has to be a constant threat between the United States and North Korea.
That is preferable in their mind to moving towards a peace situation in the Korean Peninsula, which would endanger the thrust of the Obama administration and the Pentagon in the Trump administration as well, to move toward a higher level of confrontation with China.
Now, you know, I have to tell you that the linkage between these two things is very strong in the minds of some of these people, as Ian Bremmer indicated in his interview.
And I believe that there's going to be more to be heard and seen about that linkage.
And I think I'm going to predict that it's very possible, if not likely, that our present Secretary of Defense may depart because he is wedded very strongly to that posture, to that policy.
And I don't think Trump is going to abide it.
Well, you know, I was going to ask you who in American power politics is for this at all.
I mean, the fact that he's got Pompeo going along with him, that's just particularly as thanks for the job.
I'm willing to go along with you, even on peace with North Korea, when every other part of his part of the right would reject that, right?
That's absolutely right.
It's true that Pompeo made a choice to go with Trump in a situation where it involved negotiating with North Korea, and he's thrown himself into it, apparently, with great gusto.
I mean, yeah, apparently he's reported back to the boss that, yes, this can work.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
That's right.
And so it's a very interesting case study in somebody who's made a leap from- But wait, so there's no major think tank, it's not that you can't find oil or banking or guns or Israel or any, the NRA or the AARP or any power faction in America that's pushing for peace with Korea.
It's just Trump and a couple of his guys, and not even his secretary of defense, you're saying?
That's a very good way of putting it.
Yeah.
I'd say that's pretty accurate.
Hey, Gareth, one more thing real quick here.
Did you see that these Democrats, oh, it's in your article here, Tammy Duckworth and Chris Murphy, they introduced this bill.
I love the way you put it here.
I think this is the way they put it, that it would forbid Trump from pulling the troops out of South Korea, even as part of a peace deal with the North, a nuclear disarmament deal with them, unless the Pentagon approves.
Well, they're going to have a committee of generals who are going to decide whether the president can order the troops to move?
Yeah, that's sweet.
That's a sweet one, isn't it?
I mean, that's kind of a desperation pass, I think, from people who are a bit disoriented by Trump's success and who got their heads together and said, what can we do?
And that's all they could come up with, which is pretty lame, let's face it.
Well, and shame on Tammy Duckworth, who should be using her military disabled veteran status to push for peace all the time and shout down those warmongers who claim to know better than her and instead just look at her up there doing her best Hillary Clinton.
It is a shame.
And I must say, it's another one of those signals that we're looking at a very tumultuous period here as Trump and Kim negotiate on a deal, a deal that is very big, looms very big in American politics, as well as in the future of US foreign policy generally.
And I think the Democrats are going to be hard put to go along with this without feeling like they're sacrificing politically.
So I just think we're in for a very rough ride.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think the Democratic base doesn't want to hear a bunch of militarist stuff like this, just because MSNBC says so, that's not really how they feel.
And I think that there's a great advantage there.
And it means we have to figure out a way to give Trump a scooby snack here and do a kind of classical conditioning that this is what we like.
TV might like it when you bomb Damascus, but what the people like is when you make peace deals.
Well, you're right, of course.
And I think that is the way in which this can be balanced off to the extent that public opinion, you know, continues to support this and even strengthens that support that is going to make a difference.
And perhaps that can save us from the clutches of this coalition that so badly wants to maintain the status quo.
All right.
Well, in case anybody doesn't already know, the single best article, of course, about why this is all George W. Bush's fault in the first place is by Gareth as well.
And so you just search Gareth Porter, Cheney, North Korea, nuclear weapons.
It'll come right up for you.
There's from Truthout again.
And that one's from a few months back.
And this one very important at antiwar.com, originally running at consortiumnews.com.
An elite coalition emerges against a Trump-Kim agreement.
Thanks again, Gareth.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Very good to be on.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org.
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Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
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