For Pacifica Radio, December 29th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
Alright, you guys, introducing Tim Shorrock, author of the book, Spies for Hire, and regular writer at The Nation Magazine.
And this one is really important from December the 23rd, a low-intensity war is underway in Northeast Asia.
Welcome back to the show, Tim.
How are you doing?
I'm very well, thank you.
Good, good.
Well, we're very happy to have you back on the show here and such an important subject.
According to the papers and the TV, the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula over a possible North Korean Christmas surprise that didn't come so far, what do you make of it all?
Well, first of all, it's another contrived war scare of there's been many, many in our history going way, way back.
So this is nothing new.
And what they do is they take certain statements interpreted as threats or whatever by the North Koreans, and then they almost sometimes take them too literally, and then they believe everything they read, and they start concocting theories about what's going to happen.
In this case, you know, the North Koreans had gotten tired of the, they thought the Trump administration was taking super hard line against lifting any sanctions in response for any actions by North Korea and the negotiations.
And so they, you know, got, got impatient.
And they finally said, look, if we, if you don't come back to us with an offer we can deal with, we're going to, we're going to create, we're going to have a new way.
We're going to form a new way.
And then that was the first signal from Kim Jong Un.
And then, you know, throughout the years since, you know, I mean, ongoing, they've been testing other kinds of, you know, missiles, non-nuclear missiles, non-ICBM missiles, right?
And like any country does, they're testing them for their own, you know, defense.
And you know, as I pointed out in the article, the U.S. has been doing the same with a new nuclear policy under Trump, breaking the INF Treaty and now testing weapons that were once illegal under the INF Treaty, and that's also escalation.
And so the negotiations between U.S. and North Korea, Trump and Kim, have basically broken down.
And so North Korea said, if we don't get some kind of response by the end of the year, the U.S. can pick its own Christmas surprise.
And so by that, you know, all the pundits and the U.S. government and the Trump administration and the military are saying, OK, they're going to launch another ICBM like they did in 2017, which they haven't done, you know, for two years now, or they may even test a nuclear weapon, but they may test something else.
And so there's this war scare, you know, whipped up.
And now we're in day three of this supposed Christmas surprise and nothing has happened, except there's been two false alarms that got everybody crazily tweeting about what's happening and speculating.
The first thing was a couple of days ago, NHK, the Japan state-owned network, published a story that just a bulletin saying, you know, North Korea fires missile.
And immediately all the so-called experts, especially the technical experts, jumped on and started speculating what kind of missile it is without even trying to verify whether it was true or not.
About an hour later, NHK had to pull the story because it was a story they had written in 2017 that apparently had been set up, ready to go or something.
And someone pressed the button and it went.
And so it went out as a bulletin, this old, old story.
And you know, then immediately all the techno experts out there on Twitter and, you know, these people that are constantly quoted by The New York Times and The Washington Post began deleting all their tweets, you know, showing how responsible they were, right.
But this is the kind of mentality we're in.
And the second false alarm was yesterday at the U.S. base called Camp Casey near the DMZ.
It's closest U.S. base to the DMZ, closest U.S. military base to the DMZ.
All the rest of them have been pulled back about 80 miles south.
Anyway, at the time of the end of the day where they were supposed to play TAPS, instead the siren went off that was code four or whatever, you know, the air raid siren or something, exactly.
And people started scrambling.
So then there was this little frenzy.
And then immediately, you know, the U.S. Army, they figured out, oh, they pulled it back.
But it's just both media and military is like trigger happy now.
They're expecting the worst for North Korea.
And North Korea is just kind of sitting up there, not yet doing anything, albeit they've been testing, you know, their missile capability that are short range and medium range.
And they've been testing their engines.
You know, they're not exploding any bombs.
They're not attacking anyone.
They're not.
There's just it's sort of status quo right now, really.
But it's being whipped up into this, you know, fear of war and fear of, you know, but it's this fear of the unexpected that really drives the Korea crowd here in D.C. and the U.S. mad.
You know, no one knows.
No one knows.
I don't make predictions.
You know, I don't know what they're going to do.
And I don't know, frankly, what we're going to do.
And so as far as listeners who are wondering, well, should we be concerned?
Well, no, because one, North Korea has not been testing ICBMs or nuclear nuclear devices themselves, you know, for about three years to two years for the missiles and earlier for the for the nuclear weapons.
And they do not have the capability yet to put a nuclear weapon on a warhead and send it successfully through the atmosphere, which is what you have to do to have a successful nuclear strike.
Right.
And they haven't been able to do that.
And so people don't realize that.
So people are bracing themselves.
Oh, North Korea might launch a nuclear missile.
No, they don't have a nuclear missile.
There is no nuclear weapon they have that they can lodge like that.
So that's one thing that people should obviously know.
But the other thing is there was no agreement in Singapore in 2018.
There was a general sort of statement of principles to move forward on, but there was no agreement for the North Koreans to eliminate their weapons by now or for the U.S. to eliminate their threat against North Korea by now.
There was no agreement like that.
The point was to get talks going on these issues.
But there was no agreement.
People go, well, you know, oh, there was an agreement.
The North Koreans have been building their capabilities.
No, there was no agreement.
You know, there was a statement of principles.
So let's be accurate about what's going on.
And that's what I try to do in my Nation article that was published on Monday, you know, basically showing the massive military buildup on the U.S. side and the South Korean side and the Japanese side, which is a united, basically allied military force that has 10, 20 times the military capabilities of North Korea.
And North Korea feels surrounded by that military alliance led by the U.S.
And that's what it's about.
So anyway, I'm not sure, I have sort of a feeling what the North Koreans' new way might be.
I have a feeling that it partly has to do with their alliances, reforming their alliance with China and Russia, because China and Russia have been saying, you know, there's got to be a lifting of some sanctions to get these negotiations moving.
And if there's something happens and the U.S. tries to take to the U.N. Security Council again, they may not get China and Russia's votes to clamp down further with sanctions.
Very unlikely to get them.
So I think the change could be sort of its diplomatic shift.
And anyway, it leaves South Korea, Moon Jae-in and his alliance with the U.S. in a really difficult position, which is a whole other issue.
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I'm talking with Tim Shorrock from The Nation magazine.
The piece is called A Low Intensity War Is Underway in Northeast Asia.
Is there really a difference other than a couple of really great photo opportunities and some lunch meetings or something?
Is there any real difference in the policy between the Obama years, for that matter, the Bush years, the Obama years and the Trump years?
It seems like it's just the same old more and more sanctions till they give in, which never works and certainly hasn't worked in this case all this time.
Well in terms of sanctions, you're correct.
Everything has changed.
Trump's policy from the beginning was maximum pressure, meaning through sanctions and they've really ratcheted them up over the last two or three years and even over the last year.
These sanctions are what prevents South Korea and North Korea from doing anything on their own together to lessen the tensions between them and to try to rebuild trust and that kind of thing.
They can't do it because of the sanctions and the US has refused a number of times to relax any of that to allow that process to happen.
That's one problem.
Okay.
So at the beginning of this thing, the idea was that America would possibly go ahead and facilitate the signing of a final peace treaty from the war from the 1950s, that we would drop some sanctions, that Trump would make it clear that he would give security guarantees, that he would make it clear to the North Koreans, you have everything to gain and very little to lose by going along with us on this instead of the previous policy, which has been under Bush and Obama, essentially you capitulate and then we'll talk about it.
And it seems like now Trump has gone ahead and adopted that policy or maybe he's kept that policy all along while sending a few signals the other way from time to time.
It's kind of a fusion of the two, his policy and their policy in a way, because obviously the one thing Trump did differently is talk directly to Kim Jong-un.
No other president had done that and that's actually what sort of broke the logjam in terms of creating the space to have these negotiations and have these deep discussions go on.
That was positive.
But that itself came about in large part because of Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, really stepped in when it reached a crisis stage, engaged with North Korea and they sent top emissaries to the Olympics and they sort of set off the diplomacy that triggered Trump's agreement to meet with Kim when that idea was brought to him by the South Koreans.
So Trump did something different and positive in that sense.
But the sort of scenario you just laid out of what an offer might be, that's sort of what the DPRK's thought they were going to hear at the first real negotiation between Trump and Kim after meeting in Singapore, which was in Hanoi.
And before that meeting in Hanoi, there was a lot of talk that progress had been made and there's some optimism that a deal might be created along these lines, which were that the North Koreans side would shut down this very large complex of nuclear and uranium facilities at Yongbyon, which has been there for a long time and has stopped before and then started again.
They're going to shut down the whole complex, which it's got all that old and new technology there.
They're going to shut that whole thing down and dismantle this other satellite launch facility that's now being, apparently, they're testing at again.
They offered to shut this major facility down in exchange for the U.S. and the U.N. lifting the recent sanctions applied in 2016 and 2017.
Those are the ones on oil and coal and North Korean workers overseas in China and Russia and places like that.
They have to return now.
It's really hurt the North Korean economy and it's also, you know, sort of like your average North Korean person.
It's caused hardship.
You know, that's serious.
There's been reports recently about how damaging the sanctions have been.
When the offer was made to do that and lift these onerous sanctions, turned for like basically a partial shutdown of nuclear facilities as a way to move forward, you know, Trump almost took that deal, according to that New York Times article I kind of ridicule in my own reporting in The Nation, where David Sanger is so overheated in the way he puts this stuff out.
But, well, you know, the deal was Trump almost accepted that deal and then Pompeo and Bolton talked him out of it.
Forget it.
No, you can't do that.
You know, they have to shut everything down.
And so you're right.
It's back.
You know, they came back and said, no, you have to shut, not only do you have to shut your nuclear missiles down, all these facilities that, you know, that aren't part of this Young facility, new uranium enrichment sites, et cetera, new rocket launching places.
And you have to shut all this down before you can get an iota change in sanctions.
And they rejected any kind of like step by step movement.
And that's where things really went south.
And so the meeting broke up and everybody left early and, you know, blame the Democrats here, too, because that was the day the Democrats went ahead and held a hearing with his former lawyer while he was in the middle of trying to accomplish this massive peace deal.
And along with that came the talking point that, oh, sure, Trump's going to give away the whole store because he's such a naive loser, amateur, and he's under such political pressure here that he'll do anything for a win, which meant he had to find a way out of striking a deal with North Korea at that point because of domestic politics.
Right.
And the policy itself was a much harder line than Trump's, you know, like their line is the same as the one that Pompeo and Bolton pushed for that broke the talks in Hanoi.
But, you know, but interesting, you mentioned the Democrats, because, as I said, it's where the end of that article, Schumer and some of the senior Senate Democrats actually put out a letter about 10 days ago that actually was to me was surprisingly reasonable for them.
And I saw I followed your link to the Twitter account where the guy had posted that original thing.
And I noticed that the next tweet in the chain was Senate Republicans denouncing Trump and demanding new or not denouncing Trump, but demanding new sanctions and, you know, doing taking the opposite stand there anyway.
And the Senate did pass a bill tightening sanctions and actually they're expanding sanctions Because now if you're a Chinese bank and you lend to a North Korean entity that's sanctioned, now they can deny you long capital and they can apply sanctions against a foreign entity.
Right.
So it's a broader economic war.
In fact, I just read that Steven Biegun, who was, I think, the most reasonable, at least in that one speech on, you know, offering a more generous deal rather than demanding full denuclearization first and all of that, that he's actually going around right now trying to build consensus for new sanctions that that's if there's any change in the status quo, it's just them making it worse.
Yeah.
I mean, he's he was sounding reasonable and it's actually him who made it sound like there was some shift underway just before they went to Hanoi.
Right.
I mean, he gave this one speech was widely quoted and where he basically endorsed this step by step process that both North and South Korea seek.
And he also talked about peace treaty and things like that.
But yeah, but now he's had to carry out the Trump Pompeo hard line.
It's the Bolton line without Bolton.
Trump fired Bolton.
I don't know why he fired him because he just didn't like the guy contradicting him, I think.
But he's still carrying out Bolton's policy with North Korea, except he's stopping short of Bolton's solution, of course, is the way you deal with North Korea.
So eliminate North Korea, which is what he said about, you know, eight years ago or something.
Nice guy.
Just blow up an entire country and don't even have a second thought.
But I think in all of this, ever since Trump went to meet Kim in Singapore, the media and their allies in the military industrial think tanks like CSIS, Center for Strategic International Studies, had this huge counteroffensive where they tried to undermine every idea toward peace, such as a peace agreement.
You know, oh, I can't, that'll weaken our posture.
And that's how Kim will take control of the South, because he'll demand U.S. forces are kicked.
So you can't have a peace agreement.
They'd attack that.
And then there was this almost daily for a while, then weekly, and it just kept up constant stream of imagery that think tanks like CSIS would obtain from two or three intelligence contractor imagery companies, right, who work with intelligence, but also put out publicly available imagery.
And they would show like, you know, look, they painted this roof red in this North Korean facility that, you know, there's some changes going on to this missile thing, you know, every detail of North Korea.
And then and they would they would start saying, see, they're not they're not denuclearizing, you know, that that was the constant litany since last year in Singapore.
And I said from the very beginning, there's no agreement until there's an agreement.
Right.
It's status quo, right?
You build up your.
Well, you also pointed out from the beginning that they have a huge conflict of interest in putting out these stories all the time, too.
Oh, yeah.
I think.
Yeah.
It's.
Well, I mean, yeah, because the more tense it is, the more their patrons benefit.
Right.
I mean, like which patrons are those?
Well, how about Boeing and Northrop Grumman and these large defense contractors, military contractors who fund these organizations, you know, fund CSIS.
In fact, Boeing actually has a seat on the board of directors of CSIS through, you know, this former ambassador.
Right.
Yeah.
I like how they have no shame because they don't even know what's wrong.
They just say, hey, this is business.
Yeah.
But the thing is, what I think is really what really bothers me is how whatever comes out of there was just sort of accepted as gospel.
You know, like The New York Times especially has run with CSIS, you know, imagery stories for months now.
You know, that's become part of the David Sanger legacy, right?
He's been sort of building the case against North Korea in terms of its nuclear capability.
You know, that it's a danger to this country, you know, for about 20 years now.
You know, this is one guy I know who's a Korean American who is a kind of a liaison.
He's got himself an interesting position where he's been in talks with all three parties, North and South Korea and the U.S. government.
And sometimes they seek him out for certain things, you know.
But he's been watching this for a long time and is just amazed at the whole misunderstanding on the U.S. of what's really at stake for the two Koreas and just how out of step they are with reality of the situation.
Well, you know, that actually is a little bit of a mystery to me.
I mean, they can't all just be on the Boeing payroll.
And your position and my position is so obviously right that, you know what, America has everything to give and hardly anything to lose at all here.
We can figure out a way to be generous and work out a deal with the North Koreans.
And their attitude is, no, that's treason.
That's crazy.
That's insane.
You'll get us all killed, Tim.
Well, we accept this massive American military empire in Asia.
You know, it's just like a given, right?
But when you look at it, like I sort of did in that article, I kind of dissected like what the South Koreans are buying from the U.S., you know, like, you know, they go, oh, North Korea tested a missile engine, right?
Look what South Korea has, you know, they just deliver these first reconnaissance drones.
They just took delivery of these Global Hawk made by Northrop Grumman, you know, they had very, very sophisticated weaponry.
They spend five times more than North Korea.
Their military is many more times bigger than North Korea's military.
South Korea alone, I'm sure, could defend itself against any kind of North Korean attack, except it doesn't have nuclear weapons, you know, but they could in a conventional war.
They have massive firepower.
And like I pointed out, I was trying to sketch this picture of how things have kind of re-militarized in Northeast Asia.
I referred people to that video.
I don't know if you watched it, the video put out by the South Korean Air Force.
Yeah, about their preparations for war and all that.
It showed an attack, a preemptive attack on North Korean missile sites.
I mean, that's what they're preparing for, right?
On the other side of this, the Hawk side of this, they don't expect to get denuclearization here.
Their absolute capitulation upfront demands are essentially meant to be a poison pill in order to maintain the permanent Cold War against North Korea, right?
Except that they're at what they call the red line.
They have nuclear weapons and they have intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach D.C.
Never mind the rest of us, but D.C.
Although, as you said, they haven't miniaturized their implosion bombs yet.
But still, the consensus is that the red line is crossed there.
So something must change.
But they don't really think that you capitulate first and then we'll think about normalizing relations second could possibly actually work.
It's clearly not working.
Well, I do think that going back to what I said about the acceptance of this empire, military empire in Asia.
I mean, it's massive.
We have 100,000 troops in Japan and South Korea.
We have the Seventh Fleet.
Every advanced weapon is there.
Guam is there.
B-52 bombers, right?
So that is, you know, and then now the whole discussion within the Pentagon and national security circles in Washington is we're moving away from counterterrorism and nation state rivalry, meaning the war against Russia and China, right?
So building up our capabilities.
So militarization in Asia is a platform for the U.S. to carry out its anti-China, anti-Russia policy.
You know, that's running in reverse against any forces that may try to push for peace here in the United States.
And I think that's really problematic.
But here's the two points that are often forgotten.
One, Korea is never going to launch a preemptive attack on us because that would be suicide.
And that's what would happen.
The U.S. could destroy North Korea in like two days, right?
That's why North Korea will not launch a preemptive attack.
And two, the United States is not going to go to war to—the Pentagon is not going to go to war to prevent North Korea from having a full nuclear capability.
They're just not.
You know, that's not—that's out of the question because war would be catastrophic for the whole region.
And they can already deliver them to South Korea and probably Japan, if not to America.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
Well, no, the South Korean, those medium-range missiles that they have been testing this year could easily hit Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, could easily hit, you know, Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.
Yeah.
But I mean, you know, that's their natural defense right, it seems to me, because all those bases are aimed at them.
I mean, a lot of people don't realize—everyone's like, oh, you know, Japan is under threat for North Korea.
Well, Japan has been the rear base for the U.S.-led U.N. command in Korea ever since the end of the Korean War.
The U.S. bases in Yokota, some of them in Okinawa, they fly the U.N. flag because Japan is part of the natural of the U.N. command that would, if there is a war on the Korean Peninsula, all the mobilization would come through those U.S. bases in Japan.
So, you know, North Korea is, you know, it's a divided country, so it defends itself against, you know, South Korea's, you know, military.
But it also, because South Korea is in such deep alliance with the U.S. and with Japan, that it also defends itself against those forces as well.
You know, so those missiles, you know, I see those missiles, you know, as defensive, basically, these medium-range missiles.
Yeah, they can attack us, but we have bases right around, all around them, you know.
So if we want to settle this, we've got to talk about that.
And I think all those bases are what the North Koreans mean when they say denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
You know, they don't say denuclearization of the DPRK in any of the communiques they sign.
It's always of the Korean Peninsula, because that's, they see that military arrayed against them.
And that's, and that's all, it's nuclear.
They have the nuclear cover, right?
The nuclear umbrella.
Well, you know, I mean, obviously, if we just make peace deal, the point is moved anyway.
Yeah.
End the war.
End the Korean War.
A lot of Koreans want an end to the Korean War.
By the way, I posted something, I saw this, there was a poll taken in Seoul the other day, showing that like, something like 90% want unification in Seoul with the North.
That's like a key priority, right?
I mean, a lot of people just, like, and as I posted, like, this is a shocking reminder to the U.S. pundits who think they know everything about Korea, that, you know, Koreans actually live there.
And Korea is actually, the Koreans actually want their country back.
You know, that doesn't mean they want to be taken over by North Korea, but they want to have some kind of federation, some kind of unity with North Korea as get back to one country and, you know, demilitarize the whole situation, you know?
Well, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
But I hope everyone will go and look at this article in The Nation.
A low intensity war is underway in Northeast Asia.
And read all of Tim Shorrock's great work on Korea and the real possibilities for peace here, if only the Americans would do the right thing on our side here.
Thanks, Tim.
Appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Happy New Year.
All right, y'all.
And that is Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton from antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
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