Alright now, back to the show.
Next is Jon Pfeffer.
He's got a piece at Tom Dispatch and he also runs Foreign Policy in Focus.
His Tom Dispatch piece is under Tom Engelhardt's name today at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show Jon, how are you doing?
Fine, thanks for having me on the show.
I appreciate you joining us today.
This is a very interesting article.
Oh, let me say the website for Foreign Policy in Focus is fpif.org and they have a great stable of writers there.
Pretty much every single day you will find really well thought out analysis on all sorts of foreign policy issues from all around the world.
Alright now, this article is called The End of America's Pacific Century and that's sort of a larger theme is how little influence the United States seems to have in a lot of these developments.
But the developments mostly center around changes in North Korea, which is a subject that I know, Jon, you know a lot about, which makes you different than pretty much everybody else.
And so I was hoping you could give us the lowdown on what sort of changes you anticipate in Korea, North Korea particularly, and I guess relations between the two Koreas in 2012.
Sure.
Well, the change begins, I think, with North Korea, which is kind of a strange thing to say perhaps because most people's understanding of North Korea is that it doesn't change very much at all.
But in 2012, North Korea has for several years said that it wants to create what it calls a militarily powerful and economically strong country.
And in order to do that, it has to basically turn around its economy.
The North Korean economy is not in particularly great shape at the moment.
The political situation is a little opaque.
The leader, Kim Jong-il, has identified his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, as his successor, but people are skeptical about whether Kim Jong-un has any kind of political sway in the country.
But 2012 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the founder of North Korea, Kim Jong-il's father, Kim Il-sung.
And so the country wants to be able to celebrate that 100th anniversary by demonstrating that it's finally turned the corner.
So in order to do that, well, it's going to have to basically make some friends quickly with its neighbors in order to attract the kind of capital, to attract the kind of projects that will basically provide the money that's necessary to turn the economy around.
So that's kind of the first point of change in Northeast Asia, North Korea in 2012.
So public opinion counts even in the DPRK?
Well, basically, I mean, they don't have public opinion polls, they don't really have elections.
But we have to recognize that even in a place like North Korea, if the government doesn't provide essentially what it has promised, then there is what the sociologists call a legitimation crisis.
In other words, the government, the regime can no longer deliver the goods.
And the people either in explicit ways, demonstrations, or basically by simply refusing to cooperate, withdraw their support.
And that is critical even in North Korea.
Right, and then so in order for the North Korean government to make good on these promises at all, basically, they're going to have to maybe soften their stances and get along better with the Chinese, the South Koreans, and others, in order that they can actually make some money in their communist system in order to not look so bad in front of their people.
That's correct.
Now, to give you one example, I'll give you a couple examples.
First one's with South Korea.
Now, there's been a significant downturn in relations between North and South Korea over the last four or five years.
Part of that is a function of the South Korean government, of Lee Myung-bak, who was elected on a more hardline position toward North Korea.
And North Korea predictably responded in a hardline fashion to South Korea's more kind of aggressive approach.
But one project which was not suspended was the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which is an economic complex, manufacturing complex, located just north of the demilitarized zone in North Korea, in the North Korean town of Kaesong.
And approximately 45,000 North Korean workers work at this complex, and it's run by South Korean managers from South Korean companies, producing a wide range of goods that are mostly sold in South Korea.
So even though relations between the two countries have gone downhill, that complex remains.
And it remains because it provides clear economic benefits to both sides.
It provides economic benefits to South Korean manufacturers, who are facing stiff competition from China, and it provides clear economic benefits to North Korea.
The workers there get paid much better than any other North Korean workers, and the government gets a share of the hard currency.
So from the point of view of inter-Korean relations, it's win-win.
I think North Korea is starting to realize that this is a model that it can apply to other forms of cooperation with South Korea.
One of those forms would be a gas pipeline.
The Russian Far East has an enormous amount of natural gas, and Russian President Medvedev and Putin, of course, have been looking for ways of getting that Far East Russian natural gas to the hands of the economies that need it, primarily China, South Korea, and Japan.
So recently, Kim Jong Il met with Medvedev out in Siberia, and they came up with basically a deal that would run a pipeline from the Russian Far East down through North Korea to South Korea.
And South Koreans are delighted.
I mean, it would lower their costs, it would decrease their dependency on Middle Eastern sources of energy, and the North Koreans would get approximately $100 million a year in transit fees.
So another kind of win-win situation.
But in order for these projects to prosper, there's got to be better relations between North and South, and the elections that will take place in South Korea in 2012 will likely produce a leader who is considerably more attuned to engagement with the North than the current leader is in South Korea.
Yeah, well, in your article you talk about the current leader and how he was trying to take a more tough guy approach, and it really blew up in his face and turned the South Korean people, made them nostalgic for the previous sunshine policy, huh?
I think that a lot of South Koreans will still say they're not enthusiastic about the sunshine policy, even though if you push them hard, they'll admit that yes, the actual results of the sunshine policy were much better than what they have now.
Because what they have now, basically, is periodic military confrontations between North and South Korea, particularly along this disputed northern limit line, which is in the West Sea, and this sinking of the Cheongdam, a ship that was sunk, a South Korean ship, and the South Korean government fingered North Korea as the culprit.
North Korea still denies that it was involved, but in any case, it stands as a symbol of provocative actions from the North, at least from the point of view of the South.
These are the kind of important events of the last couple of years that people in South Korea point to when they are thinking about North-South relations, and they're not happy about that.
I mean, everybody in South Korea realizes that a war with North Korea would be devastating.
They might win.
They probably would win.
I mean, South Korea's military is considerably more advanced, more powerful than North Korea's military, but the results would still be devastation in South Korea, devastation from North Korean artillery positions located near the DMZ, which is just a number of miles from Seoul metropolitan area.
Well, now, could you address Washington, D.C., maybe generally, and Obama specifically in their take on this?
Why wouldn't they do everything they could to urge reconciliation between the two Koreas as a way toward warming up our own relations?
Well, the Obama administration came into office with the intention to kind of swing U.S. policy focus away from Middle East and Afghanistan and back toward Asia, specifically Northeast Asia, with the recognition of the importance of China in terms of U.S.
-Chinese economic relations, but also concerns about China's security interests in the region.
In any case, for whatever reasons, the Obama administration wanted to shift U.S. policy back toward Asia, was unable to do so, unable to do so because of continued focus on the Middle East, Pentagon's continued focus on Afghanistan and Iraq, the national debate here in the United States continued to focus on the Middle East, on terrorism as part of the overall foreign policy discussion, and of course, to the extent that we talk about foreign policy, it's on those areas of the world, but generally speaking, we've been focused far more on the economy here in the United States than on foreign policy issues in the last couple of years, all of which means that the Obama administration wasn't able to shift U.S. policy toward Asia.
A subset of that was U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula, and the Obama administration basically stepped back from what had been, and this might be a little surprising, but what had been a somewhat conciliatory position by the Bush administration.
And I say somewhat surprising because I'm sure your listeners will remember that the Bush administration took a very hard line position against North Korea in this first couple of years, including North Korea and the axis of evil, basically through additional sanctions at North Korea, basically took a very hard line position.
But beginning in 2006 and accelerating in 2007, the Bush administration did a 180-degree turn on U.S.
-North Korean relations and basically started pursuing bilateral negotiations and then much more vigorous multilateral negotiations that resulted in actual changes in North Korea's nuclear policy.
North Korea actually froze its nuclear program, started to actually destroy parts of the plutonium facility.
The Obama administration didn't really follow up on that.
Again, it was focused on other parts of the world, it didn't want to spend its political capital in the Korean Peninsula, and so the Obama administration adopted what it called a policy of strategic patience.
Now, that might sound okay.
I mean, what's wrong with being patient?
What's wrong with being strategic?
But it was actually just a euphemism for not paying attention to North Korea and hoping that it wouldn't do anything.
It wouldn't throw any tantrums, it wouldn't do anything.
But in fact, of course, North Korea wasn't thrilled with that kind of approach and so North Korea simply went full speed ahead again with its nuclear program, tested another nuclear weapon, tested long-range missiles, adopted more provocative rhetoric toward the United States.
And so the United States in some sense found itself in the same position that South Korea found itself in when it adopted a more hardline policy and that was a much more hostile, reactive policy from Pyongyang in return.
And so right now the Obama administration is kind of caught in its policy of strategic patience.
It doesn't know basically how to move out of that position, nor does it really want to again invest the political capital because of two things.
One, because there's no major force here in the United States that pushes for engagement with North Korea.
I mean, if we think about engagement with China back in the 1970s, there were multinational corporations that were just licking their lips at the prospect of making money in China.
Well, there isn't that comparable constituency with respect to North Korea today.
And then the second reason is that there's a significant potential for conservatives to jump all over the Obama administration if it makes any kind of conciliatory approaches toward North Korea.
There are folks in Congress that can't wait to label the Obama administration as an appeasing government, as a government that sits down with tyrants.
So the Obama administration is not all that enthusiastic at this point, especially going into an election year, with changing its policy toward North Korea.
And so that's a major reason why the United States at the moment is not part of what's going on in Northeast Asia, these movements toward greater reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula and greater integration in Eurasia more generally.
Well, I mean, I don't know if I'd buy that.
I think if he could actually work something out, it'd be a great political win and he can just face down the Republicans by being right about something for once.
But same with Guantanamo or getting out of Iraq or anything else.
I would agree with that.
It seems like if this in the end just means that America loses influence in the Pacific and Japan, Korea, anybody else gains a little bit more independence out of it, then oh well.
I agree with you.
I'm giving you the rationale from the Obama administration's point of view.
I would argue that there are any number of reasons why it makes sense to negotiate with North Korea.
And it even makes sense from a narrow perspective of U.S. national security interests.
And also in terms of U.S. losing influence in the region, generally speaking, I think that too is a good thing.
When we look at U.S. military presence, for instance, in the Pacific, we're talking about a huge number of bases.
We're talking about over 100,000 service personnel.
We're talking about a massive military presence.
That's something that's economically not supportable and also something that has created a great deal of friction in the region.
Friction even with our allies.
Friction with Japan, for instance, over our bases there.
If we were to move back from our forward-based defense, that's what we call it, and basically begin to withdraw our troops and our bases from the region, I think it would have an overall positive effect on the region as a whole.
I think it should be accompanied by the United States supporting regional integration, regional mechanisms for discussing questions of security and economic cooperation.
But that's another issue.
Well, you know, I interviewed Andrew Bacevich not too long ago, the famed military analyst and conservative realist foreign policy guy.
And so I put to him the libertarian position.
How about we just withdraw all our troops from everywhere and just abolish the empire and get over it?
And his very conservative realist position was, I'm with you on Europe and the Middle East, but not Asia.
And he thought that probably China and Japan and South Korea and everyone else over there prefers the status quo more or less, prefers that we keep our forces there because, for example, we serve on a check against China and their ancient problems with Japan, for example.
He makes a good point, at least in terms of the traditional rationale for U.S. military presence in the Pacific.
We're there in order to basically preserve the balance of power to prevent any hegemon from rising up as Japan did during the 1920s and 1930s or, you know, the reassertion of the Sinocentric sphere that had been in place for several centuries.
So, yeah, that's the traditional rationale.
But I think we're talking about an entirely different era right now.
We're not talking about the Cold War.
We're not talking about the 1920s.
We're talking about an opportunity for the United States to actually work with both our partners and our occasional adversaries to create a new order in the region that is not dependent on U.S. military as the guarantor of security.
If you go even to Pyongyang, the people in Pyongyang, the leadership in North Korea, they will tell you privately that they like the idea of the U.S. military being in the region.
Of course, obviously, the North Korean government's official position is that we have to leave.
But privately, they'll tell you, look, we're worried about Japan.
We're worried about China, even though China is the sensible friend and ally of North Korea.
They like the fact that the United States serves as a check against these powers.
But that's a fundamentally Cold War look at the region.
And that Cold War order is breaking down.
The United States engages North Korea.
If North and South Korea, in fact, go much further along the line of integration, if we see greater integration between China and Taiwan, and finally, if we see greater integration between Northeast Asia and Europe, we're talking about an entirely different kind of relationship in Northeast Asia, something that the United States must acknowledge.
And must acknowledge, I would say, not through an assertion of military power, because that's basically yesterday's approach, but through a much more vigorous effort to encourage regional integration, encourage kind of regional discussion.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, first of all, for your time on the show today.
Second of all, for Foreign Policy in Focus, which is absolutely indispensable.
And for your great piece at Time Dispatch that we're running on antiwar.com today, which, again, is titled The End of America's Pacific Century.
Thanks very much, John.
Thank you for having me on the show.
