03/08/13 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Shell, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
Keep all my interview archives there.
More than 2,700 of them now going back to 2003.
And our next guest on the show today is John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, very happy to have you here.
Now let's see, before I ask you all about the DPRK, you've been out traveling around the world.
You've been doing journalism or you've been out on vacation or what's going on?
I'm doing a fellowship and I'm interviewing folks that I talked to in East Central Europe 23 years ago, tracking them down, re-interviewing them, finding out what went right, what went wrong in that part of the world.
I see what you're saying now.
It's one of the big themes that they miss the Soviet Union.
Please don't say so.
Well, they don't necessarily miss the Soviet Union, but according to polls in most of the countries in the region, if you ask people, they'll say that they think that their life had been better before 1989.
Of course, people who were old enough to remember that time.
So there's a lot of nostalgia and a lot of, shall we say, selective remembering of what took place back then.
Yeah.
Well, I guess just because I'm an American, I look at that as the American government's fault for, you know, basically bad sportsmanship after the end of the Cold War.
Shock therapy and oligarchies and just raping and liquidating all the formerly communist state-owned industries and whatever, instead of trying to help set the right example.
Your evil commie regime is gone, but all you people deserve the best in life, right?
What about that?
But no.
Instead, what do they have?
A bunch of resentments against the fall of the worst regime ever, the USSR, you know?
And it's because, I think, because of the bad, not just the bad example America sets, but the terrible boom-and-bust system that we put them through, and all the militarization under NATO, and all the rest of it.
Oh, I'd agree.
There's certainly a lot of blame to be placed at the footsteps of Washington and the economic consultants who provided that advice, but they were eagerly kind of aided by people within the countries themselves.
I mean, certainly a new elite emerged that was very happy to implement those market reforms, including, I would have to say, a lot of the former communists themselves.
Yeah.
Well, of course, it was all their secret police were the ones who ran off with everything, right?
Well, there was certainly a siphoning off of an enormous amount of money from many of the countries in the region.
Some of it went into banks in the West.
Some of it just went into people's pockets and lifestyle.
Well, a lot of the value was just simply destroyed as well.
All right, now, so anyway, let's talk about the DPRK, because the TV said that Kim Jong-whatever-the-hell said he's going to nuke me, and I'm supposed to be really scared.
Yep.
Kim Jong-un, the third leader that North Korea has ever known, who is basically about 30 by our best guess, has responded to the latest round of sanctions approved by the United Nations by saying that he will launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States if he feels that he's been threatened sufficiently.
And of course, you know, we know that he's borrowing a page from the U.S. playbook in terms of threatening preemptive strikes.
But I don't think we really have to, you know, dig our shelters yet.
North Korea hasn't demonstrated any capability of actually being able to launch a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit anywhere, much less the United States.
And that's because of the weight of how heavy a nuke would have to be, because they could miniaturize a nuke somehow, and they have been able to get missiles over Japan, at least, right?
There are, as you say, two things there, the missile itself and its accuracy.
They were just recently able to put a satellite briefly into orbit, demonstrating that they had capability of, you know, long-range rocket and getting it more or less where they want to get it.
Whether they'd be able to do that again is another big question.
The perhaps more pertinent issue is whether they can miniaturize a nuclear weapon and put it on the top of a long-range missile in the form of a warhead.
And there's no indication that they have that capability whatsoever.
Well, now, their satellite, it didn't seem to really raise too many alarms, but was that not kind of a Sputnik moment?
Wow, if they can get a satellite up there to beat that, then they can, you know, presumably it's only a matter of not very much time before they can do the math and have that thing fall out of space onto our heads.
Well, it did fall out of space, but not exactly when they wanted it to fall out of space.
I don't know if I'd call it exactly a Sputnik moment.
I mean, this was a culmination of years and years and an enormous percentage of North Korea's GDP to get this thing up into orbit briefly.
Again, whether they'd be able to do it again, whether they'd be able to transform that technology into actually targeting a long-range missile at a distance is another thing altogether.
There have been, again, a lot of claims by some, even in U.S. Congress, that North Korea now has the capability of striking the United States, and all the indications, all the evidence that we have suggests that that's simply not the case.
At the outer limit, if they were to successfully launch another long-range missile, they might be able to just about reach Hawaii, but even that's pretty unlikely, given the accuracy of the previous tests that they've conducted.
Well, you know, I heard on the radio news, I forget, I think this was on NPR, or I don't know, it could have been AM, top of the hour news, doesn't matter, point is, it was the State Department flunky, saying, and I quote, bring them on.
No, that wasn't what he said, but he did say, we are more than capable of defending America from a North Korean nuclear attack.
If they shoot a missile at us, we are ready for that.
No problem, we can shoot it down.
That was basically what he said.
Go ahead and shoot one.
You know?
Yeah, well, you know, it hasn't been the most helpful responses from either the United States or from South Korea, basically egging on North Korea to engage in even more provocative rhetoric.
You know, North Korea is doing this not because, frankly, it wants to strike at the United States.
I think for the most part, even the hardliners within the North Korean military realize that that would be a suicidal attempt, but because all other efforts at getting the attention of the United States have failed.
Just recently, of course, Dennis Rodman, the basketball, former basketball star, showed up in Pyongyang with the Harlem Globetrotters and had the only meeting that an American has had with Kim Jong-un, and, you know, if you cut through all of the nonsense that Dennis Rodman has said, subsequently, the most important kind of takeaway point is that Kim Jong-un does want to talk with the United States, preferably with Obama personally.
And that is essentially kind of North Korea's gambit.
They'll reach out in a kind of soft way through Dennis Rodman to see if they can get conversation going.
But knowing that Dennis Rodman isn't even invited to the White House to share his views on the first ever American meeting with Kim Jong-un, North Korea will follow the second half of its strategy, which is to, you know, make a big stink and expect that the United States will be scared into negotiating with Pyongyang.
Yeah.
You know, people just don't get mad at the Obama government enough, because that seems to me like pretty unforgivable.
No matter what kind of caricature or character Dennis Rodman is, or caricature he is, it has nothing to do with it.
He brought the freaking Harlem Globetrotters over there, who are the, what, dozen coolest guys in the whole world to go?
I mean, that was the coolest thing that anybody has done in the 21st century, was go and try to open up North Korea with the freaking Globetrotters, man.
There's not a single person at the State Department genius enough to have come up with that.
And then instead of using that and saying, see, we can all be friends and see red, white and blue.
Those colors are pretty good when, you know, they're doing cool tricks with the basketball, aren't they?
Let's all get along and be friends.
And you send your gymnastics team and we'll send our orchestra and we can cool this whole thing off.
We can sign a real peace treaty.
And instead they go, oh, Dennis Rodman, he has a nose ring or what?
He's a black guy.
We don't like him or something.
What is unforgivable?
It was really remarkable kind of looking at the press conference when a journalist just, you know, continually asked, well, why aren't you inviting him to the White House to talk to him?
Why aren't you inviting him?
Kept following up.
And, you know, the press spokesman was saying, well, you know, our door is open.
You know, that's such, you know, nonsense, you know, that they obviously are not interested in talking with him, obviously not interested in following up on that initiative.
And it is, it's a shame, you know, especially right now when tensions are escalating rather rapidly.
You know, here you have, you know, a pretty apolitical opportunity to follow up, has nothing to do with, you know, someone from another political party.
It has nothing to do with someone who has some hidden political agenda.
I mean, it's Dennis Rodman.
He doesn't really know very much about politics.
He even made a mistake about, you know, where Psy comes from, thinking that he might meet the South Korean rapper somewhere in North Korea.
I mean, the guy does not have a political agenda.
So you know, you don't lose any points necessarily by just having the guy come to the White House and talk.
But, you know, the Obama administration has been, unfortunately, very adamant in its refusal to kind of work on this issue.
And, you know, part of it has to do with its fear that any attempt it makes to have any kind of dialogue with North Korea will instantly be seized by the Republican opposition, which is looking for any issue that it can seize on, you know, to kind of make things challenging for the administration.
And, you know, there are some Democrats as well who are not, would not be happy to see any kind of reconciliation or rapprochement at this stage either.
So essentially, the Obama administration is unwilling to spend any political capital on this issue right now.
It's just a shame.
I guess, really, and this is something that we've talked about in years past, John, what it comes down to is they're afraid that there would ever really be peace on the Korean peninsula and that the Korean states would decide to merge in some fashion where the South Korean economy inherits North Korea's nukes and then they become an independent power of some stature in the Pacific and more difficult to push around.
And so, therefore, they would rather keep things at the brink of war all the time and people threatening to nuke each other.
Well, to paraphrase what I think it was Anatole France said about Germany, the United States likes Korea so much it likes to have two of them rather than one of them.
You know, having a divided Korea at this point, you know, not to talk about what the calculations were 40, 50, 60 years ago, but at this point, to have a divided Korea is kind of the status quo that does, you know, strengthen, you know, U.S. position in the region.
It is the justification for, you know, a modest number of U.S. troops in South Korea.
It's a justification for a missile defense, you know, system that the United States has kind of cajoled Japan into working with on.
It's justification in part for the Pacific pivot, which will, you know, at least rhetorically shift the emphasis of U.S. military strategy away from the Middle East to a certain extent and toward the Pacific.
So yes, a divided Korea does serve U.S. overall national security interests, whereas a reunified Korea is a big question mark.
I mean, it's a question mark because it could go along the lines that you suggest, you know, in which you have the two Koreas kind of cooperating with a shared nuclear capability and a strong economic position.
It could go down that line.
But there are lots of other scenarios which are equally uncomfortable, shall we say, for the United States, one which would be, for instance, greater Chinese influence over the Korean Peninsula, you know, another being the economic collapse of the Korean economy as a result of chaos in North Korea or as a result of the burdens of reunification.
Another scenario of which is, you know, something the United States deems to be kind of good for U.S. national security interests.
Yeah.
Now, back to the specific matter of North Korean nuclear weapons for a moment here, John.
They had a test just a few weeks back, but I don't think I found any good journalism about here's what all we know about what happened.
First of all, was it confirmed that the test was a success or more than half of one?
Was it confirmed that it was plutonium and not highly enriched uranium, etc., like that?
Well, you know, I haven't seen any good journalism either, I think in part because it's very difficult to ascertain whether it was a success because, you know, it obviously was not at the yield that, you know, we generally consider to be a successful, you know, a very successful nuclear test.
But the possibility is that North Korea intended to have a smaller yield nuclear test.
And you know, that would indicate that it could have, you know, a smaller nuclear weapon operational.
My guess is that, frankly, North Korea is still really at the beginning of a viable nuclear program.
It's had three tests, none of them really indicate that, you know, North Korea is at the top of its nuclear game, shall we say.
Now on those first two, was it just, it was just kind of assumed that they had fizzled rather than they were designed to be small, but was it for sure that they had fizzled?
I forget how certain that was back then.
I think at this point, the consensus is that they basically fizzled.
The first one, definitely.
The second one was, was a higher yield.
Meaning they got like half a bang out of it, but it didn't quite work.
Exactly.
But, you know, as anybody in the nuclear field will tell you, failure is sometimes much better than success, especially at the beginning, because it really tells you where you need to improve, where you've gone wrong.
So, you know, North Korea definitely has learned from its failures.
So each test has been, you know, that much better, but still, you know, we're talking about very expensive tests for a country that doesn't really have a heck of a lot of money.
And, you know, we're talking about tests taking place in a country that has, you know, not the most robust kind of, or consistent electricity.
And so, you know, this is, you know, the ability to run the kind of centrifuges necessary for uranium enrichment, to kind of maintain the plutonium reactors, and all this is iffy business in a country of, you know, that's fallen so much in its economic potential like North Korea.
Right.
Am I right that the understanding is that whatever plutonium, whatever weapons grade plutonium that they got to make their nuclear weapons, they harvested out of previous runs of their reactor?
This is not new stuff.
This is back from the days of the Soviet Union or no?
Oh, well, no, it's more recent than that.
But yes, it's, it's, it's not, it's not recent, like in the last two or three years, it's more from, you know, the time that they were running it, you know, maybe a decade ago, when they restarted it after the end of the agreed framework.
So the estimates may be enough plutonium for six to eight weapons, but it's hard to know.
Of course, it uses up, they used up some of it in the first two tests, and we don't know whether it used any in this last, this third test.
So, you know, that's the other risk that's involved for North Korea when it does these tests.
Yeah, that they're using up their stockpile.
They, they certainly still have that breakout capability.
And that's, as we've seen with Iran, I guess that's about, you know, it's a pretty good nuclear deterrent itself, even without going all the way to nuclear weapons.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you know, North Korea knows that its nuclear program is basically the most important deterrent against any kind of attack, any, or any kind of destabilization, even, you know, as the Washington, as well as Beijing, very concerned about what might happen to the nuclear material in case of either regime collapse in Pyongyang, or an invasion, or an attack followed by some, you know, conflict.
So whether it's an active nuclear program that can actually, you know, retaliate with nuclear weapons, or it's simply the threat of, you know, loose nuclear material, the nuclear program does serve as a deterrent.
I wanted to bring up, I saw this thing you mentioned about, you know, how poor their economy is.
I'm trying to focus on this, not to, you know, beat the North Koreans over the head, not like they can hear me, but to, you know, the American right is always got a scaremonger about something.
And I don't know if you saw, they just put this movie out where North Korea takes over the world, and especially North America.
And so people's imagination of North Korea compared to the reality of North Korea, that can be a real wide gulf.
So I just wanted to point out and ask you if you'd seen these recent, kind of updated satellite pictures of the Korean Peninsula at night, and how you compare it to 10 years ago, and there's about, I don't know, 15 or 20 new light bulbs in Pyongyang, that's about it.
Yeah, as I said, the electricity situation in North Korea remains dire, you know, the electricity grid is ancient, it, you know, gets some energy from China, but it's not enough to really ensure a kind of modern, a modern developed country.
And that means that its factories, you know, basically, can't function in any, any meaningful way.
The economy has rebounded a little bit, you know, if you look at the last decade, I think North Korean economy has, over the decade, improved by, you know, a little less than 1%.
So there has been a little bit of growth, but we're talking about growth from a pretty low starting point after the collapse connected to the famine of the late 1990s.
So yeah, I mean, economically speaking, North Korea can barely, you know, get it together within the confines of its own country.
To imagine North Korea exerting its power beyond those borders in China, in South Korea is ludicrous.
And then, of course, to imagine North Korea invading Washington State, as a recent film would have it, is beyond science fiction.
Yeah.
Well, you know, maybe if somebody, it could be like a fantasy instead of science fiction, right?
Somebody uses their magic wand or something, you know.
Yeah, it's possible.
All right.
Well, listen, I appreciate your time, John.
It's always great to talk to you.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Everybody, that's John Pfeffer.
He is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's fpif.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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