04/19/13 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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More than 2,700, almost 2,800 interviews now, going back to 2003.
And next up on the show, the extraordinarily patient Jon Pfeffer.
Welcome to the show, Jon.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And everyone, you know Jon, he is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at FPIF.org.
And they've got a great crew of writers over there.
I do hope that you guys have them in your bookmarks there, FPIF.org.
That's the Institute for Policy Studies.
And his own website, of course, is JonPfeffer.com.
You find him at the Huffington Post and, of course, at FPIF.
So I think, first of all, is it fair to say that the Korea thing has blown over, Jon, for now?
It looks like, for the time being, other issues have certainly taken their place in the headlines.
Okay, good.
That's what I thought, too.
I'm very happy to hear you say so.
Okay, so now my next question, then, is what have we learned?
Well, that's a tougher question.
I think, you know, the United States right now has learned that more provocative actions, which, you know, the Obama administration thought was, you know, demonstrating the strength of the United States that North Korea would back down, that that just doesn't really work.
That, you know, kind of sending over our most sophisticated weaponry, you know, having military exercises with South Korea, making veiled threats, it just didn't do anything except provoke the North Koreans to do likewise.
And it was only really when we started to moderate our language and moderate our actions that we've seen roughly comparable actions from the North Koreans.
And then, obviously, their rhetoric continues to be kind of heated, but nothing compared to what it was like a week or so ago.
All right.
Now, I know it's always hard to say, well, history began on this day, and never mind anything before that or, you know, anything like that.
You can't really do it.
But in this latest run-up, I know there's kind of always a flare-up of rhetoric in March, for whatever reason, springtime in Korea.
But wasn't there a great opening, an opportunity perhaps, where the Democrats could have preempted the chaos of this spring by rolling with the Dennis Rodman visit to North Korea, which I hasten to add included not just Dennis Rodman, it was the Harlem Globetrotters, who are the greatest men on the planet, who are the best representative of the red, white, and blue that Uncle Sam could have ever dreamed to have.
I mean that.
Absolutely.
And it wasn't just Dennis Rodman, the Harlem Globetrotters.
There's also Eric Schmidt going over there in the capacity of a private citizen, but obviously connected with the very famous and wealthy Google.
And, you know, Bill Richardson from New Mexico.
I mean, so there were some opportunities for the Obama administration to take these both informal ambassadors, but also cultural ambassadors, and really give them far more prominence.
And that didn't happen.
The Obama administration didn't even deign to invite Dennis Rodman to talk with them, even though basically Dennis Rodman is the only American who's sat down with Kim Jong-un.
So if only to get some information about the new leader of North Korea, you would have thought that the State Department would have been more interested in that.
But, you know, either because they were distracted by other issues, or because they really have simply ignored North Korea for the better part of the first term, the Obama administration just didn't capitalize on these opportunities.
All right.
Now, it's funny, you know, the whole image, Anthony Gregory and I were just talking about this, the image of Obama as a peace candidate or peace president and this kind of thing, when he really was just Hillary Clinton all along.
But he has, you know, Bush was worse, at least in his first term, was certainly worse on Korea than Obama's policy so far of ignoring them.
But, you know, I wonder, sometimes it seems like at least the people speaking for the president, they come out and say some pretty provocative things.
I mean, when Bush told the Iraqi insurgency, bring them on because I'm not in danger, so go ahead or whatever, that was an outrage.
I mean, that was a real big deal.
But the Obama administration has really taken that sort of defiant tone toward North Korea.
Oh, we can repel any attack by them.
We can shoot down any missile that they might attempt to shoot at us, which is hardly a proven fact or anything, their anti-missile missiles efficacy there.
But they could, you know, get 10,000 artillery tubes pushed into operation there, and they sure as hell can't shoot down a bunch of incoming artillery.
And I just wonder, do you think that that's the president who's saying, yeah, let's take a real tough guy stance on this, or maybe there's some guys at the Pentagon who can call an order like let's do a B-2 overflight without even checking first, or what do you think?
Well, I think a lot of it's for domestic consumption.
It's the same in North Korea.
Kim Jong-un says things about North Korea's power and effectiveness, not just to make signals to the United States or South Korea or China, but also to demonstrate to his own population that he's in charge and that he can launch these attacks if necessary.
The Obama administration, of course, has always been very sensitive to accusations of it being soft, soft on dictatorship, soft in conflict situations.
It didn't react quickly enough in the Libya situation.
It is committed to disarmament, nuclear disarmament.
So all of these charges by the Republican Party, by conservatives, the Democratic Party, are very high on the kind of priority list of the Obama administration in order to avoid this characterization.
And I think, you know, at a time North Korea is threatening, making pretty outlandish threats, the Obama administration wants to make sure that it's covering its flanks at home, that it's not perceived as capitulating, so to speak.
So I think that explains a lot of the rhetoric.
But as I said, I think it was also a miscalculation in the sense that, you know, there's a perception that bullies will only respond to bullying, and that if North Korea is making this kind of threat, that it's going to attack the United States with nuclear weapons or attack U.S. positions in the Pacific, that the only proper response is to be as aggressive as the North Koreans.
And, you know, I think the Obama administration realized pretty quickly that that was an ineffectual strategy, at least with respect to the North Koreans.
However, I do think it silenced the critics at home.
It probably had its political results.
Yeah, you know, it seems like really on all sides this whole time, everybody knows that nobody really wants a war which would be horribly destructive.
And, of course, American soldiers, North Korea can't attack the USA, but they sure as hell can attack the U.S. Army in Korea, and the Navy too, or I don't know, whatever reach they have.
But anyway, here's the thing that nobody wants, actual conflict, but all the politicians, and I guess I'll ask you to comment on the South Korean politicians, especially the new lady in charge there.
They all have to beat their chest just for domestic politics, but that's the kind of thing where at least from time to time can actually start a real war, right?
People start misjudging intentions or miscommunicating what they really meant to say.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
And, you know, you enter into either a rhetorical spiral in which your threats, you know, escalate to an extent that if you don't, you know, follow them up with some kind of action, then you look ridiculous, or an escalation of actions in which, you know, you have a reasonably low level of action, let's say the placement of troops or the relocation of troops.
There's a response, a similar relocation, and then a kind of escalation from that point, at which point the army feels as if it has, you know, demonstrated, you know, that it's gone this far, and if it doesn't go one step further in response, then it is weak.
So, yes, this kind of escalatory spiral is definitely possible.
Isn't it the Scheifen Plan, is that what it's called, the German plan, where if the Russians mobilize, then we have to mobilize, and then the French have to mobilize, and they've got a secret deal with the British and the Russians, and then, oops, 5 million people killed, or was it 20?
Yeah, and, you know, we have a pattern of alliances in Asia Pacific where we are committed to protect South Korea, Japan.
So, you know, a similar kind of escalation can take place in which we're acting not in response to the protection of U.S. population, but, as you said, North Korea doesn't really have the capability to attack the United States, but we are, you know, acting on behalf of our allies, and that can certainly lead to the similar kind of mobilization for war that we saw in World War I.
Now, you know, one thing that I think became apparent in this recent crisis is just how little information Americans have about Korea in general.
You don't really ever hear about Korea at all if Austin is being, you know, threatened with nuclear annihilation, and they go, oh, my God, and, of course, the headlines blare, North Korea threatens to nuke Austin, but they don't even have snicker, snicker, or don't worry, they could never do that, or anything like that in the headline, and people start taking that really seriously, and, of course, there's, I don't know what the new movie is like.
I guess that's more of a terrorist attack.
There was recently the Red Dawn movie where apparently the North Koreans have fleets of long-range, you know, bombers and paratrooper brigades and these kinds of things and some pretty powerful resources, when the reality is, of course, that this is the last real communist Stalinist state in the world right now, and they're in really bad shape, right?
I guess my actual question is when the headlines came across in what, late January, early February, about these reports of people reduced to cannibalism in North Korea, we don't really know if that's exactly true, right, but it's plausible enough because of how bad their situation really is.
Is that basically right, would you say?
Oh, absolutely, and, you know, there have been credible stories of cannibalism coming out of North Korea back to the 90s during the famine period, and more verified stories, of course, of cannibalism in China during famines in the latter part of the 20th century.
But, yeah, the economy is definitely not in very good shape.
North Korea doesn't have the kind of industrial foundation to, you know, to have an army that can really have power projection, a power projection of the kind that would, you know, invade the United States or take over the White Houses, another Hollywood scenario.
And, you know, there was a congressman who leaked something from a report, and quite inaccurately so, that said that North Korea had the capability of miniaturizing a nuclear weapon and making it into a long-range missile.
And suddenly that became, you know, a major headline because there is this belief somehow that North Korea can do that.
And so any bit of information that proves this thesis is eagerly grasped until, you know, it takes the Pentagon and the Obama administration to say, hold on, that actually is a misquotation.
We have no evidence.
And, you know, it again sinks back into the substratum of ignorance about Korea.
So if you take these two things together, our lack of knowledge about the existing conditions in North Korea and their ability as an economic power to support a military that could do any of the things we're saying that it can do, and our eagerness to have an enemy around which we can, you know, justify our military presence around the world as well as our extravagant expenditures at the Pentagon, then you have a potent cocktail that yields these fantasies about what North Korea can and cannot do in the global arena.
Okay, and then last question, just real quick.
Why is it that the Americans can't just leave well enough alone in Korea?
Let the two Koreas work their problems out?
Maybe they need to hold a joint committee meeting with the Japanese and the Chinese governments too and everybody work out some kind of deal?
And what the hell business is it of ours?
Why is the American government so obsessed with this conflict?
Well, I think there are quite a few people who would like in the U.S. government to wash their hands of the Korean Peninsula, perhaps.
That wouldn't include too many people from the Pentagon.
But at basis, I think, is a security alliance that we've had with South Korea since the Korean War.
And, you know, there are, of course, people in South Korea that are not happy with the presence of U.S. troops or with this alliance.
But the South Korean government basically has supported this alliance, even at times when there have been critical political parties in charge, like North Korea.
The alliance has survived and continues to guarantee support in Washington.
So absent a redefinition of that alliance, absent the South Korean government saying, hey, you guys have to leave tomorrow, I think we're going to see the U.S. government continue to maintain that alliance.
It could have been Ron Paul, you know.
He would have just told the South Koreans, hey, you're going to have to buy your own military now.
Buy.
And that would have just been the end of that.
It's possible, but, you know, it's a long tradition that really has survived any number of fluctuations in U.S. power and South Korean power.
So I would like to see the kind of redefinition that we saw, you know, between the United States and European countries at the end of the Cold War after 1989.
We'd like to see that happen in Asia Pacific as well.
But, no, that hasn't happened yet.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you as always, John.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
Everybody, that's John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus, fpif.org.
That's the Institute for Policy Studies.
And, of course, you can find him at the Huffington Post and at johnpfeffer.com.
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