All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Harry Kazianas, expert on Korea policy, and here he is writing at the Quincy Institute.
Yes, we can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Welcome to the show, Harry.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me, my friend.
How are you?
Good to talk to you again, man.
I'm doing good.
And yeah, you didn't used to think that.
In fact, I was mad at you for a minute because you went from good to bad on this, but now you're back good again, and I'm really glad to see that.
In fact, you might even be better than me.
I probably would focus on maybe we could denuclearize them if we really best friended them first, but you say, nah, man, forget it.
You know what?
They got nukes.
They're going to have nukes, and we've got to deal with that from now on, and that should be the basis of all our future discussions of this, really.
Exactly.
I mean, look, at brass tacks here, we deal with many countries that have nuclear weapons or even chemical or biological weapons that can threaten the United States homeland.
I mean, think about it this way.
China has nuclear weapons.
You know, Nixon was able to go over there in 1972 in open relations.
That isn't, you know, an earth-shattering thing anymore.
Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons.
I mean, literally, Russia could destroy the United States within 25 minutes if it wanted to.
India has nuclear weapons, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and I'd argue they're a much bigger threat than North Korea could ever be.
So we live in a world that's, you know, for better or worse, mostly worse, filled with nuclear weapons.
So having North Korea, having weapons like this is sad, it's awful, it's a tragedy, it's quite scary, but at the same time, this is the world that we live in.
And quite frankly, the United States has a track record of 50-plus years of deterring adversaries that have nuclear weapons, saying to them by default, look, if you want to have these weapons for defense, we don't like it, but we can live with it.
But just know that if you ever use them in an offensive capability against the United States, against our allies, against our bases, your country is going to be literally turned into a nuclear parking lot within 25 minutes.
So, you know, this is an awful thing, but it's a reality we live with every single day.
We might not realize it, but it is a reality that we have.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's always framed in terms of the sanity of the leader.
And the more of a dictator, the more irrational somebody is.
And it seems like if that really holds true, then Mao Zedong was the worst of all, not just in body count, but he would say things like, you know, we could have a nuclear war with you and we could lose a few hundred million of us and we wouldn't mind because we got extra Chinese to spare.
It's kind of crazy, you know, statements like that.
And but LBJ didn't invade China to prevent them from setting off their first day bombs.
They said, look, what are you going to do?
Exactly.
And, you know, I think you have when we look at, you know, we talk about rationality.
That's the big thing with North Korea.
Is Kim Jong Un rational?
Is he crazy?
Well, I think you have to look at Kim in sort of two sides of the coin.
The first side is in terms of sort of his domestic politics.
I mean, look, he is the leader of regime of twenty five million people who essentially worship him.
But at the same time, he he treats his people in a very awful manner.
I mean, he has a concentration camps.
In fact, one is geographically three times the size bigger than Washington, D.C.
I mean, he has two hundred thousand people that are in those camps.
People are literally starving to death in North Korea.
Forty percent of the North Korean population of that twenty five million, mind you, are food insecure, meaning they are literally on the brink of starvation every single day.
So this man is a cruel dictator, you know, maybe up there with, you know, within the stratosphere of some of the worst dictators ever, at least his entire family is.
But the reason why he does that is is for survival, to ensure that his regime, that the Kim family dynasty, the Stalinist, you know, family dictatorship, if you will, will rule North Korea for as long as it possibly can.
That is why he does what he does.
At the same time, the rationality of why he has nuclear weapons is to ensure that survival.
Look, the Kim family are students of history.
They've watched the United States wage regime or change war after regime change war.
And they understand one constant.
The United States does not invade countries that have nuclear weapons.
That is that you don't you don't need to have a Ph.
D. from Princeton to figure that one out in international affairs.
That is the United States is not going to take that risk.
So this is why the North Koreans have those nuclear weapons, why they've essentially starved their own people to get those nuclear weapons.
I mean, they've spent billions of dollars that they don't have.
I mean, the North Koreans don't have good infrastructure.
They have, you know, a lot of their roads are basically they're nothing, to be honest.
They're not even paved in a lot of areas, a lot of the villages going outside of Pyongyang.
There's very little electricity, running water, plumbing, and we're not even talking third world.
We're talking fourth world practically.
And the reason why is because they've invested in these weapons to ensure survival.
That's that is, in my opinion, that might seem crazy to us.
But it's if you're trying to ensure the survival of a regime that really probably shouldn't exist, that should have died at the end of the Cold War.
This is why they have those weapons.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, just like with all these, you've got to be honest about America's role in all of this, when, you know, they've been betting all along, essentially, that the regime's going to fall any day now.
So we don't have to deal with them fairly, because they're going to cease to exist and all of this.
But then, I guess the Clinton government, late in the game, finally gave up on that and said, well, you know, we want to keep them from developing whatever nuke tech they have any further at this point.
So they had a deal that was working perfectly well until Bush and John Bolton deliberately destroyed it, as Bolton brags in his memoirs and everything, that they added a series of pressures against the North Koreans and essentially forced them to make nuclear weapons, gave them no choice.
And that was, you know, they withdrew from the agreed framework, they added new sanctions, they had the proliferation security initiative, which was the self-proclaimed right to seize all their boats on the high seas in the name of counter-proliferation.
And then they put them in the nuclear posture review that said that, yeah, you know what, we might nuke them in a first strike.
And only then did they withdraw from the NPT and the IAEA safeguards agreement and kick the inspectors out of the country and really, in fact, announce that in six months they would be leaving the treaty, like in the treaty.
And then six months later they did.
And only then did they begin harvesting plutonium and making nukes out of them.
And so, you know what?
In the democracy where the American people somehow sort of kind of put George W. Bush and John Bolton in charge of making these decisions, it was the USA who pushed them directly into nuclear weapons possession, essentially.
You couldn't even really add any further steps they could have done other than really carpet bombing them with, you know, thousand-pound bombs to make them decide that we got to do this.
Yeah.
You know, you raise a good point, I think, by de facto.
A lot of times we don't think about our actions.
And we think a lot of times not just about North Korea, but Iran, China, I mean, name your potential adversary.
We think in very U.S.-centric terms, what we want, what we're looking for, what our goals are, what our rationale is.
And a lot of times we have this thing, Scott, where we do not put ourselves into other people's shoes.
We don't have sometimes, you know, international relations empathy, I like to call it, being able to put yourself in a Kim or Mao Zedong or Stalin or whoever's shoes that you want to analyze as a leader and think about, if I'm sitting in Pyongyang, what are my goals?
What are my aspirations?
And I think for Kim, it's quite simple.
That regime's number one goal is survival above all else.
They don't care about their own people.
They don't care if they live or die.
All they care about is making sure that Kim Jong-un wakes up every morning fat and happy.
He can smoke his three packs of cigarettes a day.
You know, he can, you know, he can make sure that he can do whatever he wants to do every day and he lives fat and happy till he's 85 years old.
That's their goal.
It's really simple.
And that regime is going to do whatever it takes to ensure that goal.
And you know, there is a credible argument out there, like you've just made, that some of the things the United States did, especially, you know, declaring North Korea part of the axis of evil, you know, pushed the North Koreans, if they were thinking about nuclear weapons and maybe they were on the fence, that pushed them to go all the way with it.
I mean, they had been thinking about nuclear weapons really going back to the 1950s and they made a lot of sort of small investments in reactors.
They got a lot of material from the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
But really, when their program really went into warp speed is really in the early 2000s.
And then at the, you know, when the Obama administration came in, they pushed that up further when the Obama administration, you know, went through this whole policy of strategic patience, essentially saying that, you know, we're not going to deal with you, North Korea, unless you're willing to basically offer folding nuclearization.
And then maybe after that, you'll get something that's a deal nobody's going to make.
Right.
And then, of course, you know, this is the real problem here is that in the Trump government, it'd be almost better if they were just bad on it.
Instead, you have a president who really wants to have some kind of breakthrough here and you have people who work for him who, at least in some cases, know what to do and propose to do that.
And I'm thinking specifically of Stephen Biegun, who is, I guess, was the special envoy or whatever the hell, ambassador to South Korea or whatever his job was, I forgot.
But he gave the big speech at, I think, the Brookings Institution, where he goes, look, we got to put denuclearization later on the list, make friends first, and that'll be the progress, make them feel like they can give up their nukes and that it's not suicide to do so, which is, come on, it's the only sensible solution.
Everybody knows that in the world.
And so he laid that out as a specific Trump administration delineated policy once in a big speech for that reason.
And then they abandoned it.
I don't know how soon after that, but almost immediately after that and went right back to Bush and Obama.
Give up your nukes first, which is obviously a nonstarter.
You know, you bring up a great point.
And it's funny, the things that happen with North Korea all happened so fast that I think we lose sight of some of these important markers.
The speech you're talking about, but from Special Envoy Stephen Biegun, now he's he's he's now deputy secretary of state, so he's number two to Pompeo.
He gave this amazing speech at Stanford University back in January of 20.
Thank you.
Yes.
To Stanford.
It was beginning.
Oh, God.
January 2019.
Right before Hanoi.
But a month before Hanoi.
And you got it spot on.
Basically what he says is we're willing to do a lot of different things to try and craft a new relationship.
And, you know, he hinted at so many different things, maybe ending the Korean War, maybe liaison offices, you know, willing to look at this relationship completely differently.
And that was I mean, people who are who are who are not hawkish when it comes to North Korea, who are realists, who understand that this isn't going to be something that we can just solve.
You know, there's no toolkit we can bring out to make this work.
People were floored and were really thankful for for how far he was willing to go.
You know, putting himself out there really, you know, being a little actually going a lot further than what Trump was willing to do.
But it's interesting.
If you read John Bolton's recent book, he basically hints to the fact that he was very against that idea and that that Stephen Biegun was going a little further out than what the Trump administration wanted to go.
Who knows?
Maybe Trump had authorized it.
You never really know the internal squabbles within the administration.
But it seems pretty clear that when the Hanoi summit was about to happen, Bolton's whole job was to make sure that Trump would act tough, that, you know, that if he didn't like the terms, he could walk out anytime he wanted.
And Bolton skewed a lot of the actual briefings to make Trump have a lot tougher viewpoint when it came to North Korea.
And he kept peppering his conversations with Trump, saying, you know, Mr. President, if you want to walk out, you would look really tough, you'd look really bold.
And then what happens?
He gets to Hanoi.
And the second he lands on the tarmac, you have the Michael Cohen hearings in Congress.
And Trump was probably nervous about, you know, making any concessions to the North Koreans because he knows that the Democrats would use that as leverage against him.
I mean, you could write the, you know, the commercials and the social media posts right away.
You know, Donald Trump's Neville Chamberlain.
He gave away, you know, the house to North Korea, which was the entire narrative that day on TV.
Yeah.
Oh, Kim is going to walk all over Trump and give him the whole store.
Like what does he even have to give them?
Give me a break.
Nothing.
Nothing.
So that so that's so that's why I think Trump walked in Hanoi, not because he had a bad deal on the table.
I think Kim was willing to deal.
I really do.
There's a CNN report that didn't get a lot of play that when Trump and Pompeo were walking out of the summit, the North Korean deputy foreign minister ran up to Trump and Pompeo and actually increased their offer, which isn't something a lot of people know.
It, you know, so much came out in those couple of days.
But that was a news news clipping that was very, very important.
I think Trump could have walked in and made a deal.
But, you know, thanks to Bolton, we'll never know.
Yeah, he really is.
It's funny.
They're all like this, but it always he always reminds me of Barack Obama, his supposed nemesis and opposite, where he's afraid of looking weak.
And so he acts weakly and hands, you know, gives away the store to the bad guys when he absolutely doesn't need to.
Trump could have just as easily made a great deal right there and come out and said, yeah, and screw you if you don't like it, Democrats, and been just as so-called tough and macho and whatever for his posturing for TV politics, just as much as strutting out there, walking away from the deal because nobody messes with him.
Either way, you could still get the same effect of whether you're standing up to Kim or whether you're standing up to Nancy Pelosi, as long as you're standing up to somebody, especially for Donald Trump.
It's all he cares about is that he looks like he was winning an argument with somebody.
So he could have said, fine, you can drag my lawyer up to Congress the day I'm negotiating this all important deal.
And you can sit here and try to call me Neville Chamberlain.
You don't know the first thing about World War II and you don't know the first thing about Korea either.
And we're moving on whether you like it or not.
And tough, just the same as Obama could have done on Afghanistan and on hell on North Korea too.
He could have said, I want to see this through and never did, you know, for the same reason.
I like it.
That's perfect.
They're all just a bunch of cowards.
Hate them.
Anyway.
Except that.
Yeah, boy.
And see, this is worse, right?
Because they had it right in their hand.
They knew exactly what to do.
It's not really too late now, assuming I and I do assume Trump is going to be reelected.
I could be wrong, I guess.
But I guess we'll see how it goes.
But even then, it's you know, he doesn't have enough guys who speak in right sense on these issues around to help him see through his side of things.
If it's not John Bolton, it's going to be somebody else making sure that the reasonable approach, which may not have worked, but that actually had a reasonable chance of working, is not even trying.
It was close.
You know, it was it was close.
You know, I think this has always been the problem for Trump is I think Trump has realist instincts.
I think he has restrainer foreign policy instincts, you know, but he doesn't.
Number one, obviously, he doesn't know the the history behind that foreign policy doctrine.
He doesn't understand sort of the ins and outs and he doesn't have anybody around him to say, you know what, Mr. President, you have a great idea on whatever it is.
It's pulling troops out of Afghanistan.
Here's a way we can do that to further what you want to do.
You know, you write him a one page document, which it seems like that's all he wants to get.
And you walk him through it.
You explain it to him.
And, you know, he for whatever reason, he hasn't really been able to hook up with that part of the the foreign policy establishment that could, you know, further his goals.
Now, it seems like there is some progress there.
I mean, we've got Doug McGregor, who might be end up becoming the ambassador to Germany if Trump wins.
We've got William Ruger from the Koch Institute, who could be the ambassador to Afghanistan.
So I think there is a little bit of movement there where Trump is starting to find some of these foreign policy allies that could sort of guide him in the right direction.
But I think he's got to look a little bit deeper, because what's going to happen is he always ends up going back to these people who are really tough on TV.
He likes that.
He likes that public image.
But when he actually starts trying to craft policy, he realizes, oh, these guys are not the people I really want running my government.
And this is why he just, you know, he fired H.R. McMaster, he fires John Bolton.
You know, Robert O'Brien, you know, I know him very well.
He's a good friend of mine.
I think he's well served there because he's got somebody who's who's actually more of the quarterback of his foreign policy.
Trump basically tells him what he wants done and then O'Brien goes and does it.
I think that's a smart move in that area.
But, you know, if Trump starts having people leave the administration, he's got to go find those foreign policy realists or otherwise we're just going to go back to these same problems of people sticking around for a year, 18 months and then not have any policy continuity.
And that's a problem.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, is it's getting him to understand that there is at least one good bench worth of anti-war right wingers, broadly speaking, who could, you know, who have the credentials to serve in his government.
But he doesn't know their names.
He's got to learn their names somehow and he's got to figure out that, OK, I could put this guy at the NSC and I could put this guy over here at defense and this guy at the National Intelligence Director spot or whatever it is.
And that would be good enough to, as you said, have people who are trying to help them out on the good parts instead of constantly dragging their feet.
I don't know if you saw this, but it's the one of the top headlines on anti-war dot com today is about how the military is just completely unashamedly insubordinate over Afghanistan and Trump saying, I want home by Christmas.
And they're just saying, no, screw you.
Belay that order.
They're not going and they're perfectly happy to talk about it to the AP and Reuters and a few others.
It's all over the place.
Yes.
A Fox News had their own separate report.
There's I think four separate mainstream media reports where they're saying, yeah, well, we'll see about what happens in the election or whether we'll consider following through like this.
Simply a polite request and that they are in no way obligated to follow.
Yeah.
I mean, that's that's quite scary.
I mean, you know, and I think they learned that trick from Jim Mattis.
I mean, if you read some of the stuff that Mattis has come out with and I think Bolton had this in his book, too, where they sort of learned, OK, that's that's what Trump says.
All right, fine.
Well, let's see if he asks us again or let's see if he puts it in some sort of, you know, legal memorandum or something like that.
And they just sort of politely forget about it.
And then, you know, Trump assumes it's being done or Trump moves on to the next thing.
And then, you know, Trump doesn't follow up on it.
And that's you know, I think they learn that from him.
And that's you know, that's a shame.
That's really that's really sad.
Yeah.
Ray McGovern was on the show earlier.
He was the former head analyst of the Soviet division at the CIA.
And he was saying that the Russians right now, they must, he just assumes, be on high alert because of Trump being on steroids and acting all crazy and sending out 15 tweets in a row or whatever it is that they're like doubly concerned because of the drugs he's on at the moment.
I hadn't considered that, but he's probably right about that.
Probably.
Yeah.
God, probably true.
I mean, yeah.
I think all of these different countries sort of have to be on an extra alert just because they're probably afraid.
You know, what is his mental condition?
Is it, you know, could he do something irrational?
I doubt it.
I think there's enough safeguards around.
But yeah, I mean, you got to do your due diligence, I guess.
Yeah.
And, you know, hopefully just here, sir, here's your cell phone back.
Just go ahead and tell Twitter about it.
Well, in this case, I could be on the side of the delayers.
It's just, you know, they're more likely to follow orders for a nuke first strike while they're in the middle of fighting about withdrawal from Afghanistan.
You know, they'll always take the wrong stand.
What a world.
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Well, so now here's the thing, and this is a big deal in the new Woodward book, is about all the letters back and forth between Trump and Kim.
So let's say Trump wins the thing.
You think, I mean, maybe it takes Kim himself to write to Trump and just say, listen, put denuclearization lower on the list is something I am willing to talk about, but we gotta do some other things first and just make it that clear.
If he doesn't have any staff who will make it that clear to him, maybe Kim, you know, Junior here, the grandson, should make it clear that, you know, if you'll just give us a security guarantee first, drop some sanctions, you know, et cetera like that, make a peace deal in the last Korean War that we still only have a ceasefire and pursue some of these things, that that would really make a difference and we really could go from there.
It seems like, I mean, I guess, I know Trump is up against this entire establishment pushing back this way, but it seems like if he understood a clear path, then maybe he could do it.
You know, I agree.
There's a couple of things here.
If Trump does win, and I agree with you, I do think Trump is gonna win.
There's a couple of things that are, that are, will pull together that I think makes a deal likely.
I think the first thing you got to look at this from Kim's perspective, Kim this year has been whammy all different ways with all different types of problems.
North Korea was hit by three typhoons this year that exasperated all of their different agricultural problems.
They were hit with droughts.
They were hit with heavy rains at one point.
So their farmlands in agricultural production is way, way down below where it's been in past years.
So that makes their food security issues and starvation issues even worse than what they already were.
You still got international sanctions that are, that are hitting them really hard.
And then you've got COVID-19.
North Korea was actually one of the first countries to close all of their borders.
So essentially they've created an economic embargo, essentially locking the whole country down where very little imports are coming in.
That means probably very little food is coming in too.
So Kim is, is probably starting to get quite desperate in terms of trying to make sure that he can survive.
I've even seen reports coming out of South Korea that they think by 2023 Kim will actually run out of foreign exchange reserves.
That means the country's bankrupt.
That means they're going to have huge inflation.
They're going to have all different types of economic problems.
So I think Kim is probably looking for a deal and I think Trump will probably wants a deal too.
But if Trump's real goal is to go after China to contain China or do whatever he's thinking about doing when it comes to the rise of Beijing, he's got to get North Korea off the chessboard because I think he understands that when you look at North Korea policy, we have outsourced that to Beijing because of one fact that nobody likes in Washington, 90% of North Korea's exports go through China.
So when you talk about maximum pressure, it's a BS strategy because the Chinese have to be the one to enforce it.
Do you really think they're going to do that when we're trying to stop their rise?
Absolutely not.
I think a deal will happen.
It's just going to take somebody to get the cojones together to say, look, this policy doesn't work.
This is what we need to do.
We're going to be in a better place if we do it.
You know, yes, the progressives and a lot of, you know, neoconservatives will make this a new story for maybe a week, but we'll move on after that and the world will too.
I hate that though.
Let's get out of Afghanistan and let's solve the problem in Korea so we can better take on China and Russia and all this stuff, man.
That's not progress.
That's the worst thing we could do in the world is get into a fight with H-bomb states.
I know.
So true.
It's so true.
But well, I think all things considered, looking at all of our options, I think Trump has good instincts.
I think sometimes he has these sort of get tough moments where he says things like that, but I think overall the instincts are there.
We just got to get the right people around him to sort of steer him all the way around.
I think we can do it.
Well, and you're right too about how, you know, with all their economic troubles and the COVID and the droughts and all of this stuff, that it's the perfect opportunity to kill them with kindness.
And it sounds absurd at first, but actually it's not absurd.
It's exactly what Bill Hicks said 30 years ago that, well, okay, it's pretty neat that you can shoot a missile down at Chamney and everything.
I appreciate that.
But conceivably, couldn't you use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
There's a guy who needs a banana.
Or the resources that it takes to make that.
I mean, God, I mean, you know, that's the trick.
Look, I think eventually, I think a deal is going to happen.
In Hanoi, we were very, very close, a lot closer than what people think.
I think that's the blueprint.
I think what Trump will ask for is a little bit more on the denuclearization side.
I think Kim will ask for a little bit more on the sanction side.
Everybody gets what they want.
We end the Korean War.
We have a nice big signing ceremony.
Trump gets his page in history.
Fox News goes gaga for three days, you know, asking for his Nobel Prize, and the world moves on.
There you go.
Sounds good.
Well, maybe you'll be the deputy national security advisor in the next Trump term.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Sign me up.
Yeah, man.
Ready to serve.
All right, everybody, if you need to get in contact with him, I got his number.
Terry Kazianis, writing at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
There's your bench, Trump, right there.
Thanks, buddy.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, sir.
Take care.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
