01/11/17 – Eric Margolis on the overhyped North Korean threat to the United States – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing our friend Eric Margulies back again, ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And this one is very important at unz.com, unz, unz.com.
End all the craziness over North Korea.
Happy New Year again.
I'm Eric Margulies on this side of the New Year.
And welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm just fine.
I really appreciate you joining us on this show and this article.
It's really important.
I mean, a lot of the things that you write are really important.
But this one, I guess, is especially important because of just how unique it is.
This is just a point of view we never hear, which is end all the craziness over North Korea.
What?
There's another way?
What are you talking about?
Quite right.
There's not a single party line on North Korea.
They're crazy.
They're dangerous.
And they've got to be stopped.
And that's been going on since the 1950s Korean War.
And it continues on today.
And hopefully the new Trump administration may bring some rational thinking to the situation.
But that remains to be seen.
And now you've been to North Korea or you've been to Korea, I know, a million times.
Have you been to North Korea?
Yes.
Briefly, in the southern part of North Korea, it's a pretty scary, bleak place.
And it's not for the faint of heart.
In fact, it's one of the scariest places I've been to since I went to Albania, Stalinist Albania in the 1970s.
Wow.
OK, so now I'm President Scott and I make you ambassador in North Korea or I make you special envoy or something, if maybe that gives you a little bit looser rules of engagement.
What do you want to do?
Mr. Margulies, how are we going to solve this North Korea problem?
Wait, what North Korea problem and how are we going to solve it?
This week we got reports or last week that Kim, the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un said that they were developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.
North Korea has nuclear weapons of some sort, so it doesn't take a leap of intelligence to say that this is a possible threat to the United States.
So there's a great clamor in Washington about anti-missile systems or we've got to do something to stop the Koreans and the hawks are saying we've got to go in and blitz them, so on and so forth.
We've heard all this before, of course, but North Korea has only 25 million people and the United States has 330 million odd people.
The idea that this little pipsqueak, dirt poor country in North Asia is a threat to the United States is a joke.
And what North Korea wants, what the leadership, you know, the U.S. and North Korea are still at war from the 1950s.
Korea is under severe trade sanctions and embargoes.
There are innumerable U.S. and South Korean plots to overthrow the Kim regime.
And there are America's allies, Japan and South Korea are also violently anti-North Korean.
The North Koreans want us just to be left alone.
They want recognition.
They want some assurance from the U.S. that it's not going to invade North Korea or hit it with nuclear weapons.
And for this, North Korea, I believe, would junk its nuclear weapons.
And it's the cheapest, the fastest, the easiest way to resolve this great crisis over North Korean ICBMs.
Hmm.
Okay.
So quite a few things here.
First of all, I wonder if you would be worried about, I mean, because after all, if an ICBM really can fly to the West Coast, it could be a threat to one American city.
You know, not that they would, not that North Korea would survive the retaliatory strike.
But I guess in a sense that these, you know, hypothetically could be a threat.
But then again, I mean, their missile project is a government program and it hasn't been very successful so far, has it?
Do you think that they really do have a three-stage missile that we should worry about?
Or for that matter, a plutonium implosion bomb small enough to put on the tip of one?
Not yet.
That's the consensus.
But eventually, they're very assiduous and they're clever, these North Koreans, and eventually they will develop it.
But the question is, why on earth would they fire a nuclear weapon at the United States?
They can't destroy the United States.
They don't have enough missiles, warheads to do that.
And doing so would invite immediate annihilation from U.S. nuclear forces based in Japan, South Korea, Okinawa, and on the Seventh Fleet at sea.
The U.S. is just itching to use its tactical nuclear weapons and wipe North Korea off the map.
And so for that matter, the South Koreans, who don't have nuclear weapons now, but are developing a new strategy called Kill Chain that is designed to wipe out North Korea's leadership in a moment's notice.
All right.
Well, so one thing I just want to add here real quick, you could comment if you want or we could move on.
But it seems important to note that Bill Clinton had a deal and they were within the Non-Proliferation Treaty and had a deal with the IAEA to inspect their facilities.
And Bush is the one who broke and renounced the deal and pushed them to nukes.
But even then in 2008, his ambassador had a plan and I guess Cheney was out of town when they asked Bush and he gave the okay to do this deal to get them back under the NPT.
And they started the first processes of it and even shut down the Pyongyang reactor and all of this.
But then Bush, I think he took them off and then he put them back on the supporters of terrorist list, the supporters of terrorist list.
And Bush then, in other words, scotched his own deal where he could have, he had a real pathway to solving the problem that he created, which was the problem of North Korean nukes then.
And then, you know, I guess Obama, what has Obama done other than nothing to try to resolve any of this?
Has he made it worse?
No, he's just done nothing and nothing.
He's made some ritualistic threats against North Korea.
And what he has, actually what he has done is very negative, is that he has, or the Obama administration, increased the annual US-South Korean military exercises that happen every fall when we have a crisis.
This is like a kabuki drama.
And it's a ground, sea, and air, and amphibious operation done on North Korea's border, mimicking or planning for a major invasion of North Korea and the overthrow of the regime.
And there are hundreds of thousands of troops, mostly Korean, South Korean, involved in this operation.
The US Seventh Fleet is there, and B-1 bombers and B-52 bombers are flying over North Korean territory.
The North Koreans get hysterical every year and jump up and down and rant, rave, and make all kinds of terrible threats to wipe out the Western world, which you can't do, but they're still threatening.
And the Western media, of course, picks that up, and that's our annual Korean crisis.
Obama has made it worse.
He could have stopped them or dialed back on them instead.
He's been upping these provocative exercises as an excuse for doing nothing substantial.
And meanwhile, of course, their missile program and their nuclear weapons program gets more and more advanced, and presumably their stockpile of nuclear weapons gets greater as well.
And now I'm afraid that you just answered the question that I'm about to ask with your thing about the exercises there and this big Navy project on the US side, and Army and Air Force for that matter.
Why is it so important to keep this strategy, especially now that they have nukes?
This seems like a perfect time for some kind of Nixon-goes-to-China thing where, you know, it's like if Cuba had nukes all this time, wouldn't that give us the incentive to just go ahead and negotiate a peace and negotiate the nukes off of their island somehow?
You know what I mean?
In other words, it just seems crazy to me that, well, like you say in your title here, sorry, that the entire impetus for the American political establishment, military establishment, whatever, is to just keep ratcheting up this tension instead of finding a way to solve it.
It just seems like a pointless crisis that our side has done so much to create here.
Well, there's, yeah, there's madness behind the method.
First of all, this is a highly strategic area and the US is worried that North Korea might come and roll its tanks out, its million-man army, and, quote, liberate, unquote, South Korea.
I don't think it'll happen because South Korea has a very large and powerful army plus US support.
But the US is very edgy about this.
The South Korean government is not a very legitimate government.
It does not have widespread support in the country.
Its president, Park, was just suspended from her powers.
So it's a very sticky situation.
But what's more important is that it's a way of confronting the Chinese who are North Korea's only ally.
But there's another wrinkle to this.
You know, you mentioned, Scott, under the Bush administration that they'd almost made a deal with North Korea, a sensible deal, a good one, for North Korea to get rid of its nukes in exchange for a lessening or an end to the US undeclared economic and political war against North Korea.
But what happened was that the neocons in Washington, led by this nutty UN ambassador John Bolton, he had the big mustache, went to war against any kind of compromise with North Korea.
Why?
Because for the neocons, North Korea is a threat to Israel.
I know this sounds comical and really odd, but the reason is that North Korea was exporting missile technology and missile engines, Finnish missiles, to Iran, supposedly to Syria, maybe some other Arab countries.
And the Israelis were very alarmed about this, and they wanted to have a monopoly on all high tech weaponry in the Middle East.
And so Korea became a threat.
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That's right, I remember when Chelsea Manning heroically liberated all of the State Department documents, the first thing the New York Times did with them was, I'm 99% sure it was David Sanger, wrote up this piece about, oh my God, look at all these advanced missiles that the North Koreans gave Iran.
And then a few days later, they had to admit, but nobody heard them, that actually they were fake and they were just the shells of missiles that had never been developed and didn't exist and had never been exported.
And the entire thing was fake news.
But that was what the New York Times decided to do, and I think indicating that same neoconservative establishment agenda of doing anything to try to demonize Iran, and in this case, North Korea.
And for David Sanger's sake, maybe believe anything too, you know, this guy's kind of a dunce.
Well, these are the guys who brought us the Iraq invasion, or certainly merchandised it.
So yes, but so suddenly North Korea is a big scare to the neocons, which is kind of silly.
There was talk of naval embargoes and seizing North Korean ships on the high seas, all quite illegal.
But when you're under neocon ideology, all permissible, as long as it protects the goal of the neocons.
It's good.
This continues on right now.
Hey, Eric, do the neocons denounce to this day, do they denounce Nixon and Kissinger for going to shaking hands with Mao and opening up China?
Or have they sort of had to admit what everybody else seems to think, which is that that was the greatest decision a president ever made in the post World War Two era?
Well, Scott, I've never heard neocon criticism of the opening to China, which was a brilliant move, and an obvious one, too.
It seems like that would be the standard that, you know, if you have some tinpot dictatorship, go over there and loosen them up by being overwhelming them with friendship and business opportunities.
You know, take them to lunch, give them a credit card for New York stores and away you go.
But that's all North Korea wants.
North Korea is having tantrums, missile tantrums, but it wants recognition and it wants respect.
And the Americans will not give that.
In fact, they even went so far as to commit the ultimate strategic horror.
They cut off Kim's supply of Bordeaux wine from France, really underhanded.
But that's how far they're willing to go to stick their fingers in the eye of North Korea.
And the North Koreans are totally paranoid.
And they should be.
The West is trying to overthrow them constantly.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so Trump has said in, you know, very uncertain terms, I guess, that he wants to do something about this.
I think not in a war hockey kind of way, but he says he wants to lean on China and make China lean on Korea to do what we want, which is to, from now on, do what we want, I guess.
But does that sound like a pathway to some real progress there?
Perhaps?
At least he wants to change the status quo, maybe?
Well, it could be.
That's certainly the obvious, one of the obvious paths to follow.
But the question is, what is China's interest in this?
China likes North Korea.
Yeah, they get irritated once in a while at young Kim's antics.
But China is happy to see the North Korean communist regime in power, because if it fell, it would be replaced, the South Koreans would be there in a flash, and the Americans would be there, obviously, the Japanese, and threatening China's northern industrial heartland in Manchuria.
So it would be a terrible thing for the Chinese.
So then why would they make any change?
They could pretend to cooperate with the Americans for various reasons, make some cosmetic changes.
But I don't think right now we're going to see a Chinese army march into Korea, depose the Kim regime.
So okay, now, never mind any, you know, real American national interests.
But I mean, from the point of view of the empire itself, do they have anything really to lose by simply making a permanent peace and an end, an official end to the war?
I mean, we're not talking get rid of all nukes, we're not talking reunification, and we're not talking about solving every other issue.
But can we at least do better than that little bit of a ceasefire?
It seems like that would, you know, ratchet tensions down.
But that's the real enemy here would be the ratcheting down of tensions.
Well, you're right, Scott.
They need some friendly gestures to be made to North Korea.
Both sides have to save face.
United States can't admit that it's been stared down by a little pipsqueak, tiny country, which is roughly the size of Iraq.
And so, yes, and the North Koreans, of course, will be tickled pink.
They're struggling with their economy, which is under siege.
And that's why in my column this week, I called it a North Asian Cuba, because the same thing happened.
They wouldn't give in to the United States, they wouldn't bow and kowtow to Washington.
And as a result, they've had this economic warfare imposed upon them, which has kept the country dirt poor.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny, right?
Because back to the, you know, Nixon and Kissinger worked things out with the Chinese model.
It was really only the very far right that said, no, we shouldn't do any trade with Russia, we shouldn't, or the Soviet Union, we shouldn't do any trade with China.
We should embargo them off the face of the earth till their regimes, their evil totalitarian communist regimes collapse, that should be the first order of business.
But that was only, that was like the John Berger position, and maybe others not quite that far right.
But pretty much the entire rest of the consensus was that, no, they were right to do this.
And not only just to stick it to the Soviet Union, but also because, you know, there's, and not just for business opportunities with China either in that more cynical way, but a chance for peace and a lessening of tensions and the risk for nuclear war with this huge power, you know, one of the most populous nations and civilizations on the planet.
Yeah.
Do you hear anybody raising alarms about China's nuclear weapons now?
Right.
No, hardly ever mentioned.
Right, because we're friends with them.
Mostly.
And India is now deploying nuclear armed ICBMs capable of hitting the United States.
Nobody's mentioned a peep about this.
Yeah.
Actually, well, now that you did, did they have an official excuse for that?
Because all of their official enemies, Pakistan and China, are within range of medium range missiles, right?
What do you need a three stage rocket for there, pal?
Excellent question.
Got a Pacific Ocean you need to hurtle or something?
India decides to go to war with Mexico or something like that.
There you go.
India wants to be a great power.
They want to deter the USA, it sounds like.
They're trying to guarantee their independence.
That's right.
Or worse.
Maybe, maybe they want to take over the world.
What do you think?
Well, no.
But in fact, well, they are doing it that way by exporting immigrants.
You know, there are millions of Indians in North America now.
And capable people.
They're very hardworking and yeah, they are.
But what really shocked the Indians was back, I don't know, which of their wars with Pakistan was either in the late 60s or maybe early 70s.
They were a war.
The Indians were occupying East, then East Pakistan, today Bangladesh.
And they really hurt the Pakistanis.
And the U.S. to support its ally, Pakistan, sent the fleets, I think it was a fifth fleet or sixth fleet, to off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal or in the Arabian Gulf as a big power statement.
And this outraged the Indians and shocked the hell out of them, too.
And from that point onwards, India resolved to develop its own weapons that would keep the U.S. away.
All right, Eric, well, thanks very much for doing the show.
I'm sorry I got to cut it short here because I'm running late.
But I really appreciate your great writing and your time on the show, as always, sir.
Pleasure, as always, to be with you, Scott.
Cheerio.
All right, y'all.
This is the great Eric Margulies.
Look him up at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And you can find him at unz.com, unz, unz.com.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
This one is End All the Craziness Over North Korea.
It's at unz.com, unz, unz.com.
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