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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
Clausewitz for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of arms in the world today.
My own government.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Harry J. Kazianas.
He is director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest and executive editor of its publishing arm, The National Interest.
Previously, he was the editor of The Diplomat, a fellow at CSIS, and on the 2016 Ted Cruz foreign policy team.
Huh, that's interesting.
A very important article here at the American Conservative Magazine.
You guys got to go look at it.
It's called, A War of Choice with North Korea is an Immensely Dumb Idea.
Welcome to the show, Harry.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
Good morning.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And yeah, a war of choice.
Isn't that a great euphemism for aggressive war?
Same thing with intervention, right?
Means starting a thing that you weren't doing already.
You know, it's kind of different than declaring that a state of war between Japan and the United States exists because they have launched a war of choice, an intervention against us.
Right, I mean, exactly.
And I'm shocked, to be honest with you, that there's so little debate about tensions that are rising with North Korea.
I mean, maybe this is just a beltway thing, me being here in Washington.
There's a lot of chatter on all the mainstream media networks, whether you're looking left or whether you're looking right.
Sort of about the drone beat to war.
But, you know, when I leave the beltway and I go out into the Midwest or I go back home to Rhode Island, there's so little conversation about, you know, what's happening and the stakes that are involved.
I mean, literally, if there is a war between the United States and North Korea, even if it starts out very small with, you know, a small preemptive strike by the Trump administration, sort of like what they did in Syria back in the summer, that could potentially lead to nuclear war.
And with the North Koreans potentially having a crude capability to hit the U.S. homeland, which I know is hotly debated, but it is very possible we could see a U.S. city actually attacked by North Korea with nuclear weapons.
And, I mean, just to put a stereotype, we're talking Los Angeles.
The casualties could be something like 1.2 million.
But this is not Iraq.
This is not Afghanistan.
This isn't Kosovo.
This would be an immensely bad idea, just like I pointed out in The American Conservative.
So I've been trying to sort of talk about this for the last few months and really get the word out that this would be an enormously dumb idea when we have lots of other policy options to really contain the North Koreans and potentially bring them to the bargaining table.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so a lot to go back over even so far just right there.
First of all, on the American people's inattention on this, partially that's probably just kind of a boy who cried wolf thing, right?
Because every spring and summer, North Korea says their leadership, whether it's the grandson, the son, or the grandfather, you know, going all the way back.
They always say some crazy things right around March and right around August.
And then we always don't attack them.
And then everything continues on as before.
And I think even people who don't really know much about it have probably, if they've heard anything about it at all, have probably heard the idea that, yeah, war with North Korea at this point would not be a cakewalk.
And they probably just can't imagine that the American government would start another war, one that, as you said, is so easily predicted or predictable as being, you know, an extremely difficult thing, as the current Secretary of Defense Mattis has said, that this would be the most bitter fighting of our lifetimes.
I think people just, even I just kind of look at it like, geez, to cover this is to be too alarmist, because it's probably not going to happen because it's just too crazy, right?
Because Mattis would tell Trump, let's not, right?
Well, Joe, you're absolutely right.
I think there's a couple things to unpack there.
I think the first thing is, you know, a couple weeks back I went on a little mini speaking tour just to get out to folks and talk about the stakes with North Korea and to talk about what a potential war with Pyongyang would look like.
And I think at first a lot of people are sort of thinking, well, you know, we won such a massive victory in the first Gulf War.
It looked like a video game.
And I think people are sort of numb to the different problems we've had in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and all these different interventions that, you know, we might have been very good at taking down a nation state, but we're not very good at rebuilding societies.
I mean, what country is?
I mean, these are very complex problems.
So when you apply that same logic to North Korea and you walk people through not only what a war would look like, considering the fact that North Korea could have as many as 60 nuclear weapons, has 5,000 tons potentially of chemical weapons, has biological weapons, has an army, which is not the most sophisticated on the planet, but has over a million men under arms.
It has millions in reserve.
This would not be an easy task.
And once you start explaining that to people and they start walking through, you know, sort of the history that they've learned, whether it was back in grade school or college or graduate school, their minds start turning and they start understanding that this would be a war where potentially millions of people could die.
And even putting that aside for a second, the actual rebuilding of North Korea, even if we're not talking about nuclear weapons, even if we're just talking about a very bad conventional war, would cost trillions of dollars.
I've seen some estimates where it goes as high as $10 trillion.
If it goes nuclear, the cost may be beyond that, if we can even imagine that.
And we know for a fact that the American people would be asked to pay some of that bill.
I mean, you know, especially if we launched the preemptive strike that actually started the war.
So maybe it's one of those things where the mind cannot contemplate how bad this could actually get.
I think that's part of it, to be honest with you.
Well, listen, no, you're right.
I mean, as you've said, we've been at war with a bunch of peasants in flip-flops with AK-47s who can't possibly resist us.
And so, yeah, it feels really good to be the bully, I guess.
But even a weak little communist hellhole country like North Korea, at this point, they now have the rockets and the fission, if not the fusion, to hit back and hit back hard, even if they don't have anything else.
Even if their million-man army couldn't move around or do a thing for more than a week or two before it completely broke down, they got nukes now.
And that's, of course, all America's fault.
Bush pushed them to nuclear weapons, kicked them basically right out of the NPT deliberately in 2002.
And so it would seem, I don't know, I mean, I guess here's what I'm getting at.
It sounds like you're worried about this, but you're also worried that people in Washington, D.C. don't seem to get it.
They talk about attacking North Korea like it's just attacking the Pashtuns or attacking Saddam Hussein or some pushover like that, when, no, we're past that point now.
Why aren't they acknowledging that?
Why are they talking about it in the same way like it's going to be another no-big-deal like Iraq War II?
Well, I think part of it, and I think this is very possible, is if you look at Trump's ideas and deal-making strategies and trying to leverage certain players against one another in his own business deals and reading some of his own writings, it seems like Trump likes to go for these sort of grand bluffs.
He looks at everything as sort of a grand negotiation.
He's trying to get the most for America, quote-unquote, America first and whatnot.
So what he could be doing here, and I think this is very possible, is some sort of grand bluff where he wheels out H.R. McMaster and all the members and principals of his national security team and makes these sort of grandiose statements that, for example, we can't contain North Korea.
They're a very different regime.
We can't deter them because they could sell nuclear weapons to other countries.
We need a different solution.
And there's all these illusions that war is possible if North Korea doesn't basically bend the knee.
The challenge with that, of course, is the North Koreans read every single statement that the White House or the national security team points out.
I guarantee you they read every speech.
They watch every video clip.
They're very in tune to what's going on because the North Koreans rightly realize if the United States is moving towards a military conflict, they're going to have to use their weapons in any one of those conflict scenarios very early and very often because they'll lose their nuclear weapons and a large chunk of their WMD very quickly in a conflict in the United States.
They still have some left, but they would be in a better position to strike first, and that's where this gets so dangerous, and that's why there's such risk for miscalculation in a situation like this because the North Koreans are continually getting pushed back into a corner.
And at what point does Kim Jong-un decide that it's time to strike to sort of leverage his advantages best as he can?
That's where I think this gets very dangerous.
It's this drumbeat with essentially trying to match Kim Jong-un, you know, crazy statement for crazy statement, and wheeling out the national security team in what I think could be a big bluff that could basically blow up in the Trump administration's face.
Yeah, well, and that's the thing.
Mr. Art of the Deal seems pretty ham-handed at this.
When Doug Bandai was on the show last week, he said, you know, the key to the good cop, bad cop thing is that when the good cop makes an assurance that the prisoner has reason to believe that the good cop can have his way and that it's not just the bad cop in charge here.
So when Donald Trump outright undermines his secretary of state, he's basically saying to the North Koreans, don't listen to any assurances he gives you because I won't stand behind them.
I'm the bad cop and I'm the boss.
And so where the hell is the Art of the Deal in that?
And you touched on a great point.
You know, something when we talk about with foreign policy and national security and military affairs and all this advanced stuff is we never talk about the communication strategy.
I know that's boring.
It's not like, you know, bombs, guns, and death and casualty counts, but it's important here, and you touched on it.
So last week, when Secretary Tillerson went to the Atlantic Council and offered potential talks with the North Koreans, a lot of us, like myself and others who are realists or very pragmatic on foreign policy, jumped for joy.
We said, this is excellent.
This is a turn in the Trump administration's rhetoric.
This is great.
Well, we all know what happened a few hours later.
You know, Sarah Huckabee Sanders comes out with a statement basically depends on how you want to read it, but it seemed very clear that they were sort of pulling back the Tillerson comments at the Atlantic Council.
Then H.R. McMaster the next day tries to reword what Tillerson said and basically kind of pushes it to the side.
And then hours later after that, Secretary Tillerson's own communications person puts out a statement saying that, you know, U.S. policy, quote unquote, has not changed towards North Korea.
So we're sending these mixed messages that don't make any sense whatsoever.
If right now, if you pressed me to define what the Trump administration's strategy at North Korea is, I'd say either they don't have one or we've got four of them.
I don't know which it is anymore.
And when you're dealing with a country like North Korea, like I said, who's reading everything, who's trying to read the tea leaves, who's trying to see if you're making a move towards war, this is extremely dangerous.
Even if the Trump administration had a very simple message towards North Korea and everybody sort of adopted that message, that would be great.
But when you have Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, you know, the president himself saying, you know, sometimes we'll talk with Kim Jong-un and other times don't talk with Kim Jong-un, it's confusing.
It's completely confusing.
Well, and especially what Tillerson said was, Tillerson was like, we'll meet without precondition.
Let's just go ahead and start talking.
And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, what they basically said was no, they still have to basically admit that the end of any talks will be their nuclear disarmament before we agree to sit down with them, which is them giving away the whole story, which, is that not deliberately a poison pill or am I going off the story here?
No, you know, it could be construed as a poison pill.
I agree.
I don't understand the logic of being so wedded to denuclearization.
I've never really understood that.
I mean, look, the North Koreans have made it extremely clear.
They read history.
They're not dummies.
You know, they can pick up a history book or read CNN from Pyongyang.
They understand that the United States is very good at conducting these regime change operations.
They don't end very well, but they're very good at throwing out bad government they don't like.
So the reason why Kim Jong-un has basically starved his population of 25 million and can't grow his economy past the size of Vermont is simple.
He is building a nuclear deterrent to make sure the United States does not think about regime change.
It's very simple.
It's International Relations 101.
You don't need a PhD from Princeton to figure this one out.
And so if you understand it from that perspective, you can still have talks with the North Koreans, get them to the table, and start talking and start working to come up with a little bit better relations.
So we're not in this cycle where tensions keep going up every single day because at some point they're going to explode.
I mean, there's only so much pressure you can put on any situation, not even in foreign policy, but just in life before something bad happens.
And that's eventually we're going to get to.
Yeah.
All right, now listen.
So, well, let's get back to options for negotiations in a minute.
But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that Fox News article that you wrote and linked to here.
Again, everybody, the article in the American Conservative is called, A War of Choice with North Korea is an Immensely Dumb Idea.
And in there you link to this piece that you've previously written for Fox News.
Eight million dead.
What nuclear war with North Korea could look like.
And this isn't your speculation, or at least not idle speculation.
You've been working on this, huh?
Yeah, I've been looking at this situation really since the early 2010s.
Long story short, a group of think tankers and ex-White House officials and national security officials back in 2013 got together and we did a very elaborate series of war games looking at in 2020 what the situation could be with North Korea if they had a very advanced nuclear deterrent and looking at different options of how war could break out and what the end games look like.
And I think the one the media picked up on was obviously the one that's in the headline.
Whereas if North Korea decided to launch a massive nuclear strike, assuming in, say, 2020 that they had ICBMs that could hit large portions of the western coast of the United States, Japan, and South Korea, what the body counts would look like and what the aftermath is after.
And we ended up settling at the total of about eight million people dead.
The scary thing is that actually is probably a low figure because that's just the amount of people dead.
We're not even talking about the millions of countless people who would suffer from radiation sickness and cancers and all sorts of problems.
That scenario, too, it doesn't even factor probably in the higher totals of people who would come down with issues with chemical weapons or biological weapons released.
And the amount of money that would have to be spent to reconstruct Japan, South Korea, North Korea, the west coast of the United States, the amount of infrastructure and things that would have to be rebuilt, it was beyond our simulations to even fathom, to be honest with you.
Well, and I think people know.
I mean, even if you don't know anything, you know that losing Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo, Japan, and Los Angeles, California, I mean, these are the three of the most productive centers of human activity on the planet.
So you're talking trillions, uncountable trillions of opportunity costs lost.
Yeah, we're talking apocalyptic scenarios.
And this is why it's so important that we start talking to the North Koreans.
You know, what bothers me so much in talking to other conservatives is that it's an ensemble to say that you're agreeing to talk to your opponent.
You know, Ronald Reagan had ideas for working with the North Koreans and actually tried to ease tensions.
And actually, after lots of different ups and downs, almost every Republican administration eventually talked to the North Koreans.
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing weak talking to your opponent.
There's no, you're not an appeaser by doing things like that.
It's called realist, pragmatic foreign policy.
And I think we need to really adopt that again.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right, so wait, tell the long story long again.
Give a little bit of a, I mean, I know you have three or four different examples in the Fox News piece.
You don't have to go through them all, but talk about, you know, the Americans decide we're going to go in there and we're going to grab all their nukes or I think as it's easier to put it for think tank consensus, they start it.
But they started in some limited way and then the war gets escalated.
And I think the real point was you couldn't figure out a way to limit the war.
Every time in any simulation where war breaks out, it gets worse and worse and yeah, nukes start going off.
And then once they start lobbing them or once we start lobbing them, then the other side's going to respond.
Exactly.
And I think that the first scenario is kind of probably the most realistic one today.
In that one, essentially what happens is a U.S.-North Korea war breaks out when the Trump administration launches essentially what is a preemptive strike.
And we assume that we get all of the nuclear weapons.
As the war escalates, as allied forces start pushing into North Korea, you know, Kim Jong-un basically has to make a choice.
He has to use or lose whatever nuclear weapons he has.
And in that scenario, we did not get all the nuclear weapons.
And he's able to launch a strike on South Korea, killing, you know, potentially millions of people.
And I've talked to experts in the Pentagon and they've been very blunt about this.
Even if we did mass, you know, multiple aircraft carrier battle groups and submarines and B-1 and B-2 bombers all through Northeast Asia and struck, we would not be able to get every single nuclear weapon.
And that puts Kim Jong-un in a bind because he knows he's going to have limited time to fire off what he has left.
So what Kim is probably going to do is pick the biggest, most realistic target that he can hit and fire what nuclear weapons he has left.
That's why this whole debate about preemptive, preventative war with North Korea, it's a joke because you're putting millions of people's lives in the balance and it's something we don't need to do.
It's foolish.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I think as long as somebody drops John Bolton on North Korea as the first strike here, then it might be acceptable to me.
And that guy can do a lot of damage.
We shouldn't underestimate.
He's a veritable bunker buster.
Man.
So, yeah.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess you know all about this too.
This is...
We had a perfectly good deal until the Bush Jr. administration ruined it quite deliberately in the fall of 2002, right?
Well, even the problems with it even go back a little bit further.
My fellow Republicans, unfortunately, were not the best at doling out the promises that the Clinton administration made in terms of fuel aid that was promised in the agreement as well as nuclear reactor technology that was very hard for the North Koreans to turn into bombs.
So the problems actually start a little bit further than that.
And that's a challenge.
I mean, if America...
See, I like that part of the story, that Clinton made this deal with them the Republicans refused to allow him to live up to it.
It was even Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to build the light water reactors.
But the Republicans still wouldn't let the Americans live up to their side.
But the North Koreans were still within the deal anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, for the most part, I think that's very...
I think you could say that they were within the deal.
And, you know, the North Koreans saw the Bush administration, you know, turning to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, you know, I think they made a calculation that, you know, it was time for them to build weapons that would be very hard to take out.
Well, and it was all the new sanctions and the...
I mean, they outright abrogated their side of the deal and said, oh, you have a secret uranium enrichment program, so the deal is off.
And did the Proliferation Security Initiative and the National Security Strategy of 2002 that specifically named North Korea as a possibility for preemptive war.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
And I still can't figure out what they were doing.
You know, I talked with this guy Robert, I think, Alvarez, who was in the Energy Department in the Clinton administration and knew all about this, too.
And he was saying that, well, they thought that if they just got really tough with North Korea, that they would just completely bend to our will or something.
Even though, in hindsight, it seems almost inescapable that they were deliberately trying to force the North Koreans out of the deal.
The way that...
And John Bolton is on...is recorded saying to AIPAC in regards to Iran, we're actually trying to force them to quit the deal, which we think would put us in a more advantageous position.
Seems like the same thing with North Korea.
But I don't know.
What do you...
Because it makes no sense, right, to push the North Koreans out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and toward nuclear weapons in the fall of 2002 when you're about to march into Mesopotamia from Kuwait.
Now, who's going to take care of the nuke problem?
Now, here we are having this conversation in 2017 and they've got how many nukes?
Between a couple of dozen and 60, you said?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think the bigger problem, too, is that I think you touched on this very skillfully, is that if the North Koreans...
If your goal is to try and somehow bend the North Koreans to your will, you know, I believe sanctions do have a role to play here to try and get them to the table.
There's limits on what sanctions can do for sure, but if you just look at what the North Koreans do domestically to their own people, if they're willing to starve, subjugate, you know, treat their own people essentially like slaves and export them as slave labor, you're going to have a very hard time using, you know, very, you know, tough tactics to get them to do what you want.
Very clear the North Koreans can absorb a lot of punishment.
I mean, all you have to do is go on YouTube or just go on the internet and look at the pictures and how the average North Korean lives.
A lot of them, once you move past Pyongyang and go into the more rural areas of North Korea, a lot of average North Koreans don't have running water.
Some don't have toilets from what I've been told.
Some don't have electricity.
You know, just look at the poor, you know, North Korean guard who's supposed to have been part of their elite forces that are along the DMZ.
He was infected, I think, with every disease I've ever heard of before.
He had worms in his stomach.
He was shot five or six times.
I mean, that's how desperate the situation is.
So if we think that, you know, we're going to push them, you know, as far as we possibly can, this is why I think, you know, it really could come back and end up starting a war because the North Koreans are only going to get pushed so far and they can take a lot of damage.
That's pretty clear.
Yeah.
All right, so answer me this now.
You've referred to this a couple of times.
Is it absolutely an established fact that they have chemical and biological weapons even?
Chemical weapons, we're 100% sure of.
I mean, they used VX on Kim Jong-un's brother at a Malaysian airport to basically assassinate him.
So we know they have very potent chemical weapons and have pretty good delivery systems.
There's reports out there that they probably have as many as 130 missiles on ready to launch chemical weapons at Seoul, South Korea, potentially Japan.
Biological weapons are a little bit more murky.
We know they have the dual-use facilities to build pretty potent biological weapons.
Experts vary sort of on how potent they are and how much money they can put into them.
But if you look at the logic and you look at the facilities, I think they at least have accrued capability to deliver some amount of biological weapons, for sure.
All right, now, so Lyndon Johnson did not launch a preemptive war against Mao Zedong in China when he knew that Mao was working on nukes.
And Mao ended up getting nukes.
And so it seemed like that was the standard.
Well, hey, the North Koreans got nukes and Bush didn't start a war to stop them.
He was bogged down in Iraq at the time.
But it seems like the doctrine is, there's a famous quote of, I guess it was Eisenhower talking about the Russians where he was saying, you know, preemptive war is just not what we're going to do.
I guess, again, he was talking about countries that can fight back, but still.
So I guess I wonder just whether, you know, back to D.C. because you talk about the difference between the way people think about this here and there and the other place.
I wonder, does anybody even have that much institutional wisdom that they remember back when Lyndon Johnson quote unquote let Mao have nukes?
Because what are you going to do about it?
Seriously, that wouldn't make matters that much worse.
In that case, could have led to war with the Soviet Union, which was already armed with nukes, of course.
But anyways, I just wonder whether, you know, somewhere up there there's some kind of skull and bones committee or somewhere that has a cooler head and can say, actually, you know what, we're just going to have to wait this out and work this out rather than do something stupid and unleash fire and fury like the world has never seen.
Well, you know, you make a good point.
History shows us whether we're talking about Mao Zedong who murdered millions and millions of his own people or Joseph Stalin who murdered millions and millions of his own people.
You know, they built these nuclear weapons just like the North Koreans have.
You know, and we didn't go and invade or attack them because it was crazy then and it's crazy now.
You know, I think a lot of this is the media environment that we're in because think about it like this.
You know, we're constantly fed over and over every time North Korea launches a missile or every time they do a nuclear weapons test that essentially the sky is falling, that, you know, that the North Koreans are the great enemy of the world.
I think about it this way.
If we take the long view and we take the historical view, any country that's developing nuclear weapons or missiles is going to test them and test them ferociously.
Look at the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
We did hundreds of nuclear weapons tests.
The Soviet Union, I think, did close to a thousand nuclear weapons tests.
So this is not abnormal.
What's different, though, is that, you know, we have a 24-hour news cycle that's always looking for the latest story to get ratings.
You have social media that blows all of these things up.
Probably way more in proportion than they ever need to be blown up.
And it creates this repetitive and reinforcing cycle of fear.
And when you have that and you have an administration that's, you know, I think at least debating, you know, the risks of war or peace or containment, it creates a vicious cycle.
And I wonder, does that media cycle lend itself to, you know, foreign policy prescriptions that are very action-orientated where we feel like we must always do something all the time or we look weak?
Yeah.
I wonder how much that feeds into this.
Well, and especially for a president who, you know, somebody like you or me or anybody listening to this show, we understand that there's TV politics and then there's power and policy and what's really going on in the world.
And yet we're dealing with a president who, to him, his entire understanding of this system is simply that kind of TV veneer.
He doesn't know anything about it except how does he look on TV today?
And he's saying no matter what, it's the Trump show.
And so, god dang, what you say, it really puts, you know, combined with that reality about this guy, you know, Obama or even Bush Jr., whatever, for all of their faults, at some point they could say to themselves, yeah, well, TV's going to say what TV's going to say but I'm going to do what I'm going to do for good or for ill.
Right?
But not this guy.
This guy's like a slave of what the Fox and Friends in the morning think.
Yeah.
I mean, it's very clear he's very, very media focused, very media savvy.
But, you know, he doesn't have to always go, sort of, to the most extreme sort of, you know, viewpoint.
I do think Trump does subscribe to a little bit of realism.
I mean, it seems like in all the speeches he's always trying to talk about, you know, realism or pragmatic realism.
You know, we've got the national security strategy rolling out now and there's a lot going on.
So I think in some respects Trump does have the bones of being a realist, so to speak.
I think what myself and others are trying to do is sort of push him in that direction to show him that you don't always only have to be action orientated or be the one at the front, you know, thinking that foreign policy always has to be a military first sort of option.
You can be tough and you can be bold and you can make history by going the other way and working with your opponents in ways that, you know, benefit America's interest, just like he's trying to do.
So I'm hoping it goes in that direction.
I think we'll find out probably in the months to come whether it does or not.
All right, well, so if you were up there, I don't know, working for Tillerson and, you know, presuming that the president and the secretary were getting along and had their heads together on this kind of thing, what do you think you could do?
I mean, how many degrees could you ratchet to the level of war with them to convincing them to give up their nukes and reunify with the South?
I don't know.
I think it's easy.
I think what I would do is I would slide all of them a history book and I would add the book I would give them is Robert McNamara's book about, you know, his thoughts about after, you know, when he left office and, you know, was talking about the Vietnam War.
I think it was called In Retrospect and I'd have him give a look at that and look at some of the mistakes that, you know, were made in the past.
I think that the first thing that you'd have to do is you'd have to get somebody very senior from the White House.
It could be Secretary Tillerson, McMaster, whoever, and lay out a couple very basic principles.
The first principle is that we don't seek a war with North Korea and Tillerson has said this, but of course it's been walked back.
You know, he was saying in the summer we don't want regime change with North Korea.
That, it seems like in a lot of respects has sort of been walked back and I think when you do those things and the whole White House national security staff is on the same page and they're constantly relaying the same message over and over, the North Koreans might feel comfortable well, they'll reach out or we can reach out to them and start having a dialogue.
That dialogue, I think, in the beginning needs to be behind closed doors, needs to be away from the press and that's when you can start to build some trust.
You can start to talk about the harder issues, but you're not going to jump into a situation where everybody agrees, yes, North Korea is going to immediately give up its nuclear weapons, there'll be peace in the world, we'll all sing Kumbaya, not going to happen.
It's not.
You've got multiple decades of mistrust on both sides.
So you have to start out very slow and I think what you say to the North Koreans is look, if you can give us some space by not testing any missiles or nuclear weapons for the period that we're talking, we will agree to either ratchet down some of our own military exercises or we will suspend them.
But if you test a nuclear weapon or a missile, you put us in a very bad sort of communication standpoint and you're going to make it very hard for us to go on a limb to work with you when all our neoconservative friends are going to push us to go in an opposite direction.
So I think if you start making some of those points clear, you can start having some secret talks so to speak and then you can move those into formal talks.
The challenge here is I think we would have to accept that the North Koreans are not going to give up their nuclear weapons.
I think that's pretty clear unless the regime were to change peacefully or something like that.
But I think eventually that's something we're just going to have to drop.
But I think there is the conditions can be laid out to start talking with them to get this off the newspapers on a daily basis because the more the North Koreans test, the Trump administration is going to be put in a very bad choice.
Can they live with the North Koreans testing nuclear weapons and missiles for months and years to come when their conservative allies on Fox and others are going to keep pushing the drumbeat?
So that's I think something that has to be explained to the North Koreans.
I think if you do some of those things, I think you can get put on a better path.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Harry.
I sure appreciate it.
Anytime.
My pleasure.
All right, you guys.
That is Harry Kazianas.
He is at the American Conservative Magazine with this one, A War of Choice with North Korea is an immensely dumb idea.
And check out this one for Fox News.
He wrote, I think, last summer.
Yeah.
It's called Eight Million Dead.
What nuclear war with North Korea could look like.
That's the one about all the nuclear war games that he was involved in there.
All the practice runs.
And hey, you know me, scotthorton.org for the show, libertarianinstitute.org for the institute, antiwar.com for the antiwar stuff I want you to read.
And let's see, am I leaving out?
Oh, yeah.foolserend.us for my book, Fools Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You should buy a lot of them.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thanks very much, guys.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Bye.
