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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of it's 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.
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Could we swing, go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in 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 prevail the bombs in the world today, my own government.
Introducing the great Peter Van Buren.
He used to be a state department guy, but now he's all right.
And he wrote a book called, well, he wrote a few different books.
The first one was, we meant well about Iraq war two.
And then, uh, he also wrote the ghosts of Tom Jode, uh, which was about being broke in the great recession.
And then, uh, the latest is Hooper's war.
It's a novel of world war two Japan, but come on, it's about Bush and Obama's terror war.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Pleasure to be here.
Thank you for having me once again, man.
What great news.
I'm interviewing you at a six 30 Texas time at night because of the breaking news.
It's the best damn breaking news I could have ever hoped for.
It's exactly what I said.
I wanted to see Donald Trump is getting on a plane to North Korea.
Is, is he getting on a plane to North Korea?
I guess they didn't say that.
They didn't say that.
Yeah.
Um, I'm going to, I haven't seen any news.
I'm going to guess it's going to be a neutral location, but that's, that's just a guess at this point in time.
We have, we are seeing something that is absolutely extraordinary and it, there's always a million reasons why this won't work and we'll see which of those, uh, come sticks its head up and, and takes, uh, takes its place, but you work with what you've got and what we've got right now in front of us is for the first time in 70 some years, the North Koreans are willing to sit down with the United States at the highest levels and talk.
And that is an extraordinary event.
Uh, something that has never happened before.
It's something that we came very close to, uh, in 2000 at the very end of the Clinton administration and then strayed very far away from during the Bush and Obama years, um, fingers crossed, we'll see what happens, but there's something extraordinary that, that may happen in the next few months.
Yeah.
You know, I, um, I, uh, Hey, I guess we got to be.
For the South Koreans here now, it would be pretty easy to say, well, they're just playing good cop, bad cop.
Maybe they were, do you think they were, or do you think the South Koreans got nervous enough about the bad cop?
They went ahead and made this breakthrough.
What do you think happened?
I've been writing about Korea for, for a number of years.
I served with the state department for four years in, uh, the embassy in Seoul, including during the very brief window when relationships were improving.
Um, people may forget that in 2000, the then secretary of state Madeline Albright, uh, traveled to Pyongyang and met with Kim Jong-un's father, attended the mass games and began what was supposed to be a era of, of cooperation.
At that point in time, the United States unofficially had diplomats stationed in Pyongyang and we were building the connective tissue that was hopefully going to lead to a relationship.
When that fell apart, uh, under the Bush administration, uh, the neocons had no interest in peace in, in North Korea.
Um, and Bush chucked them into the axis of evil alongside Iran and Iraq.
How'd that work out?
Um, the South Koreans never gave up.
There exists in South Korea, something that is almost impossible to understand from outside.
And it's expressed, not to sound silly here, but it's expressed almost through a word that they like to use, which is woody, which means all of us that actually refers only to the Koreans.
Because in the South, in the, in the Korean mindset, the world is divided into us's and them's, uh, in a variety of ways.
And the biggest us is all Korean people on either side of the border and any parts of other parts of the world.
And that runs very, very deep, particularly in the generation, the older generation, uh, which is in power right now in, in both countries, Kim Jong Un himself is fairly young, but if you look at the people around him, they are, they're old and they're at the end of their lives.
They are at a position where they can realize some measure of progress for their country that they've otherwise been unable to, to obtain.
And so I hate to be optimistic.
I hate to be optimistic.
It's very unusual for me, but I think we're seeing something very special going on here.
We're seeing the Koreans deciding that they want to step back from the edge and historians can debate what role Trump, the quote madman unquote played in that.
Uh, it's still playing out of course.
Um, but this is a Korean thing.
Uh, the United States job is to not muck it up and to pull the triggers.
Oh, that's a bad expression.
Pull the levers that we alone can pull in terms of sanctions, in terms of, of making adjustments in, in military stance that send very strong signals without actually changing much, uh, militarily.
Now you think they're really, uh, ready to negotiate away their nuclear weapons because that's the American insistence.
I mean, the American insistence has been that they better agree to that before we'll even meet with them.
So obviously that's a non-starter.
Come on, but they're going to have to get to that pretty quick.
And yet the North Koreans have said that they're willing to negotiate even their possession, nuclear weapons.
Do you buy that?
I think that will be a very long step and obviously the United States has dropped its precondition, which existed under Bush and under Obama, which is we start with negotiating, negotiating the weapons away, um, because that that's just not possible right now, the North Koreans have to find their footing in the world and the United States has to, has to decide what footing it's going to offer them in the world before the North is ready to start backing away from its defensive weapons.
And, and let's not kid ourselves.
These are defensive weapons.
They have nuclear weapons specifically because they saw what happened to countries, for example, Iraq and Libya that did not have nuclear weapons.
They get invaded by the United States or bombed by the United States.
It's very simple.
If you have nukes, you survive in this, in this world.
If you don't have nukes, you are prey.
And they're not going to give those things up right away, but there are interim steps that can dramatically reduce tensions.
You can, uh, you start with the easy things.
Of course, you start with academic exchanges and sports exchanges.
Uh, you, you, uh, set up a trade mission.
You do the simple things that, that always can be made to work.
If, if both sides want them to work and you build what's called the connective tissue of diplomacy.
Right now, everything that happens with North Korea has to happen at the very highest level.
Senior South Korean officials have to go to Pyongyang, talk to Kim himself to basically get anything done.
When our American diplomats went to Pyongyang in 2000, the thing almost fell apart on all sorts of things.
Like, can we get copier paper in, in Pyongyang?
Um, or we're using our diesel fuel that we brought with us for the generator too fast.
Is there a way to get diesel fuel?
Can we drive a truck up with diesel fuel in it?
These kinds of things, which are minor logistical issues of a wedding planner would normally take care of them, um, became bilateral crises.
And unless and until you get that stuff off the table, you're not going to really make progress on the big issues.
So you start, you, you send diplomats to Pyongyang, you call it a fact finding mission or what have you.
You let some North Koreans who are assigned to the, uh, the North Korean consulate here in New York city, uh, attached to the UN, you let them travel to Washington and, uh, maybe open a temporary liaison office.
Put whatever names you want on these things to make it palatable, uh, to the media and the people who are going to oppose it.
Um, and you start to build those relationships.
You start to figure out who can talk to who at what level, um, who's safe, who's trustworthy, who can be, uh, who can send the message higher up when it needs to be sent.
And with those relationships, you can then start to transition to something, the red meat, if you will.
What type of nuclear testing is North Korea willing to put on a hiatus?
What type of weapons are they willing to begin to disable?
Don't forget during the cold war, the United States and Russia did this for 50 years, we built classes of missiles that we later publicly destroyed.
Uh, as treaties were signed, we took coal classes of submarines out of service and filled them with, with concrete and watch them sink as part of the peace process.
This is not an overnight thing.
Um, it's a slow process, particularly with North Korea.
Um, but it is a process.
And if it starts with Trump talking to Kim Jong-un, uh, this spring, then it has begun and that gives us the option of going on from the easy stuff like sports exchanges to the harder stuff about sitting down and talking about, uh, some form of diplomatic ongoing diplomatic relationship and so forth and so on.
In this case, we've got the South Koreans with us as partners.
Um, they have far more skin in the game than anybody else.
Uh, don't let anybody kind of tell you they're, they're being played by the North or anything silly like that.
Um, if things go bad in, on the Korean peninsula, South Korea ceases to exist.
Nobody has more skin in the game than they do.
Nobody has more experience with these issues than they do.
It's their moms and sisters and cats and dogs that go up first, uh, when the war starts, um, and they have proven themselves to be skillful negotiators over the years.
They're there.
And that provides an enormous cultural context to this.
As we talked about a moment ago, it provides the ability of Koreans to talk to Koreans.
It provides a buffer between the United States and North Korea so that when friction occurs, which it inevitably will, um, there's a third party who can kind of step in and say, guys, guys, guys, let's, uh, let's talk this through again.
Um, if the United States and South Korea are skillful with the diplomacy, they may be able to play a form of, of good cop, bad cop that can get dicey when you're dealing with the North Koreans.
They're hard people to, to read, uh, at least, uh, here at, at first.
But the point is there are options to be had.
One point I want to get ahead of here is I'm already looking on, on Twitter.
And as you can expect, all of the people who are, who were crying for war and believing that, that Trump was going to start a war now saying things like, well, the United States doesn't have an ambassador in South Korea.
So how can we do this?
Um, let me just assure everybody that the United States has a big embassy in Seoul that is full of career professionals at the state department.
And I'm saying nice things about the state department, even though many of those same people were involved in, in, in helping kick me out of the state department.
I respect their skills as diplomats, even though some of them, I think suck as human beings personally.
But that, that's just me.
Um, these are skilled diplomats.
They've had years of experience with both North and South Korea.
The guy who is the charge d'affaires, that is the sort of, uh, temporary ambassador, if you will, uh, Mark Knapper in Seoul has probably been in the state.
He's probably coming up on 30 years right now.
He's done multiple tours in Korea.
He speaks Korean.
Uh, his wife is Korean.
He has been to North Korea.
He has negotiated with the North Koreans.
Um, he is in a position to do more than a Trump political appointee who may or may not have ever visited Korea, uh, as ambassador at this point in time.
So all the fears that we don't have a team in place or, or what have you.
Um, the state department is a lot bigger than a handful of folks.
Um, we did lose a skillful negotiator, Joe Yoon.
He was a special envoy for North Korea.
Um, Joe had been, uh, working on Korean issues.
Um, as long as I've been in the state department, his losses is not something to be that that came at a great time.
He decided to retire, but at the same time, Joe had a deputy Joe worked with the staff.
Um, the, no one is indispensable and we will, uh, I think have people available to do the work that needs to be done.
Well, that sure sounds good.
You know, not everybody who knows these guys or knows who to talk to have been fired in the great purge that they keep talking about here.
No, let me say a thing and tell me what you think of this.
Yeah.
It seems to me like, uh, even during the Bush years, the North Koreans were surprisingly willing to bend over backwards when it came to negotiating.
Not that they're, you know, always, uh, open to talks and this kind of thing, but they had made that deal with Christopher Hill and Connelly's rice there that included them shutting down the young, young heavy water reactor that the Soviets had built for them back when, and that produces plutonium as waste weapons, great plutonium.
Uh, or at least, you know, ways that can be separated pretty easily for making bombs and they were willing to sacrifice that for time.
So, um, I mean, I know it goes against, you know, the kind of overall narrative about what totalitarians these guys are, but it seems like their totalitarianism, they say for their domestic population, not necessarily their diplomacy where they, you know, tend to act just like any other state might, am I wrong?
Or, or maybe even more generously than another state might.
The basic tenants of diplomacy, um, which have not changed since it was being done by Neanderthals, uh, are, are that organizations, countries, nation, states, whatever you want to call it, have, have interests, they have needs.
And it's very, very, very, very, very difficult to exist in the world alone.
You have to find ways to talk to the people that are your allies.
And you have to find ways to talk to you, the people who are your enemies.
You look for common interests that you can work together on without harming your own self-interests.
And North Korea is absolutely no different than that.
What people may not understand is that the United States and North Korea maintain an ongoing dialogue.
It is not a formal set of diplomatic relations.
Of course, we don't have an embassy in Pyongyang and they don't have an embassy in Washington.
But North Korean diplomats are stationed in the United States as part of the, uh, their UN contingent, uh, here in New York, the United States meets North Koreans as necessary, uh, in neutral places.
Beijing is very popular.
Um, the North Koreans have a very large mission there and the United States does as well.
Um, the North Koreans have a large, uh, organization in Japan.
There are places where, where we meet each other and where we talk about things that need to be talked about.
This relationship ebbs and flows.
Um, what's set out of Washington and what's set out of Pyongyang affects what people can do on, on a, on a local level, but the idea that, that we just don't talk to each other, the idea that, that there is no way to communicate.
These, these are all just media things that try to make things look, uh, look, look scary when it's necessary.
The thing is that in any relationship and particularly with North Korea, there's steps forward and there's steps back.
And this is an ongoing part of working with the North Koreans in general, where they seem to have this strategy or predilection.
I'm not, I think it's beyond strategy.
I think it's sort of a national thinking way of thinking that they'll go forward and then they get kind of skittish and then have to back off.
Um, I can't discuss it in any great detail, but I was briefly involved in some of the negotiations, uh, from the Japan end of one of these many, many Americans who got stuck in North Korea doing something naughty.
Um, and we, uh, had to, uh, get that person out of North Korea.
You know, this, this kind of stuff that's in the news for a day or two, and then it goes away.
And it was difficult because you take these couple of steps forward and then sometimes without warning, the North would act like a cat that just heard something that nobody else heard and had to run back under the couch.
Um, and you got used to that.
And as long as the world, the media, the Democrats don't jump all over the first thing that goes wrong.
Well, the North Koreans will come back out from under the, I don't mean to compare them, the cats, but I mean, they'll, they'll come back out and the negotiations will begin again.
It won't happen quickly.
It won't be a straight line.
Um, it's going to involve rhetoric on both sides.
Um, I think covering their, their, their backside, if you will, is something that both Trump and Kim are going to have to do.
Um, neither can be perceived as being weak in these negotiations.
Um, both of them are going to have to rattle off the occasional, uh, threat, um, or rattle a saber here and there, uh, mainly to keep their own, uh, right wings, if you will, uh, comfortable.
And, and don't kid yourself.
Kim Jong-un is not a unilateral leader.
He has people that you're going to say, don't kid yourself.
The Marine Corps right now is beside them.
The, uh, Kim Jong-un does not rule North Korea alone.
He, he has generals.
He has spies.
He has, uh, elders who have served his father and his grandfather who work with him and consult with him, and he has to proceed with their, their, their consensus.
It's so funny.
Still, as you say that I'm picturing HR McMaster and James Mattis and Joseph Dunford and John Kelly, these must be appeased too.
Yeah, it's true.
And the same thing here.
Um, and so again, I just caution people to, to take a longer view of this, um, and not overreact.
I'll, I'll confess a bit of overreaction right now to some good news.
Um, but I'll caution myself and everyone else to just tamp it down.
Don't overreact to good things.
Don't overreact to bad things.
Take the long view.
And if the United States is able and willing to take the longer view, um, there may be some good that comes out of this.
Um, do you think that the, that the Pentagon would try to undermine Trump on this?
I don't think so.
No, because the Pentagon, what they, nobody wants a war with North Korea.
Um, that the war would, would be a terrible thing.
It, no one would, would win.
This would be the worst possible war.
Um, because it would pull in all of our, all of our allies and enemies and what have you is all over, uh, North, uh, East Asia.
It would kill an extraordinary amount of America.
No, no, nobody wants this war.
And the Pentagon doesn't want this war.
They, they want to have all the toys and budget that the threat of war carries with it, and that threat will be allowed to remain in place as long as the budget needs to be there.
I mean, you can always redeploy troops from South Korea to Guam and still keep the budget numbers up.
Uh, the Pentagon will, will, will be served.
Um, but I don't think that's where the opposition is going to come from.
I think the fear on the American side here is that the, everything Trump does is wrong, people will try to derail this.
Um, look, the Democrats are sitting there saying, Holy shit.
If Trump gets meaningful progress on North denuclearizing North Korea, um, we're going to, we're going to have to sit 20, 20 out because who's going to run against that.
You know, this is like running against the, uh, the end of the cold war.
I'm looking at a Democrat on Twitter right now, calling him a hypocrite for showing an old tweet where he says the U S has been talking to North Korea and paying them extortion money for 25 years.
Talking is not the answer.
So now they're accusing him of flip-flopping.
I'm promising not to talk to Korea.
So you're going to media matters guy retweeted it.
So there you go.
The Hillary Clinton Democrats.
I've got, I've got them on my Twitter feed right now, because as you know, I've written, uh, been writing since the summer that the United States is not going to war.
And I wrote a piece, uh, just before the Olympics actually speculating that Trump could in fact be the one who, who makes a breakthrough here that like Nixon, um, he's worried about his legacy.
He knows that whatever happens with this Russiagate stuff, he is going to.
Need something in his legacy to, to, to bout counterbalance the bad stuff.
And the way Nixon went to China, Trump could easily be the guy.
He loves the big play.
He loves the showmanship.
He loves the I'm doing what no one else could do stuff.
Um, and I speculated a month ago that this could happen.
And now everyone is on me on, on Twitter.
The same thing.
Is there literally nothing you won't excuse a summit with North Korea?
And we haven't even bothered to send an ambassador.
Um, you know, it's, it's the usual stuff.
I think the danger here really not rest, not with the Pentagon and not even with the neocons.
I think it rests with the left.
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Well, I mean, now we shouldn't say the left cause it's the liberals, the Democrats, the leftists tend to be very principled.
I mean, don't put them in charge of agriculture policy, but I don't know what words mean anymore.
So please put it in whatever the word, the correct word is, because I think typically a leftist, it hates liberals and Democrats enough that they're independent and thought enough to support peace in Korea.
You know, I, I, yeah, I think so.
Maybe.
So anyway, don't, don't, please don't pin me to the wall on, on terminology.
I do not know what words mean anymore.
Um, I, I write an article on Jerusalem and I'm called a Nazi and anti-Semite and a Zionist in, in three successive tweets.
So I don't know what words mean anymore.
So my apologies to anyone who, who was bothered by that.
The point is, I think that the danger with this North Korea thing, at least initially here is going to come from the folks who are afraid of Trump succeeding at something, um, and are going to try to throw some roadblocks in his way to make sure that he has as hard a time succeeding as, as possible.
Well, then they just suck at, you know, what they call the calculus of these kinds of politics.
Because I think typical, I could be wrong about this, but asking liberals and progressives and even leftists to look the other way while Obama is killing people because he's their hero and hope and change and all that.
That's one thing, but getting them to oppose peace just because it's Trump doing it, that's kind of a whole other order.
And I don't think that they're going to be able to get away with that, with impressing the American people that are really on the left or anywhere that damn Donald Trump for negotiating with a country instead of attacking it.
I mean, he's already got the right locked up because they're the right and he's the Republican president.
So that's not a problem in terms of the tea party rank and file out there, right?
They're going to be with him even, even if he's making peace and the liberals, they're not going to oppose that.
I mean, rank and file, regular humans, not the people with power, but the, the rank and file people, they're not going to hate him for dealing with Korea.
That's just a bad calculation.
So I'm sure the Democrats will try it, but we'll see how far they get with that.
You know, I don't know.
We'll have to see.
Um, there's just been so many articles already here.
Hey, um, remind them real quick.
You could do it the quick version if you want about how come this is all George W. Bush's fault, because we had a perfectly good deal with them when he took office in 2001, because that should never go unsaid if there's a chance to say it.
Way back in time, way back in time when I was still a, a relatively young man with a full head of hair.
Um, at the end of the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration made a big push in, in 1998, 1999 to try to come to some kind of rapprochement with North Korea.
And the deal was that North Korea was going to suspend its nuclear, uh, at that point, nuclear testing in return for a very specific kind of nuclear reactor that the United States felt could not be used to produce nuclear weapons, but only produce energy and electricity.
And we gave them that, um, it came along with all sorts of promises and guarantees.
It broke open the, uh, the doors to station diplomats in Pyongyang.
There was a lot of conversations going on.
Madeleine Albright, secretary of state actually went to North Korea.
Um, George W.
Bush came into office and all of that stopped.
The neocons, Dick Cheney in particular, um, gutted, talk about the state department, gutted the state department and fired some very important people who were leading that charge.
In particular, Google him a diplomat named Evans Revere, who was the point person on North Korea and moving the peace process forward, he got run out of office, um, unceremoniously by the Bush people when they dismantled that whole program, the North to be fair, uh, started to noodle around with some nuclear testing, uh, they threatened to launch a satellite, which would have violated the agreement.
The United States jumped on this.
Um, the whole thing fell apart.
Bush then put North Korea into the, uh, axis of evil and nothing happened during the Bush years.
Obama did very, very little, uh, with North Korea.
They made one attempt to, uh, negotiate with North Korea.
The North, uh, uh, again, did not follow through on all of their promises.
Um, they launched another satellite and Obama took that as an excuse to say, we're done with all this.
They labeled it strategic patients.
And in fact, did nothing else to try to move the process forward with North Korea during the eight years of the Bush administration and the eight years of the Obama administration.
And that's sort of where we ended up today.
Yeah.
And now, you know, what's interesting to me, um, is that really Bush when, uh, I guess Christopher Hill, the way, um, Ray McGovern called it was Christopher Hill and Connelly's rice cornered George W.
Bush on a Friday afternoon when Dick Cheney was out of town threatening Iran.
And they said, Hey, listen, this is the last thing that you're going to hear today, let us go to Korea.
And he was like, I don't care.
Go ahead.
And so then they were able to make, you know, some pretty profound breakthroughs for a minute there until, and I'm not exactly sure what was behind this, but Bush himself ruined it by putting them back on the terrorism list of all things, um, which included new sanctions and this and that and ruined his own deal.
But so I'm working towards the question here, which is, so why the hell didn't Obama do a damn thing on this?
Because it seems like, you know, as you're saying, there's plenty of things to talk about to get this ball rolling.
If he wanted to get this ball rolling instead, it's all this six party, this and that, and outsource it to China when they don't want to resolve it.
Not the way I guess any more than the Americans did or what, but why not?
What was, uh, what would have been so difficult about, uh, the Obama government trying to actually do something to resolve this rather than putting it off to where it's in the hands of Donald Trump?
Very hard to say.
I mean, the simplest answer is that there's just so many things to do in each administration chooses their, uh, their battlefields, if you will.
And Obama thought he was going to, uh, solve the Middle East again.
Um, he thought he was going to liberate Libya and Syria and Iraq and tied up over there, you know, the energy gets sucked out of the, the, uh, the, the organization.
Um, you don't have enough juice left in the system to pursue something like North Korea, that's going to require high level people being involved that you can't sort of outsource to other parts of the state department or the national security council.
Um, that's probably the most, uh, obvious answer.
The, the less obvious answers would be simply that, um, Obama had no interest in something that wasn't going to produce a clear, immediate win for him.
Um, it may have been something as simple as he just didn't, uh, trust the people.
Uh, he had to know enough about North Korea.
Um, his focus was on the Middle East there.
But the bottom line is that we, we have to hope something happens here.
I'm just looking now at my, my Twitter feed.
And, uh, now I'm seeing some of the, the, the Russiagate people, uh, saying every president since Truman has contained Pyongyang while not treating the psychopathic regime as an equal.
Um, I don't think that's a positive tweet and we're going to have to watch this kind of thing.
Nobody is claiming that Kim Jong-un is, is a wonderful guy.
Um, however, as, uh, you and I both know, the United States, uh, flops into bed very easily with dictators and psychopaths when it serves our immediate interests.
Um, the number of, of dictators and terrible, terrible people that we have put into power and maintained in power over the years is, is a very long one.
Um, and so the idea that we can't negotiate with Kim Jong-un until he becomes a born again Christian, uh, you're going to see that and it's just, it's just a deflection.
It's just an attempt to try to say we cannot have Trump succeed at anything, even by accident.
Yeah.
Well, and they're saying, okay, you know what?
I'm an ideologue, so forget me.
Is there really such a thing?
Maybe there's really such a thing as America would legitimize Kim Jong-un if Donald Trump would deign to meet him.
That was one that was going around on Twitter earlier.
I think that was a right winger saying that he's being sucker.
This only helps Kim.
See the fun thing.
Well, the fun thing is, is that the Kim family has been in power, uh, in North Korea since North Korea was created, um, out of the, uh, the ashes of world war two in 1945, so they don't need the great white father back East to bless their dictatorship there.
They've done pretty well.
You know, Scott, the, the Kim family has survived the cold war.
They survived the fall of the Soviet union.
They survived the Chinese revolution.
They survived the full might of the United States army directed against them in 1950.
They survived 70 years of sanctions and threats.
They survived starvation, natural disasters.
These are folks who don't need anyone to sort of anoint them as legitimate.
They have for better or worse, and we're talking politics here, friends.
We're not talking about who do you want as your neighbor or your Tinder date.
We're talking about a regime that is now in its third generation, third generation that has survived all of those things.
There's not a lot of countries out there who can, who can make that claim.
And that gives them a legitimacy that that simply has to be de facto recognized.
Whether you want to put a flag on it or not, it's really between you and your God.
But the reality is, is that North Korea exists.
They have nuclear weapons.
They're what they were willing to sit down with us for the first time in decades, and we would be fools to simply step away from that.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, as long as I got you on the line, you want to talk about Putin's new nukes?
Not really.
I don't know that they're anything particularly different than the old nukes.
The Russians have had the ability to destroy the United States many times over for longer than I've been alive.
They have bombs and planes and missiles and submarines and sleeper agents and what have you.
And so the fact that Putin has a new one that's faster, sleeker, better, shinier or sweeter, to me, doesn't change the equation in any particular way.
I do note carefully that there are no Russian divisions poised on America's borders, which is not the same situation that Putin faces right now.
Well, now, I mean, according to what Putin said in there, he got the idea, Peter, that the Americans were trying to change the equation for mutually assured destruction to really gain a credible first strike capability against Russia's nukes and that that was why they had to embark on making these new hypersonic bombs and this ICBM that can go around the South Pole now.
You know, anytime a world leader says that kind of stuff, I just roll my eyes and think, OK, you've got to feed your defense industry, too.
There's no such thing as a definitive first strike.
If there was, we wouldn't be talking about North Korea.
The United States would have destroyed it with nuclear weapons years ago.
The thing is, is that once you start using nuclear weapons, everybody loses, everybody dies.
Whether we destroy 80 percent of Russia and they only destroy 43 percent of America is not a particular victory.
We've all seen Dr. Strangelove.
The answer is that Putin needs to feed his industry.
He needs to talk to his domestic people.
He needs to look mean and tough, keep that Bond villain status alive.
I wouldn't make too much about his his new weapons, whether they are real or not real.
Well, but so, I mean, you just dismiss the claim then that this is a reaction of Bush pulling out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty and all that.
I don't know if I can dismiss it, to be honest.
I'm not as ready and as I should be.
But I'll say that I don't think that Putin's decisions are driven by things that George Bush did.
I think they're driven by his domestic considerations and by the so the the endless great power struggle.
I think that he would have made that these missiles, whether we gave him a handy checkmark excuse to do it or not.
Big H bomb.
There's a lobby we don't focus on nearly enough in America or Russia.
Well, the money is actually not in building the things.
It's in the research.
Once you figure out how to make it, then you just go out and make it.
The great thing is to fund 15 or 20 years worth of basic research and build laboratories and stuff.
That's where the big the big cash is.
And especially think about all the opportunity cost of all those brilliant physicists who could be delivering goods and services to people wasted on fusing hydrogen atoms together here.
We'd have our flying cars by now.
Yeah.
Long time ago.
All right.
Listen, I'll stop ruining your night now.
Thank you very much for your time again.
My pleasure.
And let's keep let's keep talking about this, because developments are going to going to happen quickly and then slowly.
And we need to keep the audience up on this.
Yeah.
You know what?
We could even add a little call to something.
We're like, hey, if you're interacting with any political people, let them know you support this.
Everybody, we're doing a big thing on all day Friday to call our senators and say that we want to support.
We want to see our senators support Bernie Sanders resolution to invoke the War Powers Act on the war against the Houthis in Yemen.
And why not throw in and hey, we support what the president is doing in negotiating with Korea.
We want to see more of that.
Right.
Why not?
Let's give peace a chance.
Let them know that we actually do prioritize this stuff.
Right.
Give peace a chance.
All right.
Good night, Peter.
Appreciate it.
Take care.
Bye bye.
All right, you guys.
That's Peter Van Buren.
We meant well dot com.
That's his blog.
And we run a hell of a lot of it at antiwar dot com.
He also writes for the American Conservative Magazine and his books are We Meant Well, The Ghosts of Tom Joad and Hooper's War.
That's the latest there.
And yeah, like I say, former State Department guy.
Okay.
You know me.
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