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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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Christine Ahn.
She is a founding board member of the Korea Policy Institute, and that is at kpolicy.org, and also the National Campaign to End the Korean War, and she's also the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a movement of women globally walking, literally walking, to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women's leadership in the peace-building process.
And she wrote this very important article with Kevin Martin for Common Dreams, US response to coronavirus in North Korea can save lives and lead to peace.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Christine?
Good.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Happy to have you here.
Such an important issue, and I'm so glad that you're working on it as hard as you are and constantly like this.
Before we get to the particulars, there's something in your bio that might be surprising to people, which is this National Campaign to End the Korean War.
Didn't Eisenhower end the Korean War back in 1952?
Well, the war never ended.
There was an armistice agreement that was signed in 1953, and that was by US and North Korean commanders on July 27th at the DMZ at Panmunjom, and they had promised within 90 days in that armistice to return to negotiate a permanent political settlement.
And that has never happened.
And in fact, 2020, I know everybody is thinking about how we're going to get out of this desperate situation that we're in, but I think the unresolved Korean War is quite significant to the lives of Americans, obviously to the lives of the Korean people, because this is a war that never officially ended.
We never returned back to negotiate a peace settlement.
And in fact, the Korean War is, when we talk about Trump, the Defense Production Act, trying to reinstate that, to try to nationalize certain industries so that we could get the protective equipment that our doctors and nurses need.
But it was the Korean War that, in fact, set forth the US military industrial complex.
In those three years from 1950 to 53, it quadrupled, actually, defense spending, and it just set off the US to become the world's military police.
And so I think right now, as we are facing a looming depression, recession, really deep recession in this country, I think we have to now think about what are the priorities that's going to give this country security.
And I think to end endless wars, we have to begin with Korea.
This is an easy, I know it's hard to believe it, but ending the Korean conflict will be such a huge step towards reversing that process.
It'll be a huge step towards changing the dynamics between the US and China, which we know we've seen really growing hawkish rhetoric against China.
So I think Korea could play a significant role if we're able to get to peace.
And right now, the urgency is to lift sanctions, to try to halt the military exercises permanently.
These are two things that we believe could really advance a process towards peace with North Korea.
Hey, after all, our president really needs a win right now.
And this should be an easy one, right?
He's already broken the ice.
He's had two unsuccessful summits, but a couple of very successful public relations stunts and a little bit of a personal relationship that he's begun to build with Kim Jong-un.
And he made a phone call, right, what, two, three weeks ago.
I don't know whatever came of this, but he called Kim Jong-un on the phone and said, anything we can do to help you with your coronavirus crisis, which the North Koreans are denying they have at all so far.
But did anything come of that phone call?
And certainly you'd agree that that's a good place to start building, right?
Well, absolutely.
And I am in total agreement with you that Trump has done the right thing by reaching out to Kim and meeting him and trying to begin a process of reversing 70 years of war between the U.S. and North Korea.
The problem is, I think he faces, even within his own administration, some very hawkish forces that want to maintain the military-industrial conflicts, that wants to maintain this hostile stance against North Korea.
And so North Korea saying they don't have COVID-19, I mean, so much of that has to do with, you know, we see often in the news, North Korea tested missiles during the coronavirus.
Well, we actually, the U.S., launched a long-range nuclear test, sorry, missile test that's capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
I mean, we did that towards China and Russia and North Korea.
So, you know, we tend to get a very one-sided view in this country.
But the point is that Trump did the right thing.
He did appeal to North Korea that we could send some humanitarian aid.
But at the same time, you have Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking at various other fora about the need to maintain the maximum pressure campaign.
So there's two things coming out of the Trump administration that are completely in opposition to one another.
And I think President Trump has to get his house in order.
I agree with you.
This is an easy win.
This is a symbolic year.
2020 is the 70th anniversary of the start of the war.
And the thing is, is that the people of both North and South Korea and their leaders, and there's a big election coming up on April 15th for the South Korean National Assembly.
President Moon, as you know, as you've seen, South Korea has been a leader in addressing this COVID crisis.
They have done mass testing.
They have not locked down their economy.
They are still, you know, I have family, my sister's right to say, we're going out to dinner.
We're starting to have a normalized life.
And that has a lot to do with President Moon's leadership.
So it's reflecting in the polls.
His party is likely going to win.
And so he will have an even greater mandate for the next part of his term.
He's in office till 2022 to pursue what he came into office to do, which is to achieve peace with North Korea.
And him and Kim Jong Un have signed two declarations, the Panmunjom Declaration, the Pyongyang Declaration.
The people of North and South Korea want an end to this war.
And so that is a huge message that we need to hear here in the United States.
And I think it's a huge win for us to kind of reorient how we're allocating our vital and limited now resources into achieving security in this country.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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Yeah, so I mean, really, most of this could really just take the form of America getting out of the way and letting Moon go ahead and finish his negotiations that they've obstructed.
But it seems like, as you say, especially with the success that the South has had, that this is an ace for Moon to play in his game to just call, you know, Kim and say, listen, I'm sending all my doctors.
Don't shoot him as they cross the DMZ and just send his doctors to come and help.
And there's an offer you can't refuse.
And if they can really get up there and get to work and save people's lives, then it's a real meaningful thing that they could do to help the North.
And then how could you ever put the Cold War back together again after that?
Maybe.
Well, I know.
And it sounds so simple.
And in fact, you know, the South Koreans have been making those overtures, South Korean government to South Korean civil society.
And North Korea has not been willing.
Part of it is because the U.S. and ROK are conducting these joint drills together.
And these are still going on where they practice invading the North and that kind of thing?
Well, they did, you know, take a pause on them.
But, you know, I think who knows?
I mean, obviously, the fact that the U.S. tested that long range missile, you know, earlier in March or late March is clearly some indication that North Korea feels like they are constantly under attack.
And so, you know, as much as we want that to just proceed, I mean, there is not just the U.S. unilateral sanctions.
There's the U.N. Security Council sanctions.
There's all these autonomous sanctions that are resulting from the U.N. Security Council that impact these other countries like Canada, for example.
I was on the call yesterday with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about Canada's sanctions against North Korea.
And, you know, they feel constrained.
They feel constrained.
They want to lift some of the sanctions.
But at the same time, they want to follow along with the U.S. because of the U.S.'s, you know, control, obviously, of the global economy.
And so I just think that it's not as easy.
But I think that your analysis is spot on, which is if the U.S. would just step out of the way and allow the two Koreas to proceed in what they set out to do in 2018 with the Olympic diplomacy, that would be a huge step.
But at the same time, given the kind of complex relationship between the U.S. and South Korea, the historic alliance, the unresolved Korean War, we have to have the United States change its orientation.
We still have 30,000 troops in South Korea.
You know, it's a huge opportunity.
And I agree with you that this would be a foreign policy win for President Trump or whichever administration is in power.
But this is a war that is just really long overdue to find its conclusion.
Well, and as far as that part goes, Biden has attacked Trump for his naivete, for trying to negotiate with Moon, I mean, with Kim, and would prefer the Obama policy of letting everything get worse and worse and doing nothing about it at all.
I know, Scott, I'm so worried about that, because frankly, the maximum pressure campaign, while it is much more cruel and draconian, the predecessor was the strategic patience policy.
And it has meant just further politically isolating North Korea.
It has meant maintaining an aggressive military stance against that country.
And it has meant these like brutal sanctions.
They have definitely intensified under the Trump administration, where it has, you know, obviously banned Americans from going to North Korea and has created this massive bureaucratic red tape for humanitarian aid workers that have long served in North Korea.
I think about Dr. Ki Park.
He is a Korean American doctor, faculty member at Harvard, a brain surgeon who has gone to North Korea.
He talks about how, yes, the sanctions before have been always difficult, but he went last year to do some surgeries, and he went to make a cut, and the scalpel that he was handed would not cut, because it was dull, and it had been reused so many times.
And so that's the situation.
It is dire.
North Korea's health system, from generations of being under sanctions, the economy being since the 1990s famine that was almost near collapse, that country is in a pretty desperate situation.
And so I think the urgency now is to call for the lifting of sanctions, I mean, at least the humanitarian sanctions.
But if we want the people of North Korea to have the basics to live a life of dignity and to have that country recover its economy, then we need to think about permanently lifting sanctions.
And that sounds bold, but I think the conditions, we just can't return to business as usual.
And it's time for a new U.S. foreign policy that reorients away from aggressiveness and more sanctions and regime change policies towards, yes, we are fighting a war against this pandemic, but more than, I think that's like the wrong frame, what we need is actually more international cooperation.
We need more diplomacy, and we need more policies that will actually lead to peace.
I think the American people so desperately want that.
And, you know, they should anyway.
I mean, if someone would bring it up to them on TV and they could consider it for a minute, I'm sure they'd agree.
Sort of seems like it's all just, you know, neither here nor there, because it's not part of the discussion really at all.
But, you know, Doug Bandow, I always say it wrong.
Doug Bondow wrote a thing for the National Interest back a couple of weeks ago about how when the North fired off that rocket test, that that hardly garnered a remark anywhere in the media.
I mean, I know you're a hawk on the news on this, not a hawk on the policy, but on keeping up with everything Korea here.
But for most of the American media community, they all just ignored it.
Congress ignored it.
The White House ignored it.
And the media ignored it.
And if you were really looking, you saw a headline or two, but there was no real coverage of it.
And Doug says, well, look, this just proves that North Korea doesn't really matter at all.
Now, we could just, we don't even need a new deal with them.
We could just ignore them and it wouldn't make a difference whatsoever because they are not a strategic asset or adversary or anything that matters at all.
Any threat that they pose can surely be handled by the South Koreans and the Japanese and for that matter, the Chinese without our help.
And for that matter, they could probably make peace without us in the way.
And so we ought to just ignore this situation to death.
If asking for a new deal is too much, let's just forget about it.
What do you think of that?
Well, I really admire Doug and I appreciate so much that as a conservative, he really sees eye to eye, I think, with those of us that are on the left on this very issue.
And so I would concur that that sounds right.
And at the same time, we still have 30,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula.
We still have an orientation towards, frankly, China.
And so I think that's probably like a hard realpolitik view of U.S. foreign policy.
Now, I come at it from a different perspective as a peace activist, which is what kind of future do we want to see in terms of U.S. relations with the Asia-Pacific?
And my concern is that we are really ramping up towards a potential war with China.
We see now in this whole pork barrel grab of the defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, everybody has gone in for the grab with these stimulus packages, and they are using the potential war with China.
And so I think that we can't just turn away, and especially the American people should be concerned that so much of the U.S. military apparatus is shifting away from the Middle East.
It began under the Obama administration.
We know Hillary Clinton made a speech about the U.S. pivot to Asia.
And so whether it's Democrat or Republican, we are seeing an orientation of a potential war with China.
And so that is where I think that the Korean Peninsula and the fact that North and South Korea want to make peace, that they could potentially be a neutral territory that could help de-escalate tensions between the U.S. and China.
So I concur with him.
Let the Korea sort it out.
But we can't just say that the U.S. is not because so much of our apparatus, the economy, the military, is currently directed at a potential standoff with China.
Yeah.
And, you know, we saw that speech that got modly fired.
The Secretary of the Navy there, part of what he said was, you know, I know you're all scared of this virus, but you'd be scared of hypersonic missiles coming in at this carrier, too.
But you still have to do your job, which goes to show that that's exactly what he's thinking about is a potential war with China, where American aircraft carriers, as he's admitting there, are completely obsolete.
And those 5,000 sailors would be sitting ducks to be sunk in the event of a war.
But just like with Russia, they talk about this as though we could have a war with China that would not involve the exchange of hydrogen bombs and the extinction of millions of lives in a day if it didn't get worse from there.
Just, you know, look, we cannot fight China no matter what.
If they take over Japan and South Korea and Taiwan in a week, we still can't fight them unless we're willing to give up San Francisco and Portland and Los Angeles and San Diego and maybe further inland than that, Dallas and Denver and whatever you got.
So that's it.
We just cannot fight them.
There's got to be another way.
There's got to be another way.
And I do see that the Korean Peninsula, let's not forget the first Sino-American war was fought on the Korean Peninsula.
So I think that it can play a significant role.
Let's begin with ending the U.S. war with North Korea and seeing a different kind of future.
I do think it's possible.
Yep, me too.
Thank you, Christine.
I appreciate you so much.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
Have a good one.
All right, guys, that is Christine Ahn.
She is a founding board member of the Korea Policy Institute and the National Campaign to End the Korean War.
And she's also the executive director of Women Cross DMZ.
And find her latest at Common Dreams.
U.S. response to coronavirus in North Korea can save lives and lead to peace.
