04/17/17 – Ted Galen Carpenter on Trump’s schoolyard strategy for dealing with North Korea – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Ted Galen Carpenter.
Virtually everything he writes is just perfect, man.
Great libertarian foreign policy guy from the Cato Institute at cato.org.
He's the author of 10 books and the editor of 10 more.
And I won't sit here and read them all to you, but you can find them all at his people page there at cato.org.
And he has this very important and very timely recent blog entry there at the Cato blog, Cato at Liberty.
Trump's strategy for getting China to pressure North Korea.
All sticks, no carrots.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you?
Doing just fine, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
So, well, before we get to the article, I guess let's get to all the big breaking news and everything.
The very latest, I guess, to sum up, they had a big parade in Pyongyang.
They showed off a bunch of missiles, some of them solid fuel that can be launched at shorter notice.
Then they tested one and it blew up.
At the same time, the Navy flew a sail, the big carry task force up there toward Korea.
Leaks were made to the Associated Press saying, yes, we're preparing a possible preemptive strike, even though the Secretary of State and Defense Department officials later walked that back and said, no, we're just kidding.
But anyway, it seems like tensions are really high.
The White House has said that this whole doctrine of strategic patience is over.
They're going to do something about this Korea problem one way or the other.
Trump has said, well, he's going to make China solve it for us, since apparently we can't.
And then I guess that's where we get to your article here, that if we're going to get China to solve it for us, we better figure out a better way of coercing them.
But anyway, can you comment just there on my last couple of weeks worth of updates of the ratcheting up of tensions here?
Yeah, we've had a bad situation and it's getting rapidly worse.
The United States has warned North Korea that it better not underestimate, quote, America's resolve.
And Vice President Pence, during a visit to South Korea, specifically cited the the airstrikes in Syria and Afghanistan as a warning to North Korea.
This is, if anything, going to make the North Koreans even more jittery than they are now.
And given the unpredictable nature of that regime, the one thing you don't want to do is heighten their paranoia, which is precisely what the Trump administration is doing at this point.
We certainly hope that we can avoid a military clash.
But I think the danger of that happening is significantly greater than it was even a few weeks ago.
All right.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, I keep hearing people say this, that, well, you know, there's greater and greater possibility of miscalculation.
And I understand that Donald Trump, of all people, is the president of the United States right now.
So miscalculation.
OK, that sounds plausible.
And then also the North Koreans, as you say, paranoid as they are, they may have reason to be.
Is this you really think that we could have like a World War One type of screw up here where nobody really wants to have a war, but we end up having an absolutely horrible one anyway?
I think there's a significant risk of that.
And I'm reminded of what Henry Kissinger once said.
Even paranoid have real enemies.
And for North Korea, the United States is very much an implacable enemy.
We have refused to negotiate in any serious manner with that government, despite talking to the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s about cross-recognition of the two Korean governments.
Russia, as a successor to the Soviet Union and China, promptly recognized South Korea at the end of the Cold War.
The United States then reneged on any implied promise to recognize North Korea.
So this has been an entirely dysfunctional relationship.
The United States has adopted the classic Woodrow Wilson strategy of we don't like you and we're not going to talk to you.
It's a wonderful strategy if you're in middle school, although it doesn't work particularly well there either.
But it is a disastrous approach when you're dealing with world affairs as a major nation.
All right, so there's so much to go over here in terms of current affairs and the background and of course the relationship with the Chinese and all these other things.
But I don't know, man.
So if I'm just, you know, Hector, my next door neighbor here, and I'm curious, how come we don't just go over there and make peace and say, OK, look, here's a security guarantee.
We promise not to attack you if you'll promise not to attack the South or attack American positions in the South there.
And we'll go ahead and work out that peace treaty that we should have had back in the fifties and forget utopia, forget reunification and, you know, everything being wonderful.
But why can't we just turn the tensions down by five notches?
It seems like, you know, especially since all the power is on our side, really, I mean, they do have some nukes and all that, but it seems like we could afford to be very gracious here in a way that puts the ball in their court to go ahead and ratchet tensions down, you know?
It's very interesting because a few years ago I wrote a couple of articles proposing what I termed the grand bargain with North Korea, essentially that a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, the end of military exercises that are conducted on an annual basis with the South Korean forces that North Korea regards as very threatening, the lifting of economic sanctions and the extension of diplomatic relations in exchange for a freeze on North Korea's ballistic missile program and the phasing out of its nuclear program.
I think we at least ought to try that, but we're heading in the opposite direction.
And what is especially annoying about this, to me, is that here the United States, thousands of miles away from North Korea, once again on the front lines of a dangerous, dangerous crisis.
Why don't we simply say to North Korea's neighbors, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, this is a problem you have in your neighborhood.
Come up with a program to deal with it.
We should not be even that interested a party, much less the leading party, in terms of dealing with North Korea.
Yeah, it seems like Obama took part of that and said, well, let's just ignore the issue for eight years and do nothing at all.
And that was not a very effective strategy, but it's preferable to what the Trump administration appears to have in mind.
Yeah, I have to agree with that.
Yeah, I mean, negligence sometimes is preferable to deliberate confrontation, and that appears to be the path that we're on.
I'm very much afraid that the administration can miscalculate.
And if that happens, the people who are going to suffer the most are not only the people of North Korea, but the people in South Korea who live anywhere near Seoul.
Seoul is just 30-some miles south of the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, well within range of literally thousands of artillery installations in North Korea.
Seoul would suffer very expensive damage and a lot of casualties if a war broke out.
Well, OK, now the Hawks would say that we're just being naive, right, that these guys are crazy, they're some sort of pseudocommies anyway, and it's this, you know, Jim Jones cult of personality surrounding the grandson dictator here.
And so, you know, come on, yeah, yeah, Carpenter, kumbaya, and everybody gets along.
In fact, there's a terrible threat here and it must be contained.
Well, there's no doubt that the North Korean regime is utterly odious.
I certainly will break out the champagne the minute that regime ends up on the ash heap of history where it so richly belongs.
But the task for effective diplomacy is handling relations with unpleasant and difficult governments.
If every government was like that of New Zealand, diplomacy would be a piece of cake.
It wouldn't be challenging at all.
The difficulty comes in diplomacy in getting results from regimes that are very difficult, that are extremely unpleasant and repressive, and dealing with people that often, after we shake hands with them, we want to plunge our hands into disinfectant.
But that is what's required for effective diplomacy, effective foreign policy.
Blustering and threatening is not a foreign policy.
All right, well, now, so part of the problem that we face here is that we're already living in the future, whereas back in the old present, they didn't even have any nukes.
In fact, they even had a deal.
It was kind of an extra deal that Bill Clinton and his government had, you know, come to with the government of, I guess, the son, right?
The middle dictator here, Kim Jong-un's father, Kim Jong-il, after the grandfather, Kim Il-sung, died.
And he said, okay, we'll stay within the nonproliferation treaty and our safeguards agreement, and we won't produce plutonium that we could, you know, as waste in our nuclear reactor that we could make bombs out of, as long as America does this, this, and that, which, you know, is basically, I guess, welfare and build them a light water reactor, which they never did.
And then that policy lasted until the 2000s.
And then George Bush came into power.
And then what happened?
Well, we began to dial back what little relationship we had with North Korea.
And in reality, the North Koreans did pretty well keep their agreement not to process plutonium.
However, the agreement did not cover enriched uranium.
So they simply pursued a nuclear program by a parallel path.
And we have just been kind of on foreign policy autopilot for the last 12, 13 years while this has gone on.
You mentioned Obama and the doctrine of strategic patience, which was essentially, we will just ignore what's going on, issue periodic warnings when they conduct a nuclear test or a ballistic missile test, have more utterly ineffectual sanctions imposed, and then hope that the problem eventually solves itself.
We have been waiting for the North Korean regime to collapse since quite literally the mid-1990s, at roughly the time of the original agreement freezing North Korea's plutonium program.
Unfortunately, I think we'd all hope that that regime collapses, but it hasn't.
It has managed to survive for better than two decades.
We don't know if or when it will finally collapse.
And we have to have a more effective, less dangerous policy while we're waiting for that to happen than the policy that we seem to be pursuing.
Well, you know, well, yeah, there's too many different subjects here, Ted.
The policy that Nixon took toward China was, okay, you guys are communists, and you're yellow, peril, scary, and you have H-bombs even, and so let's be friends.
Why have Cold War?
Let's go ahead and open things up, and we'll trade, and we'll have diplomatic relations.
So if that's okay for Nixon and Kissinger, who, you know, after all, represent the political center, right?
Nixon was no right-winger or left-winger.
He was a center-right kind of a guy.
Henry Kissinger is known as, for some reason, the most respectable foreign policy wise man of previous generations and all this kind of thing.
If they can make that kind of peace with Mao Tse-tung, who's arguably the greatest mass murderer in all of world history, then, you know, other than viruses, then what is the mindset in Washington, D.C. that says we just can't deal with these Koreans?
What is it?
It's an excellent question, and if they use the Nixon-Kissinger initiative with China as a model, I think there is at least a reasonable chance that we could develop a normal relationship with North Korea, reducing the overall threat environment.
Let's face it, China, despite its defects, and it's still a very repressive political system, is a lot better member of the international community now than it was at the time that Nixon and Kissinger made their initiative to open up relations with China.
So that policy has been very much a success.
We ought to consider that same policy for dealing with North Korea, and at this point, I don't think we have a lot to lose by trying that strategy.
Now, in the 1990s, when they said, well, we're pretty sure that their regime's going to collapse here pretty soon, did they not say, okay, well, look, if it doesn't within a year and a half or something, then we need to reassess how we're approaching this, because, you know, that's sort of like the sanctions against Saddam Hussein, that, yeah, you know, even though we just stabbed the uprising against him in the back and let him win against them, right, you know, in our presence, we're pretty sure if we just starve them, then they'll rise up and overthrow Saddam and install an America-friendly dictator, or at least there will be a coup, or, you know, something will happen.
But then they just kept the policy, even though it wasn't working, for year after year after year.
And it seems like the same thing here, that maybe it made sense, not moral sense, but strategic sense from America's point of view.
I can imagine a National Security Council meeting in the Bill Clinton years where they said, well, we're sure the regime is on its last legs.
If we just boycott the hell out of them and strangle them a little more, they'll be gone by the end of the year or something like that.
I guess I can understand that thinking, but then that didn't happen.
As you said, now here we are, you know, after three administrations, you know, we're in the Trump years now, and we still have the same kind of policy of this isolation.
Well, you'd almost think that our foreign policy establishment in the United States is somewhat incompetent.
I'm beginning to entertain the possibility.
I think there's only thousands of pieces of evidence to support that.
And this is one.
I mean, a total failure of imagination, flexibility, creativity, whatever you want to say.
This is a policy that has been basically on autopilot for two decades, getting absolutely nowhere.
And yet the first serious reconsideration of that policy is to move precisely in the wrong direction toward a much more aggressive, much more confrontational stance.
And that the only thing worse than what we've been doing the last 20 years is going down that path.
Is there a professor or a think tank or anywhere who's written up a big study that says if we only really threaten them like we're really mad that then they'll comply?
Because that just doesn't seem to make sense to me when we're talking about the North Korean regime here.
I'm not sure if anyone has ever stated it in terms that blatant.
But you do get the euphemisms.
We have to exercise firmness.
We have to exercise American leadership.
We have to display resolve.
That's now one of the favorites.
They never finish the sentence, though, right?
They never say, and then that will work.
They just say, because it'll make me feel good is what they really mean, it sounds like.
They imply that it will work based on what evidence they almost never say.
And given the track record of failure with regard to that kind of strategy, I think it takes an article of faith that's really faith-based foreign policy to assume that that strategy will work.
Yeah.
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All right, now.
One small kind of bright spot that went away pretty quickly, I guess, but one kind of bump in this constant autopilot policy that we've had all these years was, I think, in 2008, the very end, like the spring of 2008, the clock running out on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney was out of town, and Christopher Hill, the State Department weenie, came to Bush and said, let me go to Korea, man, I have an idea to work out a deal.
And it started to work, right?
They took North Korea off of the terrorism list, and the North Koreans then shut down their Pyongyang reactor.
If my timeline is correct here, this is before they had ever harvested plutonium and begun to make a single nuke yet.
And this was the last minute effort to prevent them from doing so.
And then somehow it fell apart, Ted, and only then they started finally making these implosion bombs out of plutonium.
Is that correct?
No, the...
Oh, I had it all wrong.
They had tested one bomb before that.
They were proceeding with this.
But yeah, there were signs of a willingness on the part of the North Korean government to freeze that program in place again, if the United States continued to offer conciliatory gestures.
Obama opted more for a policy of indifference punctuated by occasional sanctions in response to North Korean moves.
And that just is the kind of sterile approach that we had for the next eight years.
Now Trump, of course, has deviated rather markedly from that, and is insisting that the North Korean problem, as he puts it, has to be solved soon.
And I think he's talking about months or weeks.
He's definitely not talking about years anymore.
So at a minimum, we're headed for a very tense time.
At worst, we're headed for a second Korean War.
All right.
Well, now, so what's the hurry exactly?
They say they're making H-bombs.
Is that it?
Well, as far as we know, they've only made fissile bombs, atomic bombs to this point, not hydrogen bombs.
But the intelligence agencies in Washington are worried that they're not very far away from being able to make a hydrogen bomb, and more importantly, that they're able to miniaturize atomic weapons enough to put them on top of the missiles that they're developing.
At that point, so the argument goes, North Korea could directly threaten South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. bases in those countries with nuclear annihilation.
And further down the road, and I think most experts believe this is more like five, six, seven years, North Korea would have intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach at least the West Coast of the continental United States.
And Trump has made it clear, his advisors have made it clear, that they intend to take action against North Korea long before Pyongyang achieves that capability.
All right, now, so, well, now, in South Korea and in Japan, do their governments think that they're in danger of being hit in some kind of preemptive strike by the North Koreans?
Or, I mean, in other words, is it really true that the North Korean government is run by a bunch of crazy people?
Or are they basically just as crazy, but no crazier than the rest of the nuclear weapons holding politicians in the world?
And they hold them for deterrent purposes, just like the Indians and just like the Americans?
Yeah, I think U.S. officials tend to confuse ruthlessness with craziness.
There's no doubt that Kim Jong-un and the leadership in North Korea are absolutely ruthless.
But I've not seen credible evidence that they're crazy, much less that they're really wanting to commit suicide, which is what an attack would be.
There is no question that that regime would cease to exist and major parts of North Korea would cease to exist if they attacked neighbors, particularly with atomic weapons.
So to me, that is a very remote scenario, unless the regime concludes it has nothing to lose, that the United States has opted for yet another regime change war.
And at that point, all bets are off on what Pyongyang does.
I know the Japanese are worried about the outbreak of war and perhaps even a preemptive North Korean attack.
The South Koreans do not seem to be that worried.
And in fact, the leading candidates for the upcoming presidential election in South Korea are both committed to moving back toward the so-called sunshine policy, the conciliatory policy that was pursued with the previous governments before the last administration.
So there's a bit of a split between Japan and South Korea on how to react to North Korean actions and provocations.
So that's an important point there, right, about the previous right-wing president has been impeached and removed from office.
And so now that means there's a temporary caretaker government, but the liberals are expected to win.
And then so that's hopeful that goes back.
Can you describe that sunshine policy from before, if we can really count on that?
Yeah, this was a policy pursued under both Kim Jong Sam and Kim Dae-jung of trying to have an outreach effort with North Korea.
This is when they, for example, developed the joint economic site just north of the DMZ.
And relations at least improved marginally.
They were hardly bosom friends.
But the two Koreas at least seem to have a relatively peaceful coexistence policy.
That began to break down even before the election of Park Geun-hye, the woman who was just impeached and removed from office.
And the leading candidates in the upcoming election essentially want to return to that much more conciliatory policy.
U.S. officials do not seem very happy about that.
And in fact, one of the things that the leading candidates apparently would do would be rescind permission for the U.S. to deploy its THAAD system, its anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea that is supposedly directed against North Korea.
But the Chinese suspect that the long term goal is to degrade China's nuclear capability.
So there's some serious policy disagreements that could erupt between Seoul and Washington with any new administration.
Yeah.
Well, the Chinese should rest easy about that and know that missile defense is just a welfare program.
It doesn't work.
It could never work.
And their deterrent is just fine.
They're less confident of that.
They should read the papers.
And now, so speaking of which, though, and I'm sorry, because this is such a multifaceted and complicated subject, I'm sure I'm not even asking all the best questions I should be here.
But I keep reading that when they do war games at the Pentagon, where they say, you know, in this or that case scenario, we attack at dawn with our best stealth bombers and bunker busters and whatever it is that doesn't matter, it leads to nuclear war anyway, it leads to the North Korean government and on the red team is able to deploy at least a nuke or a few to South Korea, maybe even Japan.
Is that the way you understand that?
There certainly would be a great danger of that happening.
To take out the entire North Korean nuclear program, to take out the entire arsenal, the airstrikes would have to be absolutely perfect.
And perfection rarely happens in the real world.
So there would be a great danger that the North would strike back.
The logical targets would be Seoul, the capital of South Korea, quite possibly Tokyo or another city in Japan, and or US bases in those two countries.
It'd be very, very difficult to decapitate the North Korean nuclear capability.
And even if the North did not strike back with nukes, South Korea is within easy artillery range, especially the Seoul metropolitan area.
That's not only the South Korea's capital, it's its economic heart.
If it suffered serious damage, and it would, that would be a tremendous blow to South Korea that would last for a very long time.
Yeah, I read a thing years ago now, but I don't think much has probably changed the way they describe how these even tens of thousands maybe of artillery tubes are placed in these concrete bunkers that, again, even if you hit them with every bunker buster in the arsenal and you hit them all on the first try, you still leave 10,000.
You know, that kind of thing.
There's just nothing America could do short of using H-bombs themselves to take out all that artillery before they were able to hit Seoul.
And then at that point, you might as well be dropping an H-bomb on Seoul.
As you said, it's only 30 miles away anyway.
You better hope that the wind is blowing a certain direction if that option were ever adopted, because otherwise the fallout alone would have devastating effects on South Korea.
And even if the wind is blowing from another direction, that means it goes either into China or Japan, which I don't think would lead to thank you cards from either Tokyo or Beijing.
Right.
And yet, as Eric Margulies pointed out in his recent piece, most people forget this, but North Korea borders Russia too, right up there in the Northeast, just a couple hundred miles from Vladivostok and their territory as well, which of course raises the question, this is why Truman fired MacArthur, because he said, man, you're not going to get me into a nuclear war with Russia.
Because if we end up in a full scale war with China, then that means we end up in a full scale war with Russia.
And I'm not certain that things are different right now.
They're a little bit different in the sense that at that time, the Soviet Union and China were very, very close allies.
They're certainly less so now, but the Russians are as concerned, I think, as the Chinese about the US doing something rash with respect to North Korea.
I noticed just yesterday, the Russian government issued a statement urging the reduction of tensions, urging calm on both sides, because this situation was threatening to spiral out of control.
And that's to indicate Russia has some important interests at stake here too.
It's not just China and South Korea and Japan.
So the Russians are nervous.
The Chinese, I think, are very nervous.
And the South Koreans, I think, have managed to convince themselves that it's all just a bluff.
If they thought this was a real intent on the part of the Trump administration, I believe the South Koreans would be terrified.
Right.
Well, they kind of have a point, right?
I mean, you know, Henry, go out there and tell them I'm drunk as hell and I'm ready to blow up the world.
That's kind of a credible threat from Richard Nixon in a way, right?
But with Donald Trump, he ran for president saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to be threatening people and bluffing all the time.
Just watch them call my bluffs.
I mean, he basically, you know what I mean?
He's sort of telegraphing.
To me, it seems like, well, for example, yeah, look at us.
We're floating our carrier battle group up there.
But then immediately Rex Tillerson is like, hey, come on, we float our battle groups all over the place all the time.
Don't read too much into that.
He seemed like he was the one being honest, you know, to me.
So I don't know.
And I guess I just usually don't like being too alarmist because when I am, I'm always wrong.
But then again, I guess if I'm wrong this time, we'll all be dead and it won't matter.
Well, it's obviously hard to predict whether the administration is serious about these moves or whether it is just a display of strength and resolve, as they put it.
But there's always the danger of miscalculation.
As you noted at the top of the show, no one really wanted a major war in 1914.
That didn't prevent it from happening.
Because there were multiple miscalculations on all sides.
And that led to a horrific human tragedy.
This could do the same very easily.
Not because one side or the other deliberately sought to provoke war, but simply miscalculated.
One misunderstanding led to a counter misunderstanding and just an escalation process that gets out of control.
Okay.
But now the news says that Donald Trump said to the president of China, hey, would you solve this North Korean thing for us?
And then according to Trump, the Chinese president explained things to him for about 10 minutes and then he realized that, oh, I see what you mean, huh?
So apparently it's actually complicated after all.
But so I don't know, I'm Donald Trump.
What's so complicated?
Why can't China lean on these Koreans if they're that dangerous, that unpredictable?
They're that close to being able to nuke Tokyo and maybe, you know, embroiled China in a war that they don't want.
Why can't China just do the damn right thing here?
Because obviously they can.
Why can't they?
Well, I've talked to Chinese officials and think tank experts and journalists for the last 15 years about North Korea.
And I'll tell you, there's growing impatience in Beijing regarding North Korea.
More and more Chinese regard the alliance with North Korea as an embarrassment to China.
On the other hand, they know that if they really muscle North Korea, and they have the capability to do that given how much of North Korea's food and energy supplies China provides.
But if they do, they're worried that North Korea will implode.
And then they get millions of refugees flowing over the border into China.
They get a massive power vacuum in North Korea.
And the likelihood then of a united Korea allied with the United States militarily, with the prospect of U.S. military bases being put in what is now North Korea.
China would lose its geographic buffer between the Chinese homeland and the rest of Northeast Asia that is dominated by the United States and its allies.
So China is very reluctant to use the power that it has.
It's very much like having nuclear weapons.
They theoretically give a country great power, but you really don't ever want to use them.
And that's China's diplomatic and economic clout with North Korea.
Yes, in theory, it's very extensive.
But in practice, it creates an enormous amount of dangers.
If China takes that risk, the benefits go primarily to the U.S. and its Northeast Asian allies.
It doesn't really benefit China that much.
So why should they incur the risks unless the U.S. is offering them some very appealing incentives?
And except for Trump agreeing to back off a bit from his protectionist trade demands, the U.S. really hasn't offered China much of anything.
OK, but, you know, the Americans say that, well, I mean, I've heard it said by critical analysts, I think your colleague Doug Bandow, for example, that, well, you know, the Americans are a bit reluctant on their own side, as you said, to, you know, endorse the sunshine policy and this kind of thing, because they're afraid of reunification, too, because they think, well, geez, with the South Korean government and economy combined with the North Koreans' nuclear weapons, well, that's an entirely new independent power in Asia that America has to deal with.
Instead of right now, they're plenty divided and conquered just right.
So they want to keep things as they are.
So but then doesn't that cast doubt, if that's right, on the Chinese calculation here, that that would just end up bringing the American, you know, giving the Americans more and more power on the peninsula, when in fact it might cost us our excuse to stay there?
Well, the United States government has never been lacking in creativity and coming up with excuses to do what it wants.
It's true.
After all, with the end of the Cold War, you'd think NATO would have had a nice retirement party.
But instead, officials searched for an alternative mission, and the alternative mission turned out to be expansion right up to the Russian frontier.
So I think U.S. officials believe that if there were a united Korea, they could convince the Korean authorities to maintain the military alliance with the United States, maintain U.S. military bases on the peninsula.
I don't believe that U.S. officials are that frightened that a united Korea would kick the U.S. military out.
It's a possibility.
But there are arguments against it, including the fact that even a united Korea would be facing stronger neighbors in China and Japan, and might want a more distant protector as an ally.
So I think U.S. officials would be perfectly content with a united Korea, with a non-communist regime in power.
How happy China or Japan would be with that is another question.
I think they would both have some concerns.
Okay, so Andrew Bacevich is a great critic of America's empire around the world, and he absolutely says, no problem, let's get the heck out of the Middle East yesterday, immediately, 10 years ago, 20.
But when it comes to Asia, he says, oh man, what a precarious balance of power there.
And if the Americans pulled out of Japan and pulled out of Korea, and the libertarians had their way, and we were non-interventionists in Asian affairs, he just hates to think what would happen with the House of Cards falling down, and Japan and China and Korea and others going for nuclear weapons on their own, you know, carving out their own spheres without our umbrella that provides the stability where they don't need to bother.
For example, Korea and Japan have foregone nuclear weapons, you know, so this whole time.
So what about that?
Maybe, yeah, yeah, libertarians have great principles and everything, but consequentially, if we really just quit intervening over there and said, hope for the best, things will work out, that we could end up with a devastating war between China and Japan, for example.
One can't rule that out, but on the other hand, those countries have an important stake in maintaining peace.
Both of these countries are key export-oriented economic powers.
Any regional war, much less a major regional war, would threaten their prosperity in a tremendous way.
So they have important incentives.
And I think Andy should know better than this that the alternative to U.S. dominance, U.S. hegemony, is not necessarily regional anarchy.
That's an argument that knee-jerk interventionists use.
Andy is a much more thoughtful analyst, and I think he ought to reconsider his assumptions about the likely effects of a more limited U.S. role in East Asia.
The United States does have some important interests in the region, especially maintaining the economic links to the prosperous economies of that region.
But we don't have to try to micromanage it.
We don't have to try to dominate it.
We don't try to have to solve all the problems that might arise in that region, assuming that the only alternative is a catastrophic breakdown of relations among the various powers there and endless war.
That's scaremongering.
It has very little relationship to reality.
Well, I mean, I guess it makes sense on the face of it that America's mission over there is to hold stability in place the way things are so that things don't get out of hand.
But on the other hand, like we're talking about on the Korean issue more specific here, keeping everybody divided and ruled is a big part of it, too, keeping them under the thumb of, I don't think what you and I would consider American national interests, but what our U.S. government certainly does.
And so you could see how perhaps there are distortions of power in the relationships in the various countries over there.
Korea, just another as one example, but maybe others, too, where if we weren't involved, they could actually settle outstanding issues.
But in a way, we kind of incentivize them to keep problems that otherwise would have been put to bed.
Well, you see that same problem in other regions as well, that it is all too easy for countries to sit back, let the United States deal with messy problems rather than taking the initiative themselves to address those problems.
That was certainly the case in the Balkans during the 1990s and beyond, where instead of the European powers trying to deal with the disorders in the former Yugoslavia, it became much, much easier to just offload that onto the United States and let Washington deal with a headache.
And unfortunately, the egotists that ran U.S. foreign policy at that time, they were quite happy to take not only the leadership role, but really the dominant decision-making role.
And all we did was make a difficult situation even worse for the people of the former Yugoslavia.
And we're dealing with the consequences of that two decades later.
Yep.
All right, well, listen, I've kept you long enough here.
I will let you go about the rest of your afternoon, but I sure appreciate you coming back on the show to talk about this stuff with us, Ted.
Well, thanks very much, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Ted Galen Carpenter.
He is at Cato.org, senior fellow there at the Cato Institute, author of 10 books and editor of 10 more, all about foreign policy, many of them on Asia issues, of course.
And check out the most recent piece at the Cato at Liberty blog, really important piece, Trump's strategy for getting China to pressure North Korea.
All sticks, no carrots.
That's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
And follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks, y'all.
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