06/25/15 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

Okay guys, it's summer fun drive time at the Scott Horton Show.
Bills are piling up and equipment is wearing out, so here's the deal.
Anyone who donates $50 or more gets a chance to win a week's vacation for two to Costa Rica.
Drawing is July 15th.
Winner, go whenever you want.
See more details at scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Anyone who donates $100 or more gets entered into the raffle, plus a one-ounce silver QR code CommodityDisc from CommodityDiscs.com.
And the first 25 people to donate $100 or more will also get a copy of Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman or the audiobook of Lou Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, for free.
Stop by scotthorton.org slash donate or scotthorton.org slash raffle for details.
You can also sign up for monthly donations by way of PayPal per interview at Patreon, support with Bitcoin, and shop through scotthorton.org slash Amazon.
And thanks.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Live here weekdays from noon to 2 Eastern time on the Liberty Radio Network.
That's 11 to 1 Texas time.
We'll interview archives and whole show archives at scotthorton.org.
And our next guest today is Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute, and this one originally ran at the Washington Examiner.
It's called How Do You Fix a Problem Like Korea?
Welcome back to the show.
Doug, how are you doing?
Doing okay.
And I guess North Korea, South Korea, one big problem.
What's the problem?
It seems like everything over there is perfectly peaceful and fine.
What's the matter?
Well, the problem, of course, is we don't know how long it'll remain perfectly peaceful.
We have the North Koreans who are kind of mad at everybody.
We have the South Koreans who are depending on America.
We have the U.S., which is over there defending the South and irritating the Chinese.
I mean, it's one of those things where everybody hopes nothing bad happens, but you never know.
And if something bad did happen, it'd be a real mess.
Yeah.
Well, and just how much of a mess would it be, really?
Well, if you had a real war, this would not be Serbia, this would not be Iraq.
The North has nuclear weapons.
We don't know exactly how many or if they're deliverable, but they also have a lot of chemical and biological stuff, and they have a big conventional force.
So if somebody rolled the dice and war actually happened there, Seoul, South Korea would probably disappear.
We talk about hundreds of thousands of casualties.
The U.S. and South Korea would win, but it's the kind of thing that no sane person wants.
Yeah, well, and I guess legend has it, anyway, that the North Koreans have more artillery tubes set up in hardened concrete bunkers right there on the DMZ than anybody could ever imagine.
And they're right there within range of the capital city, that even without nukes, they could basically reduce the capital of Seoul to rubble just with the amount of artillery that they have.
And before the Americans or South Koreans could destroy them all.
Is that really right?
Yeah, one of the estimates is something like 300,000 to 500,000 artillery shells per hour they could put into Seoul.
And I mean, assuming that that's anywhere close to the right estimate, obviously that there wouldn't be a lot of Seoul left after that.
So it's the kind of thing nobody who's sane wants.
Yeah, well, I got that right.
All right, so now, but listen, it's a unipolar world now, and America is the reluctant hero sheriff here keeping the peace.
And the North Koreans are communists, Doug, communists.
And they're the worst kind of people in the world.
As you say, they got nukes, they're completely dangerous.
And America has got to use its might to hold this status quo, because it's better than any other alternative.
You know what I find amazing about these kind of arguments, of course, is that, you know, no one ever pays attention to anybody else in the world.
It's as if, you know, there's America, you know, the godless commies, and then kind of nothing.
So, you know, if America doesn't do it, what's going to happen?
But of course, South Korea has about 40 times the GDP, that is four zero times the GDP of North Korea.
You know, you have Japan has an interest in these issues.
Japan has the, at this stage, the third largest kind of economic strength in the world.
It's got a pretty competent military as well.
You know, the question is, why don't America's allies step up to the plate?
The point is, you know, it's welfare.
You know, if you're prepared to defend other countries, why on earth should they actually go out of their way to defend themselves?
And that's the challenge we face, especially in Korea.
South Koreans rely on us because we insist that they rely on us.
So we have a defense treaty.
Our job is to defend them.
Their job is to be defended.
You know, it's a pretty good deal if you're South Korean.
Well, it sounds like for the empire, they much prefer that the communist dictatorship in North Korea lasts forever then.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of those where they don't actually sit there and say, now, let's see, can we make that happen?
But you're absolutely right.
Frankly, it is in their interest, because, you know, if all these bad guys disappeared, how on earth then would they be able to, you know, kind of demand to have a huge military and a globe spanning, you know, base structure and whatever.
And if they demand that because, oh, isn't it awful, all of the stuff out there.
If that stuff disappeared, it'd be pretty hard to see how they'd convince anybody.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like they kind of do wear it on their sleeve.
I don't know how often they really talk out loud about it.
But there was a time when, in the Bush years, when the South Korean president and prime minister and whichever, I don't know, I used to know the man's name.
It would be the president.
He matters over there.
The prime ministers are pretty kind of irrelevant.
Yeah.
It was the president.
I can't remember his name, though.
Probably Kim Dae-jung, you know, early on.
Yeah.
No, anyway.
But it was the it was the thing with where they were doing so much in the South to try to open up relations with the North and how the Bush administration basically moved to stop them from doing it and said, we don't want to have any further negotiations about peace and reunification until we take care of the nuclear issue first.
And then, of course, they just proceeded to make the nuclear issue completely intractable and and serve to really make sure that peace and reunification is off the table.
I mean, that was a very bad time.
The Bush administration coincided with two fairly liberal administrations over there, Kim Dae-jung and the Noh Moo-hyun.
And yeah, the U.S. was very much against their policy.
So you had, you know, kind of a very difficult situation where they were completely out of tune with each other.
And the problem here is my reaction is I frankly don't care, you know, what the South Koreans do in terms of policy.
The problem is, is we're defending them that all of a sudden we have a right to go in there and tell them what we want, because, well, we're prepared to defend them.
And it's the reason I tell the South Koreans they shouldn't like this relationship, because, yeah, I get some kind of defense subsidies, but they really do lose control over their own policy.
And that's hardly good for them.
Yeah.
All right.
And I guess so the deal is, though, is the Americans really are worried about reunifying us.
The assumption is that if the North Korean government fell, that the peninsula would be unified and probably obviously under South Korean leadership because of, as you said, you know, they have the vast majority of power on balance there.
And of course, that would be a real hard reunification, you know, the reconstruction of the North and this and that kind of thing.
But on the other hand, I guess in the long term, that means a new Pacific power that the Americans have to deal with.
And without the threat that they've been protecting the South from makes them that much harder to control.
Right.
Well, I think that the presumption in Washington is if there is reunification, the South Koreans would still be our buddies.
And the other real hope in Washington is that South Korea will be our ally against China and will be part of this kind of attempt at containing China.
And I actually don't think the South Koreans view that as being what they want to do.
They don't want to make a permanent enemy out of China.
You know what the South Koreans want is America to defend them from anybody who might attack them.
But they don't want to have to do much beyond that.
And that's where there's a real tension, where the U.S. kind of assumes that South Korea will do America's bidding.
The South Koreans just want the U.S. to do as much as kind of South Korea wants.
So I think over the long term, it's hard to see how that relationship works.
And I think that there'd be real tensions with reunification for the reasons that you suggest.
That is that South Korea would feel much more independent.
And then it would decide why on earth should it go out there and kind of do what Washington wants.
And the moment it stopped doing what Washington wanted, you know, Washington would get rather upset.
And now you've been there to North Korea, huh?
Yeah, it's been a while.
I mean, it's 20 years ago.
So the place has changed.
It was very, very strange when I was there.
Still strange, I think.
And I guess, I believe as you write in here, the famine is over now, but still life there is just like in the worst propaganda you can make up about the place, huh?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it's, look, this is a place that the economy, the only reason it works today is that in fact there's a big black market that the government has actually given up a lot of the controls out of necessity, you know, and that's for the good.
And then that allows some people to go out there and produce stuff.
You're seeing some private businesses and stuff emerge, but it's still a very hard life.
This is a totalitarian state and the government basically grabs everything that it wants for itself.
It's not a place where any of us would want to live.
And now I forget, I know that Bush Sr. pulled the nukes out of there when the Soviet Union fell apart.
But now I'm trying to remember whether Bush had put them back.
No, I mean, at the moment we have no nukes over there.
There's been talk about whether we should put them back, but they have not gone back.
All right.
Well, that's good news at least.
All right.
Well, we got Doug Bannon on the line.
On the other side of this break, we're going to talk all about China and how America and China must and can get along.
Right after this.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow.com.
All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott.
Writing at the National Interest for this one.
Cato Institute guy, I should say.
So we were talking about North Korea, etc., but now, so let's switch to China.
He's got a great one here at the National Interest.
It's called How China and the United States Can Learn to Get Along.
It's a review of Lyle J. Goldstein's new book, Meeting China Halfway.
How to Diffuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry.
And so I guess basically to set up here, you make a little bit of a comparison to the German challenge to British hegemony back 100 years ago and America and China's situation now.
So if you could kind of explain that and then get to the part about how both sides have H-bombs.
And so no world wars allowed.
We've got to figure out something else, Doug.
I think important is that we seem to act at times like everything's unique, and I think if you look here, the big issue is how does the dominant power, that is America, deal with the rising power, which is China?
You go back to the 1800s and Britain was the dominant power, not frankly as dominant as we are, but nevertheless, it was the rural Britannia.
I mean, it kind of ran the sea waves.
It was a big empire.
The sun never set, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think what's important here is that they dealt with challenges, and they had two big challenges.
They had the United States and they had Germany, both of which were industrializing, both of which were militarizing, and the question is how do you deal with that?
And the British basically opted to conciliate and accommodate America.
I mean, the U.S. made kind of outrageous claims in terms of territory with its border with Canada and Mexico, et cetera, and the Brits pretty much gave in.
What they decided was, and I think correctly from their standpoint, was it made no sense to try to go toe-to-toe with America.
Its interests in North America simply weren't as strong, it couldn't afford to, it couldn't match it, and what you found was an enduring relationship.
It took some time, there were a lot of tensions, the Civil War and elsewhere, nevertheless, they made the decision, you're not going to confront and fight and go to war with this rising power, you've got to find a way to get along.
They were much less forthcoming with Germany, and there were reasons for that, but nevertheless, the result with Germany was two world wars to try to figure out how everybody kind of sorted themselves out.
If you step back and look at that, there's no doubt, accommodation was a far better outcome than war.
It strikes me that we should look at that, and no historical analogy is perfect, but you look at that and you say, what do you want to do, and my response would be, well, let's not go to war.
I mean, we saw that in the past, it didn't work very well, we've got to find a way to work things out with China.
All right, so now, really break it down for me here, because I know you come from a very libertarian point of view in terms of your economic understanding and all that too, not just non-interventionist principle, but what exactly does America have to lose from the growth of China, and I mean America, the population between Bangor, Maine and San Diego, California, you know, the other way too, not necessarily the state, and I guess that's the second question then.
What does the U.S. state have to lose from the rise of China, really?
Well, economically, you know, there are some people in America who will lose in the sense that, you know, trade means some people gain, some people lose, but overall, we win.
I mean, overall, free trade is a good thing, you get cheap products, and I think over the long term, you know, we're having markets open up, this is a country that has a growing middle class, you're seeing Chinese investment in the United States, so overall, we win, but that doesn't mean that nobody loses, and I think that's always the challenge, those people have political clout.
You know, in the 2012 election, you had Romney and Obama both running ads in Ohio attacking each other for being wimpy on China, it was all over trade.
So that's a political issue in a certain way, I think more than an economic issue, but it's a major one.
You know, the American state worries about its dominance, that is, the U.S. government believes that its role in Asia is to continue to dominate, I mean, the U.S. wants to continue to kind of run everything along China's border, you know, and I just tell people, you don't have to like the Chinese government, and it's not a good government, but you don't have to like it to understand why Chinese are not thrilled at the thought that the U.S. is kind of running ships along its border, et cetera.
You flip that around and say, what if the Chinese were sending its navy along the eastern seaboard and dictating policy towards Cuba, you know, if there were constant discussions in Beijing about the necessity of war with America, you know, Americans would respond.
So I think we have to try to step back and look at things from their perspective.
It doesn't mean there's necessarily moral equivalence, but it does tell you, you've got to understand what the other side's thinking, and to me, again, what you want to do is come up with a way of how do we work with them and realize, look, they're growing, they're not going to accept American domination on their border, you know, is that worth war for us?
Well, somebody in the American state might think yes, but I think that's a crazy position.
All right, so I interviewed Alfred McCoy, and he was talking about how America's policies, and we could list them, I think you'll know what he has in mind, have really served to push China and Russia back together to heal that Sino-Soviet split of old.
And he seemed really worried that this means the end of dollar hegemony, this means the end of American, you know, rule from the rim and the world island will fall into the hands of the Russian-Chinese alliance, and that this is really going to hurt the Americans ultimately.
The more they get along, the less power the American state has around the old world, the less well-off the American people will be, I mean, and I don't think he was really an advocate of empire, but he was saying, you know, we have to face up to the un-face-up doable here, we're going to lose everything when we lose our empire, which is happening now.
Well, I think that it's fair to be concerned if two authoritarian governments kind of get together because they don't like you, and I mean, that's the oddity of the hawkish policy is all these people who want America to be dominant have come up with kind of the one way of all things, the one way to convince China and Russia to work together.
I mean, you have to kind of in certain ways compliment, you know, the neocons for their ability here, and the only problem is it's not what they intended.
You know, they, I mean, they're horrified by it, but it is their policy.
You know, there are a lot of things that should keep China and Russia apart.
Look, if you're a Russian, you worry about Siberia.
I mean, the reality, you know, I don't know, there are three or four million Russians there, and that's it.
It's empty.
An awful lot of Chinese nearby.
You know, there are a lot, you know, so you look at kind of the rising power of China eventually can easily threaten Russia.
But at the moment, from their standpoint, the U.S. is a bigger thing that pulls them together than the issues that divide them.
That's all Washington's fault.
So the easy answer to that is stop doing it.
I mean, to me, this is one of the most curious things.
If one's worried about pushing those two countries together, Washington has an easy answer, which is to stop doing what it's doing.
I mean, that's what's doing it.
Well, stop it.
You know, then you'll be OK.
Well, how sure is it that overall the American Republic suffers from losing its empire?
Well, I don't think it suffers from losing its empire.
I mean, I do think, look, you know, in a world in which I think that both the governments and both Russia and China strike me as not being the most friendly to human rights and liberty.
You know, so I probably don't want those states being particularly strong either.
That I worry about them working together.
You know, so if it was only America, you know, not having its empire, then I'm pretty happy because actually I think we're better off without an empire.
We're better off if we're not threatening to go to war to maintain influence.
What I worry about is that we might find ourselves with some negatives in there that we hadn't intended.
And, you know, they'd be kind of inadvertent.
It's not something which anyone is thinking about, but it's a natural result of the policy.
Well, and I mean, that's basically what they always say, right?
If it's not us, it'd be them.
So we have to.
Well, you know, I and I'm not look, I'm not worried about this sense of, oh, my goodness, the Chinese will fill the void.
I mean, the reality is, you know, the book that I review by Lyle Goldstein, Lyle is actually on staff at the Naval War College.
I mean, he's a serious guy.
He's a professor.
He teaches military folks.
He had me up at a conference two or three years ago to talk about these issues.
I was probably the only one there who wasn't beating the war drum.
So Lyle is a really, really solid guy who's very much for peace.
You know that my view is the reality is China is going to be more important in its region.
And what we want is basic countries around it should be willing to adapt.
In fact, they are.
I mean, everybody there is building submarines and thankfully they're not building submarines because of America.
My reaction is that's great.
That's the natural reaction to China.
It's not our doing.
We don't have to tell anybody to do this.
You know, they naturally do it because they don't want China running their lives.
Well, that's frankly the way it should work.
So to me, that's the real answer is that I just nervous where you have.
I mean, Vladimir Putin and President Xi, neither of these are particularly friendly guys.
I'd prefer that they not be particularly powerful either.
But I don't think the U.S. should be intervening militarily to try to stop them from doing things in their neighborhood.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're out of time.
But everybody, please go and check out Doug Bandow at Cato and at National Interest dot org.
How China and the U.S. can learn to get along.
And how do you fix a problem like Korea?
Thanks, Doug.
Hey, happy to be on.
Take care now.
Appreciate it.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future Freedom featuring founder and president Jacob Hornberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy and many more.
It's just twenty five dollars a year for the print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's FFF dot org slash subscribe and Tom Scott sent you.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State and The War State.
Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War Two.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon dot com and Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at Scott Horton dot org or The War State dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say the one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at one eight hundred eight seven four nine seven six zero or stop by our RBI dot co.