Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all.
Introducing Tim Shorrock.
Here he is in the nation again.
Most Democratic presidential candidates are attacking Trump's Korea policy from the right.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Tim?
I'm good.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here and you do such great coverage of this Korea issue.
I think we've talked about this long ago, but I recently read about this too, that you were raised for part of your time in Korea when you were a kid.
Is that it?
That's right.
I was in South Korea from 1959 to 1961 when my father was working for a church organization there.
Before that, I was in Tokyo.
After that, I also was in Tokyo.
I spent my youth in Japan and South Korea in those years in Seoul.
I see.
Since then, you've been back numerous times, right?
Many times, yeah.
I've been back a lot since I used to report out of there a lot in the 1980s in South Korea.
I've been riding pretty steady on Korea in general since basically the late 70s, with a few gaps here and there, but especially intensely over the last two years, three years.
It's such valuable stuff.
Speaking of which, before we get to these horrible Democrats and their horrible things that they say and their policies that they support, let's talk about the good news.
Tell us, first of all, what's going on with the government of South Korea and their efforts to negotiate with North Korea?
Then at whatever point you want to integrate the narrative about what the Trump administration is up to here, then go ahead and add that too.
I think basically the whole process of the peace process that began back in January 2018 with the opening at the Olympic Games, at the invitation of President Moon, and when Kim sent his emissaries, his sister, and other senior-level people to the South, that's when it began.
It's gone pretty well.
The two Koreas had made some sweeping agreements then, and then when they met in March of that year, and then later in September of 2018.
In terms of diffusing tensions between South and North, a lot has happened.
The border area of the DMZ, demilitarized zone, it's a very heavily militarized area.
They've really decreased tensions there by just destroying guard stations and getting rid of them and joint patrols and getting rid of a lot of the weaponry along there in the immediate area of the DMZ.
That's really decreased tensions, and that's been all for the good.
By the way, talk a little bit about those joint patrols.
That's interesting.
They mingle at different places.
There's been some amazing photographs of North and South Korean soldiers standing together where they've met at different intersections.
That sends quite a signal.
They had met in September of 2018, just about a year ago.
They had agreed to deepen their economic relations by reconnecting their railroads, roads, and all that.
But a lot of that economic cooperation has been stalled because what North and South do violates UN sanctions and also US sanctions and even some South Korean sanctions.
The US military and the US government has actually put a lot of pressure on South Korea not to go too far in some of these economic projects because it violates the sanctions.
There's been some tension between the Trump administration and the Moon administration and South Korea over that.
That whole issue of South Korea's relations with the US is now a major source of contention with the North because they're saying that some new military exercises that are coming up between the US and South Korea violate the spirit of the Singapore summit back in June 2018.
North Korea has been saying South Korea is too much a vassal of the United States.
The whole peace process is bogged down over that, plus over what I would say the Trump, John Bolton demands that not only should North Korea not give up its nuclear weapons, but they need to give up all their weapons and their chemical and biological weapons, whatever conventional weapons they have that might endanger US forces, give it all up before there can be any move on decreasing sanctions.
That's problematic.
That's kept the two sides apart.
Even though there's been this weird friendship between President Trump and Chairman Kim in North Korea, at that top level, below that, there's been dissent within both the Washington camp and the Pyongyang camp.
There are people that want to take a tougher line in North Korea toward the US, particularly in the military.
There's hawks here as well.
It's stalled right now, although I think talks are going to continue.
They're going to pick up soon.
Trump met with Kim, crossed into North Korea.
That was a pretty bold thing to do and send a signal that that's certainly never happened before.
Yeah, that's great.
In other words, Nixon's already gone to China and shaken hands with Mao and presumably broken that ice into a million pieces and the rest is just details.
That's how it's supposed to work now, Tim.
Well, that was the idea.
Getting back to the article you brought up at the beginning, the Democrats led by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, seem to think that they can go after Trump by saying he's cozying up to Kim too much and he's buddies with this dictator and so on.
What's their alternative?
He's the leader of North Korea and that's who you got to talk to.
Actually, things have really happened on the ground that have made a big difference in Korea.
That's what I was saying to you before in terms of the changes at the DMZ and the demilitarization of the DMZ.
What are they going to do?
Have a more militaristic policy and go back to the danger of war that existed in 2017?
Are they going to really run on being tougher on North Korea?
That seems crazy.
If they're aiming to break away people from the Trump camp to win and then they want to get independent voters, do they really think promoting militaristic policies in Korea is going to win them those kind of votes?
People don't want a war in Korea.
Trashing Trump on the single best thing about his presidency this whole time by a million miles.
Exactly.
It's very unpopular in Washington among the intelligentsia and the media, the mass media, the whole idea of talking with Kim Jong-un.
You can read David Corn, Mother Jones, he's always hammering him every time he meets with Kim.
He's meeting with this evil dictator, blah, blah, blah.
But nobody looks at it from the point of view of the Korean people.
What's good for Korea?
South Korea is supposed to be our great ally, and yet we treat them like a child, a recalcitrant child, and expect them to just follow us blindly no matter what we say to them in terms of their dealings with North Korea.
In fact, you quote Biden here saying that Trump is betraying the South Koreans by doing this.
He's dissing them and turning his back on them.
It's the exact opposite.
Here you have one of the most progressive presidents in South Korean history, Moon Jae-in, who's made this a huge part of his presidency, defusing tensions with the North and reaching out to them and trying to engage and really move forward on getting peace in the Korean Peninsula.
Here you have him supporting this.
In fact, he's the one who brokered the talks between Trump and Kim.
Biden's statement is just abjectly false.
That's one thing.
He has Obama's record to protect, right?
I guess he thinks that we all want to go back to that period.
What I've written about at different places is actually, under Obama, the situation got worse than ever.
I'm not sure if Trump is right when he says there would have been a war if Hillary Clinton had won.
But as I pointed out in The Nation magazine before the election, when I was focusing on Hillary's foreign policy, I had this article about Hillary's hawks on North Korea.
They were talking about preemptive strikes and stuff like that.
This was her advisors, right?
They were pushing a tougher line.
There was a sort of ironic moment when Trump crossed into North Korea and then he came back.
He said something that is one of his typical false statements.
He said, well, Obama tried to talk with North Korea a lot and Kim didn't want to talk to him.
Then all of Obama's advisors and Biden's advisors jumped in and said, oh no, we never asked to talk with him, as if that's a good thing.
They're like, oh no, no, we didn't negotiate with him.
It underscored their lack of interest in resolving this through diplomacy, which is what led to so much tension.
When Trump came in, when Obama passed power to Trump and he told him that the biggest danger internationally is North Korea, that's because tensions were really high.
Then when Trump made this about face at the initiative of South Korea and Moon and decided, okay, I'll meet with him.
If Kim wants to meet with me, I'll meet with him.
That totally changed the dynamic.
Ever since then, like I was saying, the Washington consensus in the media, and you can always tell, anytime I record on any of this stuff in the mainstream media, NBC, Andrea Mitchell, those people, they just talk about the Korea peace process with just utter disdain.
They just can't stand the fact that the U.S. is actually negotiating with North Korea.
It cuts against all their Cold War mentality and the whole view of the way the U.S. should be acting in the world.
It's strange to see these Democrats push for policies that are even more hawkish.
I'm interested to see what happens tonight and tomorrow if this comes up.
Well, you know what?
I mean, just in narrative terms, it's easier to memorize and regurgitate Trump just likes dictators and that's a bad thing about him than to know the first thing about North Korea's nuclear program, their relationship with South Korea, the history of our sort of unending warm war there at the DMZ and all of these military exercises and relations with China and all this complicated stuff you're writing about.
Trump's bad.
Trump likes the other bad man.
Right.
And the thing is, they say, oh yeah, we don't like him because Trump cozies up to Putin, he cozies up to Erdogan, he cozies up to the great Saudi Arabia, right?
Well, the thing is, actually, the U.S. relations with North Korea, he may be sort of friends or has this relationship with Kim, but that doesn't mean relations between North Korea and the U.S. have turned around at all.
What North Korea has been saying in the last few weeks is, we think the U.S. has really not lived up to what we agreed to in September, which was 1.1 of the agreement that Trump and Kim made last June was to basically normalize U.S.-South, U.S.-North Korean relations and create a new relationship, right?
And that could have, I think that was just ending the hostility is what what North Korea is getting at.
And I think that the U.S. has not done that.
I think we still have, there's all these reports about North Korea firing off conventional testing, conventional weapons, short-range missiles, and this kind of thing, but it's not like the United States has de-escalated its military forces around a raid around North Korea and Asia.
Well, and the U.S. still tests intercontinental ballistic missiles.
We test them and we also, just the other day, we're very advanced anti-missile system too, right?
Which the Soviets always saw as, even though they're supposedly defensive, but they're offensive as well because they completely eliminate, or they don't eliminate, but they reduce the threat of incoming missiles, right?
So they can give the country that has them an edge and a strategic edge.
And so the other day, the U.S. and Israeli military, Israel military tested this long-range missile interceptor, and of course they always claim it works, right?
But yeah, we're shooting off missiles all the time.
Vandenberg, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and have nuclear weapons on ships and aircraft that are all stationed in the Pacific.
Submarines, warships that are based in Japan, long-range bombers that are based in Guam.
And so there's this huge nuclear force, a raid against North Korea.
And when North Korea talks about denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, that's what they're talking about.
Somehow deescalating the nuclear force and the nuclear umbrella that the U.S. has over South Korea and Japan, which means if they're attacked, the U.S. will attack the other country.
If they're attacked with nuclear weapons, the U.S. would respond with nuclear weapons against that country, right?
That hasn't been resolved.
And so there's a lot of pressure by, well, within both Korean governments want this, a peace treaty to end the war.
And that's what peace groups are really pushing for here in the U.S. is, let's get a support, a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, which is still an armistice, and create the basis for full normalization and ending the war.
And that is an important step.
But there's incredible resistance here in Washington by both the government administration and all the think tanks that wield so much power in foreign policy against a peace treaty.
It's seen as like a sop to North Korea as if South Koreans don't support it also.
And actually, there's been some support for this in Congress.
Ro Khanna from California coauthored this amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that calls for a treaty to end the Korean War, and to support the U.S. putting its name behind agreeing to sign a peace treaty.
And that was passed, actually, by the full House.
So it's an idea that does attract wide support in the United States.
And I think that movement to try to end the war through a peace treaty is going to continue.
Okay, y'all, I'm doing a fun drive to raise money for an advance on my new book.
I published my last book, Fool's Errand, through the Libertarian Institute, and it worked out great.
There was no one to boss me around about it, and I was able to publish within a few days after dotting and crossing the last I's and T's.
This time, I'm going to do the same thing, only instead of starving and borrowing money from friends to try to get it done, I'm coming to you loyal listeners first.
I'm trying to raise $20,000 by September to help me get the book done, edited, and out the door in time for Christmas and the 2020 campaign season.
You liked Fool's Errand?
Well, this is like that, only for all the terror wars.
I want what you want, for us to have a voice in this upcoming presidential election debate.
Hey, there's a new book out that says it doesn't have to be this way, finally.
Frankly, I need your help to get it done.
Simple as that.
Check out scotthorton.org slash donate for all the details about all the kickbacks, including signed copies of the book when it comes out.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And thanks, y'all.
All right, now, so there's so much here.
First of all, you were paying attention back then, so let me ask you, I had read that when Nixon and Kissinger got home from China, that the Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate, which both were controlled by the Democrats at the time, as well as all the liberal opinion writers at the New York Times and all the official media organs and institutions, all congratulated him and welcomed him home, and that this has been the legend of Richard Nixon ever since then.
It was the best thing he ever did was go and shake hands with Mao Zedong.
So that's really right.
Then I guess the second question is, how absolutely insane would it have been for Kissinger and Nixon to start that with Mao with complete and total and verifiable denuclearization first, Mao, before we had any other progress?
Yeah, well, you know, it's the U.S. views, obviously, views China much differently than views Korea.
You know, I mean, basically...
GDP's about the same, probably, if you went back to the 70s.
Well, South, yeah, well, you know, both South Korea and North Korea, you know, I mean, North Korea's economy was pretty advanced, you know, it rebuilt amazingly after the Korean War.
And actually, you know, by the early 70s was more advanced in a lot of areas than South Korea was.
Which was still a dictatorship, and Americans supported right wing instead of left wing dictatorship until...
I mean, nobody, you know, a lot of Americans have forgotten or they don't even know.
And it's certainly never reminded by the media of how brutal the South Korean dictatorship was under, you know, first under Ri, Syngman Ri in the 50s till 1960 when he was overthrown.
And then after that, from 1961 on, there was this military dictator, Park Chung-hee.
And he was sort of succeeded after another military coup after his death by another general who extended, you know, military rule for another five or six years.
So like from, you know, basically 61 to 87, South Korea was ruled by different forms of military dictatorships.
And these were extremely cruel dictatorships.
I mean, you know, talk about, you know, internal, you know, political prisoners and torture states and surveillance state.
I mean, it was a really, it was a horror show in South Korea.
But it was in our interest, and they had a strong, powerful military that, you know, the U.S. was happy to use and utilize and, you know, send to Vietnam and terrorize villages there.
So there's been this long relationship with South Korea as a sort of supplicant, you know, almost, you know, like they treat it like a colony and they treat North Korea, you know, they've always, it's always been like this pariah for them.
And even, you know, in the days when, you know, North Korea was strong economically and was led by, you know, Kim Il-sung, the North Koreans had very, you know, extensive relations throughout the, you know, so-called third world, right?
Africa, you know, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, projects all over the world, you know, military support to African countries and stuff like that.
North Korea was seen as this, you know, big rival to sort of South Korea in the third world in terms of the confrontation between U.S. and, you know, what they called, considered the Soviet Union and its client states.
So the animosity toward North Korea goes back a long way.
And the sort of treating of South Korea like a colony goes back a long way, you know, just, you know.
Hey, what's the Japanese take on all this right now, you think?
Oh, man.
Well, under right-wing Abe, Shinzo Abe Shinzo, it's, you know, relations are really bad.
I mean, you know, there's been, there's a case brought, you know, about a year ago, you know, Supreme Court of South Korea approved a settlement where Koreans who had been forced into labor by the Japanese World War II government, you know, were entitled to compensation from the corporations that used their labor, right, forcibly used their labor, including, like, Mitsubishi, you know, very big Japanese corporations.
And so Korean citizens have been going after these corporations.
And Japan, Japan led by Abe, this LDP, liberal democratic government, has never really owned up to its war crimes and doesn't like to be reminded of them, and has really, you know, made a huge issue out of this, these claims by these Korean workers for compensation.
And they're, like, basically, you know, putting South Korea on a list of countries that shouldn't receive strategic exports because they can't trust them, and they might sell them to North Korea.
And, you know, basically, Japan has, you know, begun this economic war against South Korea for this, over this very issue.
And South Korea now, suddenly, there's this huge boycott in South Korea of Japanese goods, right, that's being apparently supported by, like, 80% of the South Korean people, according to some polls I saw today.
People are really pissed off, angry.
Angry at the, this right wing Abe, who Trump loves.
And, but, you know, the US has very, very extremely close relations with the Japanese right wing and the military.
And that's also, you know, goes back a long way.
And that's like, that's like the pinnacle of American policy in Asia, is Japan.
And so there's been this push by the US to incorporate South Korea into the US-Japan alliance.
And there's a lot of resistance to that in Korea.
But there's a huge push for it continually in Washington.
That's why you see calls, you know, like, we should send a, I mean, Bolton was just there trying to arbitrate between South Korea and Japan.
I don't think they listened to him much.
But like, you know, there's all these calls, America must intervene to stop this conflict from, you know, the problem is not South Korea.
The problem is Japan refusing to own up to what it did in the war.
You know, they've never really fully dealt with that the way the Germans did, the way Germans buried Nazism.
You know, you can still hear these conservative Japanese politicians talking about, you know, the positive nature of Japanese imperialism during in Asia during, during the 30s and 40s, right?
They think they did a lot of good.
But now, on the current issue, though, of finally ending the war and breaking down all these walls and possibly negotiating an end to the North Korean nuclear weapons program, eventually, is the Japanese I mean, well, okay, how about this?
What's the South Korean government doing to get the Japanese on board for supporting that?
Well, this issue that I've been talking about has really been dominating, you know, politics between the two.
So the Japanese are just sort of out of it.
They're not really part of this at all.
Not really.
But Abe, you know, after, you know, being sort of this hawkish advisor to Trump all this time, you know, finally saw the light.
And now he's like said he would like to meet, you know, Kim Jong Un without preconditions, right?
He's been saying that.
But North Korea has sort of been not very receptive to that.
It's basically told him to, you know, jump in the lake.
They don't like, you know, they're, I mean, they see, you know, Japanese militarism is rising.
And, you know, Abe trying to, you know, lift the constitutional prohibitions on Japanese militarism abroad.
And, you know, they see it for what it is.
And they're very suspicious of Japan, and Abe and the right wing that rules Japan.
So North Korea has not been receptive.
And, you know, I think Japan still has a big influence on U.S. policy because they're, you know, they see the missiles that North Korea has tested, even a short range one, as a big threat to themselves.
So, you know, they, and so therefore, you know, they also have an interest in trying to resolve it.
But their role is, I would say, it's not necessarily minimal, but it's not major at all.
I mean, right now, it's right now the countries most involved are the U.S., South Korea, North Korea.
And China is sort of observing and sort of saying, you know, we'll be there to support the DPRK if things collapse.
And they're going to be extending, you know, the kind of economic assistance that North Korea needs and wants, you know, if that doesn't come with a solution.
And I think, you know, Kim Jong-un made some speech earlier this year, and he said, like, he's basically giving the Trump administration till the end of this year to sort of come back with a decent offer.
I don't know if he's serious or not.
But there's a lot of analysts here in Washington who are like, oh, man, we got to get this, you know, they better move and getting a deal before the end of the year.
I never think those timelines are really that big of a deal.
But certainly, before the next, before, you know, the 2020 election, I mean, obviously, it's in Trump's interest to get something done substantially.
I mean, believe, you know, I'm not telling people that that's why you should support Trump or that you should support Trump at all.
But like, as you said earlier, this is one policy of his that should be applauded, in my view, and not undermined, because, you know, it's made a really big difference to Koreans.
And it's made a big difference in the situation there between South and North Korea.
North Korea and South Korea can't move forward in resolving the Korean War, ending it, and develop a peaceful relationship and then, you know, eventual reconciliation, unification.
They can't do that if there's this tension between the US and North Korea.
So, you know, resolving the US-North Korean standoff is essential to South Korea and North Korea's future, both, you know, their own countries and as they try to, you know, bridge the divide.
Sure.
And, you know, partisanship and all that is just poison.
You could look at the same thing where Bill Clinton sent Jimmy Carter over there to break the ice.
And I guess, was it Perry or Christopher that went over there and got the agreed framework of 1994 done?
And so Bill might be the other worst person in the world, but that was a great deal.
We can all applaud that too.
And he happens to be a Democrat on that one, but so what?
It was a good deal.
And actually, Carter went on his own, right?
He wasn't really blessed by the Clinton administration.
Oh, okay.
Bill didn't even send him.
He just showed up over there, huh?
I mean, yeah, which was a good thing because, you know, they were ready to go to war.
I mean, I've heard Bill Perry, who you just mentioned, who was Secretary of Defense, talk about it.
Like, he had gone to Japan, gone to South Korea, made sure all the bases were ready to, you know, everything was ready to roll, basically, you know, because in Japan, a lot of people don't know this, getting back to Japan, is that there's an important part of the United Nations command that the U.S. controls in South Korea, right?
That was the force that fought North Korea during the Korean War, was this U.S.-controlled U.N. command.
The U.N. command is still in place, kind of an aberration, but there's this important part of the U.N. command, which is called U.N.
Command Rear, which is all based on U.S. bases in Japan and Okinawa.
And they are, you know, if there's a mobilization of the U.N. command in a Korean war, all these bases in Japan would become part of it, right?
And it would be the, you know, so it's like, Japan is part of this, no matter, you know, any way you cut it.
So, you know, Perry went there in 93, 94, ready to mobilize, you know, people on all those bases for a war, and it was pretty well planned out.
And that's when, that's when Jimmy Carter went there.
And then, you know, cut this deal with Kim Il-sung, where they would, you know, they would, where they eventually reached the agreed framework where they basically stopped their nuclear program for, you know, quite a few years, stopped plutonium.
Yeah, until John Bolton ruined it back in 2002.
Yeah, until the Bush administration came to office with Bolton determined to destroy that agreement, which, you know, by the way, you know, from the moment it was signed by Clinton, you know, it was not a treaty, it was an agreement.
It came under super attack from the Republicans, you know, like, you know, the agreement was actually agreed to in October 94.
And, and, and then, Gingrich and them wouldn't fund it, right?
Well, then, then, like, you know, a month later, it was when Gingrich took the house, and the Republicans took the house for the first time in years, right?
And then, yeah, they backtracked, wouldn't fund a lot of the oil that was supposed to, the heavy oil that was supposed to be sent to North Korea.
They made all kinds of, you know, blocked it, but they also said it was appeasement.
They also attacked it politically.
Yeah, but you know what, Donald Rumsfeld's company still got the money for the light water reactors they never delivered.
You know, I know, I was asked that about about that once in Democracy Now!
a long time ago, and I told Amy Goodman, like, don't ask me about that.
That's, that's too, that's too, you know, like, his interest in this is not really part of the, you know, it's not enough.
Oh, it's just fun trivia.
No, it's in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld.
It was Westinghouse.
I know.
I mean, the thing was, like, the whole thing was, it was a good idea.
They were going to build them light water reactor.
Harder to get, you know, to enrich uranium out of them all.
You can't make, it's harder to make plutonium and so on.
And, you know, they were well on their way.
And then you're right.
And then, you know, they, Bush said, oh, no, you haven't, the CIA, they used the CIA information that was really old, that they had this enrichment program going on for uranium.
And actually, what the CIA had determined correctly was that they were, they were buying material that could be used in the uranium enrichment, but they had not built a uranium enrichment plant yet.
It was not yet built.
It was not yet constructed.
And it wouldn't have been a violation of the agreed framework or their safeguards agreement or the NPT at the time.
They could have just gone back to the table.
That's right.
That's right.
Right.
It would not have actually violated.
But when Bush sent his people there to, to, you know, tell, you know, to, you know, turn the tables on them and say, ha ha, you got this uranium plant.
They said, well, you know, one, we believe we have the right to build it.
Two, it's not completed.
Three, we're happy to negotiate about it.
Okay.
We'll talk, we'll talk about it.
And Bush's envoy had no authority to negotiate.
He was sent there only to deliver this word.
Right.
And wouldn't, it was like, we can't hear you.
I can't hear you negotiate.
I can't hear you.
And he went back and they, and they abrogated the agreement.
And then, you know, this was not long, this was not long after that Bush was saying they were part of the axis of evil and, you know, the whole cycle started again.
Right.
Well, and they added them to the nuclear posture review where they said, yeah, maybe we'll do a preemptive nuclear strike.
That was the final straw before they finally withdrew from the NPT and the IAEA safeguards agreement and kicked the inspectors out and started making nukes then.
Yeah.
Well, they made, they, they, they, they tested their first nuclear weapon.
Uh, what was it?
2006, I believe.
So it was pretty long after, uh, the, the whole thing.
And by the way, it was all indications where it was made out of plutonium, not uranium.
So like you're saying that would have been the simplest path to a bomb if they really had had some, any kind of uranium enrichment program.
The uranium enrichment program wasn't finished until later after that.
Uh, but, you know, the thing is like, even like, it was like 10 days after they were, even their first nuclear explosion, Bush, Bush approved, uh, Condoleezza Rice to negotiate with, with, with North Korea.
Uh, so like even he was willing to negotiate more than Obama was.
And you know, the last couple of years, the last couple of years of the Bush administration, uh, there was, uh, there, there was a lot of negotiations went on, but they finally collapsed in large part because the, by that time the government in South Korea was really right-wing, uh, pro-business, pro-U.S. right-wing.
And they were not, they were not really behind, uh, you know, this engagement that had been their predecessor.
You know, Ray McGovern had written about that, about how really what had happened was Rice and Christopher Hill, the state department negotiator, uh, ambassador, that they had cornered Bush on a Friday afternoon when Cheney was out of town doing an apology tour of the Arabian Peninsula for putting the Shiites in power in Baghdad.
And Bush said, okay, last guy I talked to said I should do this.
So, all right.
Yeah.
They had a, by that time Cheney had lost his luster, his, you know, his neocon, his, his blunder in Iraq and, you know, spying and everything that he was responsible for, it sort of left him in ill repute there.
Although Bush, so I guess, you know, he did ruin his own thing though, right?
In the, in the summer of 08, he put him back on the terrorist list for no good reason.
And then the whole thing fell back apart again.
Right.
And then, you know, for some reason, Obama, his advisors wrote him when he was president and would go to Korea, go to South Korea.
Like he, he gave the most extremist speeches about the Korean War and stuff.
He started reviving this old right-wing trope that the Korean War was a victory.
You know, everyone, everyone knows, you know, that used to actually, you know, the Korean War ended, you know, at where it began, basically, you know, it was like, it was, it was, it was standoff, right.
And, you know, both sides lost, you know, huge numbers of people, you know, mostly Koreans, you know, millions of Koreans, but, you know, a substantial number of Americans died in that war.
And it was not a victory, you know, it ended at the border basically where, you know, where it began.
And that is, you know, the US had invaded North Korea and been pushed out of North Korea.
As far as Obama goes, I mean, that set the tone for his entire eight years where he just really refused to do anything that when they say six party talks, they mean nothing essentially, right?
Well, you know, what he did was over the Korean War was revived.
And after the Korean War, these right-wing Republicans used to go after Eisenhower because they said, you know, like he had signed that armistice and, you know, he betrayed, you know, he betrayed us and by, you know, like having a, you know, just ending in the war where it began.
And they said, you know, the war was a victory.
The right-wing used to say the war was a victory for America.
And then, you know, that no one would adopt that, no one would say that because it wasn't.
And then Obama started, you know, saying it in his speeches, the Korean War was a great victory.
And it was, in his policy became very, you know, they turned to, instead of negotiating with North Korea on its missiles and nuclear capability, they made this demand that they had first had to give up, you know, their nuclear weapons before even agreeing to talking.
And then, you know, Obama approved all this, you know, cyber war against them.
You know, they tried to, you know, like these were the stories that, you know, David Sanger of the New York Times has fed, you know, in during the Obama administration, how they were, you know, using cyber weapons to go, you know, get into the North Korean missile command system and screw it up, and, you know, that kind of thing.
And so, you know, he actually took some quite aggressive steps and actually made some very, some of the things he said publicly, like he said once or twice, you know, if there's a war, we can completely destroy them.
I mean, he said things that Obama, that Trump said later, except, you know, sort of let, you know, in the typical Obama sort of quiet way, right?
Yeah, and he would fly B-1 bombers over the DMZ.
And I remember reading a hawk say, look, everybody knows that those B-1s aren't fit for hydrogen bombs right now.
And so therefore, that must be the North Koreans point of view that they would never perceive it that way.
But come on, what's the point of flying B-1s over the DMZ if it's not to say, remember that time we burned your entire country to the ground?
We could do that again, conventional or thermonuclear or otherwise.
Come on.
Well, they also proved, you know, they did fly B-52s.
And B-52s do, I mean, some of the, you know, B-1s don't, aren't built for nuclear and they have other weapons, but they've got weapons that can do a lot of damage, so.
Yeah, and it was just a configuration thing anyway, right?
You just, you can set it up to be able to deliver different kinds of bombs, of course, cruise missiles or whatever.
Yep.
Listen, Scott, I got to get going.
Oh, okay.
Wait, I was going to ask you one more thing, which was, so does this represent then an attempt, a strategic attempt, say for example, by Trump to peel North Korea away from China, or do you think that the Chinese see it that way?
Or is it really just a matter of, hey, they got missiles that really were strong enough to reach to DC, and so something had to be done?
Or is there more of a Henry Kissinger type of a geopolitics power play going on here?
Well, I think the people who have said that, you know, the advisors, CIA people who have told Trump that, you know, this is a one way you could wean North Korea away from Chinese influence, I think they've lost out.
I mean, I don't think Trump thinks so much in those terms.
But, I mean, it's very clear, you know, that North Korea has always been, you know, more independent of China than South Korea has been in the U.S. And it's not like it has, you know, first of all, there's no Chinese troops or no military in North Korea.
There's no, that kind of relationship doesn't exist.
And, you know, they depend on China for a lot of things, and there's a lot of trade going through, you know, getting through the Chinese border now, despite the sanctions that China has observed.
But China has made it clear that, you know, they think there should be sanction relief.
I mean, they signed on to the U.N. sanctions, but they think that they proposed with Russia kind of step by step, you know, agreements where, you know, there's de-escalation between the U.S. and North Korea on the nuclear side, and then, you know, relaxation of sanctions, and so on.
That kind of process that's also, you know, popular in South Korea that Moon has talked about.
But I think that somehow the Pompeo, the hawkish elements within the Trump White House are still pushing this sort of maximalist, you know, position, which was, you know, you got to give it all up before we can grant any sanctions.
And that's, as I reported in that article, you know, there's been some public, you know, discussion of that by, you know, especially Biegun, who is Trump's special special ambassador for North Korea, who's been negotiating with them, saying, you know, adopting a more like saying, you know, this step by step process.
And I think, you know, most people who understand how North Korea operates think that's the only way that an agreement is possible.
There has to be some concessions by the U.S. beyond, you know, just stalling, you know, military exercises.
There's got to be some steps, you know, that could make a difference in terms of, you know, lifting these sanctions.
And so I think, you know, that's where we're at, basically, right now.
And so I think Trump sees it like, you know, in his, you know, he's said stuff like, you know, oh, North Korea has great beaches, and, you know, it's a great town, great place to have, you know, hotels and all this kind of stuff.
I mean, he sees it like, you know, the real estate guy he is, right?
As opposed to some sort of strategic thinking about like breaking North Korea away from China.
I think he just thinks that they're just waiting to get their capitalist reward.
And everyone in the world thinks the same way he does.
Yeah, good enough for me, man.
I'll tell you what.
All right.
Well, listen, I won't keep you any longer.
But I thank you very much for your time on the show, Tim.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
Absolutely.
Talk again soon here.
You guys, you'll find Tim Shorrock most often over at thenation.com.
And I guess in their magazine, they still publish that thing.
Most Democratic presidential candidates are attacking Trump's Korea policy.
From the right is his most recent one there.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
